When Michael Schuckers and Jim Curro began to devise a statistical model to encapsulate the effectiveness of any given NHL player in a single number, they shared a frequent laugh about the perils of the territory.

“It’s something we talked about all the time. I said to (Curro), ‘What happens if you create a model and Sidney Crosby is not first?’ ” Schuckers said.

He and Curro recently created THoR, or Total Hockey Ratings.

And no, according to their calculations, Sidney Crosby is not first. As a result, Schuckers has been doing plenty more talking since presenting the fruits of his and Curro’s research at last weekend’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

He has been explaining, for instance, why Crosby is the 15th most effective player in the NHL based on data from the previous two NHL seasons, and why Alex Steen, the ex-Leaf and current St. Louis Blues forward, is the top player in the league as measured by THoR.

Before you dismiss the research out of hand, consider this: Schuckers said Crosby would have fared much better had his career not been waylaid by the effects of a head injury. And as for Steen’s prominence — well, it was Bill James, one of the gurus of sports analytics, who once said that any newly devised statistic should yield results that are 80% predictable and 20% surprising. By that measure, Schuckers and Curro are doing okay.

The THoR model ranks Pavel Datsyuk No. 2 in the league, hardly a stretch. And the likes of Evgeni Malkin, Jonathan Toews and Daniel Sedin all rank in the top 10.

“I don’t think what we have here is perfect,” Schuckers said. “But we’re slowly advancing.”

The same can be said for the use of analytics in the NHL. Advanced statistics have gone mainstream in other corners of the sports world. It’s been a handful of years since Moneyball became a best-selling book and blockbuster movie telling the story of the Oakland A’s successful use of against-the-grain number crunching. ESPN’s magazine recently published its first Analytics Issue. The NBA and NFL have largely embraced the merits of math-heavy perspectives on their games.

Hockey, for a myriad of reasons, lags behind the other major sports in its reliance on empirical data, but it’s hardly blind to the possibilities. While Brian Burke, the ex-GM of the Maple Leafs, briefly stole the spotlight at the MIT Sloan conference by taking repeated pot-shots at the value of numbers — they’re “overrated,” he informed the audience — there were open-minded NHL types in attendance.

You don’t need to go far in the Leafs dressing room to find a player who’s intrigued by the idea of more progressive statistical measurements than goals and assists and plus-minus — the latter of which is seen by many as a grossly flawed stat.

“It’s an interesting way to evaluate a player,” Leafs forward James van Riemsdyk said. “I think it’s hard to put a number gauge on certain abilities a player might have, like hockey sense. But you’d be stupid not to want to try and learn from stuff like (THoR).”

Hockey excellence isn’t easy to quantify, of course. And one of the key problems faced by Schuckers and Curro — and by the many researchers who’ve done similar work — remains the quality and quantity of existing data. The statistics currently kept by the NHL are, to summarize a widespread opinion, dreadfully inadequate.

The totals ascribed to a player for hits, giveaways, shots, blocked shots — ex-Leafs coach Ron Wilson, among others, have long raised skeptical eyes at the accuracy of those numbers. Something as simple as a stat for passes attempted and passes completed would be helpful to statisticians, but it’s currently not kept by the league. Ditto a log of changes in possession, and where they occurred. Schuckers said the league, at one point, kept time-of-possession numbers, but no longer does.

“The NHL has a data problem,” Schuckers said.

There was feeling, speaking to hockey inclined types at the MIT Sloan conference, that teams that have recognized these inefficiencies are happy to let them persist. Teams are known to keep a long list of stats they don’t share with the public or media. If an old-ways coach wants to wax eloquently about the merits of plus-minus, there are others who’ll benefit from the ignorance.

“I think there are plenty of front-office folks for whom that case for analytics has not been convincing to them,” said Schuckers. “That said, I think, talking to folks, there are at least 10 or a dozen teams that are at least taking a look and paying some attention to what’s going on.”

Among the teams in attendance at the MIT Sloan conference were the Vancouver Canucks, Washington Capitals, Tampa Bay Lightning and Edmonton Oilers. The Leafs were not, which is not to say they, or another other team that didn’t attend, aren’t wise to the possible benefits of further investigation in the field.

“It’s worth brainstorming,” Leafs assistant general manager Claude Loiselle said this week. “As far as just crunching numbers and spitting them out and saying, ‘Sign these 10 guys ...’ nobody’s doing that. But it’s worth looking at.”

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Schuckers, for his part, said he would never use THoR as his sole source of judgment when evaluating a player. He points to other metrics, among them CORSI relative, as reference points. But he won’t undersell the value of THoR, in part because he says it values skills that aren’t recorded on a typical stats sheet.

“The value for players who are doing the little things — keeping the puck in the offensive zone or being able to get possession in the defensive zone and get it out to stop an attack — that’s stuff we’re getting at by proxy here,” he said.

“I have a 9-year-old son who got switched to defenceman this year. He’s not scoring the goals he did last year, so he sometimes feels he’s not contributing. I’ve got to say to him, ‘You’re doing all these things to help the team.’ It just doesn’t show up in the regular stats.”

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