METHOD TO THE MADHOUSE: Following the path of the Cubs in MLB, the NHLBlackhawks will centralize all their player information using a custom internal app. Story from frank_seravalli:
CHICAGO — The question lingered in the air for a moment. The braintrust of the Chicago Blackhawks, Kyle Davidson and Jeff Greenberg, looked at each other with eyebrows raised.“We can give it out,” Davidson relented.
If that idea of an all-encompassing central nervous system for a sports franchise sounds familiar, that’s because it’s been done before in the Blackhawks’ own town. On the North Side, the Chicago Cubs launched their own internal operating system, called “Ivy,” more than a decade ago under Theo Epstein. That technology was one part of what propelled the Cubs to win their first World Series title in 108 years.
There is a Method to the Madhouse, because they know Madhouse will only be worth as much as what they provide for inputs. The Blackhawks are embarking on a journey into hockey’s unknown and attempting to solve for problems that may never have answers. And even if their coders and quants are able to mold Madhouse into a Hockey AI savant that spits out some of the answers, what the Blackhawks are really after is honing their decision science to differentiate themselves.
“I didn’t want to take anything to the floor,” Davidson said. “If we were going to get it done, we were going to get it done. What was another two hours going to do? For some of these teams, we’d talked for three months. “ “There’s different levels of risk aversion. In baseball, they’re so much more calculated because they can better quantify it,” Greenberg surmised. “Teams feel comfortable putting specific valuations on everything they do in a way that doesn’t exist in hockey. That just leads to conversations that become more grinding than they are in baseball.”
To Greenberg, that means there is no shortage of opportunity to quantify different things and extract information and expand upon it. Think about it. A cutting-edge NHL team hones the scouting process by virtue of setting AI guardrails to identify players that adhere to their curated style. They select the player. They then set milestones for that player to achieve based on other development paths, can benchmark when to promote or trade a player before his value diminishes, and then predict and project when to sign a player and for how much.
“I think the assumption when people say AI is that [baseball] teams are just throwing information into a black box and it spits out whatever and teams are making a decision based off that,” Greenberg said. “I don’t actually think that’s the case in baseball. I think the teams that do it best in baseball are still blending the objective with the subjective. Sure, they’re trying to curate frameworks to make better decisions.
Davidson agreed. “There’s always going to be that feel, that mystical art of scouting that is always present because you cannot get to that science-based evaluation fully.”Madhouse will be at the center of so many facets of the Blackhawks’ approach. One of the biases that Davidson and the Blackhawks have consciously worked to eliminate in the scouting process stems from opinion of the decision-makers.
Before the Blackhawks can think about teaching computers how to consume hockey, they are seeking in Madhouse a place to pull together disparate sources of information and attempting to build connective tissue between all of those different areas. It’s a place to house that information, consume that information, make it accessible, user-friendly and agile.
“So there is consistency in the message,” Davidson said. “It can’t be one person thinks he needs to work on this, another person thinks he needs to work on this, so he has these competing and different thoughts on what he needs to work on – and it becomes he needs to work on everything. It ends up being very pointed and specific. Whatever it may be, it’s all understood throughout the chain. Everyone has got to be on the same page.
“I spent weeks and months trying to put the No. 1 pick out of my mind, to take our prep in another direction given the realities,” Davidson said. He actually instructed his scouts to not focus on any of the first three picks of the Draft earlier that day, knowing the Blackhawks were most likely to pick fourth or fifth. It was in 2015 that the Edmonton Oilers had the third-best odds to win the lottery of all lotteries and draft Connor McDavid.
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