10ThingstoSeeSports - Members of the Los Angeles Kings, right, celebrate as they win in double overtime as New York Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist, left, of Sweden, reacts during the first overtime period in Game 5 of an NHL hockey Stanley Cup finals, Friday, June 13, 2014, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill, File)

About halfway through last season, the Los Angeles Kings started posting statistics internally. Not traditional stats like goals, assists, points and plus-minus ratings. So-called “advanced” stats. Coach Darryl Sutter and his assistants – John Stevens and Davis Payne – explained them to the players.

“They’re like, ‘This is what we look at after a game,’ ” said winger Justin Williams. “ ‘It’s not the be-all, tell-all, but it says where we are.’ ”

Not everyone absorbed the specifics. Even Williams, a darling of the analytics community for his outstanding possession numbers, said he couldn’t remember exactly what the stats were. (He thought they were Corsi and Fenwick but wasn’t sure.) The coaches soon stopped posting the stats, and the talk faded.

But the larger point was this: The Kings value puck possession. They use analytics as one of their tools to evaluate players and design strategies, whether the players understand that or not. They judge the process with a long-term view; they don’t just judge short-term results.

“We lost the game, and they looked at the stats,” Williams said. “And they’re like, ‘You know what? We probably deserved better in that game. We keep playing like this, we’re going to get our wins.’ ”

A few months later, the Kings won the Stanley Cup. They became the second team to win it twice in the salary-cap era – after the Chicago Blackhawks, who play a different style but also value puck possession and use their own brand of analytics.

View photos New Maple Leafs president Brendan Shanahan added an analytics department to the team in the offseason. (AP) More

It was no coincidence, and it’s no coincidence that more and more NHL teams have begun to embrace analytics, too, some hiring bright, data-driven bloggers over the summer to bring fresh perspectives to their front offices.

The most visible example? The Toronto Maple Leafs, who went from dismissing analytics to creating an analytics department under new president Brendan Shanahan. As Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment president Tim Leiweke put it in a talk at Ryerson University last week, Shanahan decided the Leafs would be “smart from now on.”

“What sport doesn’t that happen in, right?” said Kings general manager Dean Lombardi with an exasperated laugh. “You know it’s coming. You now have the target on your back. But it’s your job to keep pushing in every area to try to make it better.”

The question is not whether analytics can help. Clearly they can. If analytics have helped teams win Cups, we should be beyond the simplistic, dualistic debates – good or bad, right or wrong, skill or character, data or eyes, geeks or scouts, bloggers or mainstream media.

But questions remain: Exactly how have successful teams used analytics? How have they weighed new information against the old? (Answering that is easier said than done when those teams wisely try to protect their secrets.)

How will analytics evolve? How much influence will the new guard have in organizations like the Leafs, who still have some of the old guard in place? Can the copycats catch up, and if so, how quickly?

“Sure, everybody else is doing it now, but there’s a lot to learn there,” Lombardi said. “You’ve got to be careful. There’s a difference between data and knowledge. … It’s not only what you use, but how you use it.”

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Let’s start with data. Analytics experts say advanced stats in hockey aren’t that advanced. Generally we’re talking about percentages of shot attempts (Corsi) and unblocked shot attempts (Fenwick), combining shooting and save percentages (PDO), where players are deployed (zone starts) and against whom (quality of competition).

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