Month: March 2011

Rod Phillips

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Source: Edmonton Journal

Oilers play-by-play man Rod Phillips officially retired last night. The Oilers honored him for his 37 years behind the mic with a special pre-game ceremony and congratulatory gifts.

The amount of attention and accolades Philips has received is for good reason. For so long he was the voice of the Oilers. TV commentators came and went, since the Oilers broadcasted their games across different networks, so there never was an attachment to a single individual on television. No other play-by-play man, aside from Phillips, could be considered “our” guy.

To me, Phillips was that narrator whose voice echoed the game. The game itself has so much going on, but you begin to rely on his judgment and interpretation of the events. After getting used to his tendencies and phrases, it becomes hard to imagine the game without him.

I think the attachment fans have developed with Phillips is because the narrative of the game is so important. Our experience, interpretation and understanding of the game is through narration. Phillips told a story each game to keep listeners informed and entertained. He never did anything that made him unique or irreplaceable. Yet he remained a highly influential person for fans because of his storytelling abilities.

Edmonton Oilers Legacy – Rod Phillips. (n.d.). Retrieved March 30, 2011 from http://www.oilersheritage.com/legacy/contributions_announcers_rodphillips.html

MacKinnon, J. (2011, March 30). The Voice Part of Oilers History. Edmonton Journal. Retrieved from http://www.edmontonjournal.com/sports/John+MacKinnon+Voice+part+Oilers+history/4526619/story.html?cid=megadrop_story

McCurdy, B. (2011, March 29). Rod’s Retirement Roast: Fans’ Roundtable. The Copper and Blue. Retrieved from http://www.coppernblue.com/2010/6/10/1492529/rods-retirement-roast-fans.

Oiler’s Rebuild

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After another disappointing season for the Oilers, my wife has decided to give an outsiders take on the teams rebuilding efforts.

Oilers Rebuild – I don’t get it.

I’m not a hockey expert. I catch the game every so often and watch the Oil Change series, but that’s the extent of my knowledge. I grew up in the 80s watching the Oiler’s glory years. So naturally, I will always support the Oilers, but I’m not sure that I support the Oiler’s Rebuild.

Generally, long term projects tend to be avoided. The reason is simple: the longer the project, the more uncontrollable factors there are to deal with and the more likely a project is to fail. In my opinion, the Oiler’s rebuild project is no different.

First, the lack of resources (people) often plagues long term projects. Projects often lose momentum when key resources are lost or new ones are gained. This is common on projects that last 3-5 years and people move on for various reasons. I see this as an issue for the rebuild as well. Oiler’s Management continuously refer to players (ex. Hall, Eberle, Paajarvi) as ‘pieces of the puzzle’. But what happens if those players get hurt and we lose a piece of the puzzle? Eventually you can’t make the puzzle. My point is not that the Oilers will never be better, but that resources/players are not static. They get traded, injured, quit, etc. So, how do you rebuild if you don’t know what pieces you’re going to have to work with at any given time? They didn’t know that how many people they would lose to injury or trades this year. How can they plan for 3 years down the road?

Secondly, changes in technology or external factors affect long term projects. What was the right way of doing things at one time, is not always the right way today. Hockey is no different. The game of hockey is evolving every year – the rules, the players, the techniques, the skill, right down to the ice they skate on…it’s all evolving. Would Wayne Gretzky be the player he was in the 80s in today’s hockey? It’s tough to say since the game and its players are different now than they were 20 years ago. Having stated that, what are the Oilers ‘rebuilding’ to match up to? I see the goal as a moving target. So, how do you assess what you need when you don’t where you, the game and your opposition is headed?

Finally, how do you know when the rebuild is done? How do you measure its progress and success? One might argue that making the playoffs means that the ‘rebuild’ is working. But in 2006, the Oilers made the playoffs and didn’t need a rebuild. Many teams have attempted the ‘rebuild’ , some successful (Pittsburgh, Chicago) but the majority have failed (Atlanta, St. Louis, Florida, Columbus, etc). So what made some of them successful over others? How do you know it wasn’t just a fluke? If we do make the playoffs in a year, then why can’t we just attribute it to work of the players and coaches rather than some complex rebuild formula?

Like I said earlier, I’m not hockey expert. There may be intricacies of a ‘rebuild’ that I fail to understand. But as it stands right now, I just don’t get it.

