For the NHL, it was an all-hands-on-deck operation. It was early January in Las Vegas, and the league was testing its player tracking system in regular season games for the first time. The first game was between the Golden Knights and New York Rangers. Two nights later, came the second test – a game between the Golden Knights and the San Jose Sharks.



NHL commissioner Gary Bettman was there for this moment. So was deputy commissioner Bill Daly, and just about every person on the NHL’s senior executive group. The league extended invitations to all 31 teams to witness this breakthrough moment and large number accepted, although surprisingly not all. Many teams funneled the invitation from the business side to their analytics experts to try to get as much advance information on the coming data revolution as possible.



That’s where things got interesting.



There were vendors in Vegas to show some of the cool byproducts of this tracking technology.