The NHL is embedding technology into its pucks that will allow it to track movement on the ice at a rate of roughly 200 times a second, according to David Lehanski, the NHL’s senior vice president of business development and global partnerships.

The smart puck will aid in the league’s development of live data, which the NHL hopes to deploy across the league in a number of ways, ultimately enhancing the fan and broadcast experience, according to Lehanski, who spoke Monday at SAP’s inaugural North American Sports Forum.

The real-time data could be provided to coaches during games as an analytical tool, potentially embedded alongside the videos coaches currently receive on the bench via league-distributed iPads, according to Lehanski. The league is currently working with both Apple and SAP to do that. Further in the future, puck-produced live data might even be integrated with livestreams to assist with sports betting, something that Lehanski said the league would mostly likely power with SAP’s HANA system.

“There’s no doubt that [sports betting] will be a part of the fan experience almost across any touchpoint. Live streaming products will start to incorporate betting functionality. And today, the foundation for that experience is data,” said Lehanski. “We’re seeing that 75 percent of all bets in sports now are in-game prop bets. The only way we can do that in a real-time manner is to be aggregating data and distributing it on a real-time basis with someone who can create odds and probabilities in real time and distribute that to the fan.”

The idea of a smart puck was introduced in October by NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, who revealed plans for a league-wide player and puck-tracking system. The system, he said, would not require players to wear transmitting chips as they did during a trial at the 2016 World Cup of Hockey (or the Zebra Technology chips NFL players wear in their shoulder pads).

Last fall, Bettman said additional research and development work was required, but that the league was aiming to have a system operational for the 2019-20 season, potentially even testing it as early as the Stanley Cup playoffs at the end of the 2018-19 season. So not quite quick enough to capture the Golden Knights’ appearance in the Finals in the Las Vegas team’s inaugural season, but perhaps in its second.

The challenge, noted by both Bettman and Lehanski, is that the quick pace of the game and small playing field require a high level of accuracy. The puck’s lightning speed around the ice, the tiny square footage of the rink compared with a soccer pitch or football field, and the fact that the puck itself is often shielded by a hockey stick or goalie’s glove, present unique challenges to tracking.

“We have 60 minutes of actual play with very few stoppages. The puck moves fast and it’s not always visible. We’re looking to put technology into the puck that’ll track at about 200 times a second to give us that live dataset,” said Lehanski.

SportTechie Takeaway

The NHL hopes to use a highly-advanced puck-tracking system to quantify the game. The league imagines a future in which all of this live data is incorporated into both a seamless experience for the fan and a video-data iPad tool for coaches.

Game and player tracking has become hugely attractive to all major sporting leagues and has led to the brokering of multimillion-dollar deals. The NBA, for instance, was paid a reported $250 million two years ago in an expansive data deal with Sportradar and Second Spectrum.