Oilers4Life

Transmedia Storytelling – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

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Here’s an example of transmedia storytelling I posted on our class blog. You can find more details about transmedia storytelling from Dr. Henry Jenkins’ blog post.


TMNT used various platforms to continue on and develop its storylines. Aside from the Saturday morning cartoons, there were comic books, feature films and board games. They also utilized video games to engage fans in a medium that not only continued the storyline, but also allowed fans to take control.

The television shows worked well for the storyline since it combined visual and audio effects to draw viewers. It gave fans a sense of what the characters are like and how they react when in conflict with villians. This also established the vision of the animators and creators of TMNT.

Video games gave fans the power to control the heroes within established storylines. Video games works well as a platform since fans have a clear goal in mind, which is to complete the story and finish the game. How they do this is up to player as they decide which character they get to be and control how exactly they finish off the villains. Fans become more familiar with the characters as well as the TMNT narrative.

Photo: http://www.ign.com/blogs

Jenkins, H. (2007, March 22). Transmedia Storytelling 101. Retrieved from http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html

Transmedia Storytelling – World Wrestling Entertainment

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Here’s an example of transmedia storytelling I posted on our course blog for New Media Narratives. You can find more details about transmedia storytelling from Dr. Henry Jenkins’ blog post.

Example 1: World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)

The WWE has utilized transmedia storytelling in the past to develop its characters and plots. It has been years since I watched wrestling but do remember the methods that were used in the eighties. Television was used for wrestling matches and to promote the good guy versus the bad guy drama. A Saturday morning cartoon was developed starring the wrestlers with stories that contributed to the franchises storylines. The opening itself for Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling was a blend of real-life and cartoon.

Today, the WWE uses weekly television shows along with Twitter to develop their storylines and characters. The television program is live and provides fans with two hours of time for several storylines to develop. Programming includes matches, highlights from previous weeks and promotions for upcoming pay-per-views and merchandise. The television is a valuable medium since wrestling and acting is a visual and audio display. Hearing two men grunt out a match on the radio just would not work out as effectively. Television content is also available online after the show has aired.

Twitter is a platform that allows for the continuation of the storyline before and after the television programming. Fans receive real-time updates regarding content but also stay in touch with the wrestlers who send messages to build up their matches and appearances. It suits the build up of the storylines since it fills the silence that exists between live programming. The storylines don’t always require a visual aid and can be communicated by text.

Jenkins, H. (2007, March 22). Transmedia Storytelling 101. Retrieved from http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html

Swallow, E. (2011, January 28). How WWE Conquered the Social Media Arena. Mashable.
Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2011/01/28/wwe-social-media/#

Advanced Statistics and Hockey Analytics

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Traditional hockey statistics have been around since the birth of professional leagues. The NHL’s first game was on December 19, 1917, with the Montreal Canadiens defeating the Ottawa Senators 7-4. According to hockeydb.com, the Canadiens went on to win the league championship that year after winning 13 games in a 22-game season. Assists were not tabulated, but Joe Malone did score 44 goals. The accuracy of these stats is sketchy, but there is evidence that basic stats were tabulated early on.

Today, the NHL publishes hundreds of statistics. Aside from goals, assists, penalties and shots in a game, the league also provides ice time, hits and faceoff percentages and breaks it down by power-play time and even strength. The amount of information the NHL provides has increased over time, and reflects a growing demand for statistics.

These stats can be used for a variety of reasons. They can used by game broadcasters to give more detail about a player or team and to add to the narrative of a game. Fans can use these stats to build their own fantasy league rosters and track favorite teams. Players can use these stats in contract negotiations as they provide more detail about a player’s ability. Coaches can use statistics to focus on specific competition and develop a game plan for their team.

Recently, advanced statistics have surfaced, to supplement these traditional stats. The site behindthenet.ca, a leading provider of advanced statistics, supplies data on where the player starts when play begins, the quality of the teammates he plays with, quality of the competition the coach plays him against, among others. Combined with the basic stats the NHL provides, these statistics provide more insight into the game. An FAQ regarding advanced stats can be found here.

Gabriel Desjardins is the individual behind the site and was recently interviewed on Nation Radio (Team 1260, Edmonton). Alan Mitchell, or Lowetide in the Oilogosphere, hosts the new show and talked to Desjardins about advanced stats, how it started and where it could go in the future.

