At the conclusion of the last NHL season, Pittsburgh Penguins head coach Mike Sullivan told the Boston Globe he attributed the team’s success in the Playoffs and their Stanley Cup Championship to the league’s new in-arena coaching system. Now the league is going all in. The coaching system comes courtesy of a new partnership with Apple, placing Apple iPad Pros on all team benches loaded with an app that allows coaches to view video highlights in near “real time” and was implemented just in time for the Playoffs last season. The program and partnership is now expanded to all 31 teams and also sees on-ice officials use iPad Pros to conduct all video reviews this season.
The partnership comes as part of a broader digital strategy designed for the league designed to help players, coaches, media and fans. Cynopsis spoke with David Lehanski, SVP, Business Development & Global Partnerships at the NHL about its technological evolution and what to expect in the years ahead.
Lehanski on evolution: We’re seeing a lot of trends from a technology standpoint. Stats and analytics are something that we’ve been thinking about and focusing on in a number of ways over the last several years. Stats are record-keeping hadn’t changed much over the last hundred years. I think there was some kind of organic movement in stats and analytics that was taking place and we really wanted to get ahead of it and create a new offering that would allow everyone in the hockey community to have a better experience from players and coaches to media platforms to fans.
On digital initiatives: We partnered with SAP a couple of years ago to present all the data that we had in a more compelling manner so we had a whole refresh on NHL.com and across our digital platforms to give fans a more customized experience with the data that we had. There was more cross-referencing, visualization, comparison tools, etc. We had also started testing different tracking technologies, putting technology on the players, putting technology on the puck as well as some optical technologies. We tested those going back as far back as the All-Star Game in Columbus. We are now pretty far down the road in establishing some official partnerships which we can’t talk about yet that would put in place the beginning of the implementation of a tracking system for the league.
On Apple: One of the other areas that we’ve been working on is the in-arena coaching system we built Apple that we launched last year for the playoffs. Basically, it provides the coach on the benches with the ability to see near real-time highlight of the game while they are coaching the game. Leading up to last season, teams had their own video coaches and were looking at video in-between periods. Now we’ve given them the ability to look at it live during the game. In working with Apple, we’ve been able to really optimize the characteristics of the iPad to create an experience that coaches can use quickly, securely and gives them what they want and nothing else.
On next steps: The next phase would be to add another application to the iPad that would give coaches real-time stats and data so that’s where the future of tracking comes into play. There is some data that we know coaches want to get right now that they are not getting –in-game that we can deliver. Once we have a comprehensive and accurate tracking system in place, there will be a lot more such as exact time on the ice for each player, puck possession per player, things like that. In the near term there will be a small subset of data that coaches will want to get in-game, and we would grow it from there.
On skepticism: Like anything, the coaching side of any sport is pretty much to develop a system for doing what they do. So the introduction of a new system is always going to be met with some skepticism. There were some coaches who openly ready to embrace it from the get-go and others who were skeptical. In addition, we chose a tough time to introduce it during the playoffs so creating a disruption at that point in time was something we had to deal with, as well as the superstition factor. All of that said, by the end, for the most part, every single team saw some value in it, even those that were skeptical in the beginning.