Regarding how behindthenet.ca started:

“There wasn’t really much interest or much to do in terms of hockey analysis during the lockout (2004-2005 season). Then the NHL started publishing ice time in a much more usable format. Charts with green boxes showing who was on the ice. So they switched that into a text format that I could much more easily process into a website and once I saw that, there were a lot of ideas that sprang to mind. A lot of things that we could borrow particularly from basketball in terms of analyzing players and analyzing what they do on the ice.”

According to Shirky (2008), when the barriers to getting things done drop, more and more people will participate and contribute online. As soon as the league made their stats easier to use, fans were all over it to produce and share high quality data and information. Today, the NHL.com site has data sets that are detailed, updated regularly and easy to use.

Regarding where hockey statistics are going in terms of the data:

Desjardins believes that acquiring more detail about the game at the micro-level is the next step. Examples would be tracking passes and tracking exact pass location.

“Step after that is where you would have every single player and the puck tagged electronically at all times. So you know where absolutely everybody is. And obviously there’s some massive, massive database construction and programming problems to get any useful information out of this. But I think we will really push forward in terms of understanding some of the things that confuse us right now about how the game works.”

If hockey analytics is to expand, the NHL needs to get on board. Fans can take the data that the NHL provides and apply countless mathematical formulas and theories to develop new, innovative, information. There is the possibility that fans can collaborate with one another to begin tracking their own data, as done by Cult of Hockey and mc79hockey.com. But it would be in the NHL’s best interest to be involved in the accumulation of data.

Regarding the visitors to the site:

“Usually I only get a lot of request for things that aren’t there or are things that are broken down. It’s a pretty broad distribution of the pages that people look at. But I think the biggest thing people look at are the Oilers, and then they look at the Flames, and then they look at the Leafs, and that’s basically the bulk of the traffic is going to those three pages.”

“Much more interest in Canadian teams. Which is interesting because I think that the notion that advanced stats in hockey, a lot of people look at it as an American baseball idea, whereas its Canadians who are really pushing it and are really interested in it.”

Canada being hockey obsessed is already known. Recent studies have also shown that Canadians spend a lot of time online. But the fact that the Edmonton Oilers’ advanced statistics gets a majority of the traffic is interesting since the market is considered much smaller than cities such as Montreal and east coast hockey markets such as New York and Philadelphia. Why the Oilers content draws traffic would require research before drawing any conclusions.

Advanced statistics in general will continue to grow since we’ve seen in the past a growing desire by fans to get more involved in the game. Fans are moving from simple observers of the game to participants as they collaborate with other fans to build new information and share knowledge within an online community. The next step may be electronic tracking of professional players, but it’s more likely that a crowd-sourced method of building data sets is much more closer. Mobile technology continues to improve and could give fans the ability to share their observations and data instantly with others. New statistical methods and theories will continue to drive how the data is analyzed, but it will be the collaboration amongst fans that take hockey analytics to the next level.

Behind the Net (n.d.). Retrieved March 9, 2011 from http://www.behindthenet.ca.

Hartley, M. (2011, March 8). Canada maintains title as world’s most engaged Web nation. Financial Post. Retrieved from http://business.financialpost.com/2011/03/08/canada-maintains-title-as-worlds-most-engaged-web-nation.

HockeyDB.com. (n.d.) Standings for the Montreal Canadiens of the NHL. Retrieved from http://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/stats/display_standings.php?tmi=6929.

McGourty, J. (2007, November 26). NHL celebrates 90th anniversary today. NHL.com. Retrieved from: http://www.nhl.com/ice/news.htm?id=369827.

Mitchell, A. (2011, February 19). Interview with Gabriel Desjardins. Nation Radio. Team 1260, Edmonton. Retrieved from http://oilersnation.com/2011/3/3/nation-radio-february-19-2011.

Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody. New York: Penguin Press.

MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference

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MIT Sloan School of Management recently held its annual Sports Analytics Conference in Boston focusing on Sports Analytics. Its goal is:

To provide a forum for industry professionals (executives and leading researchers) and students to discuss the increasing role of analytics in the sports industry. MIT Sloan is dedicated to fostering growth in this arena, and the conference enriches opportunities for learning and understanding the sports business world.

Different panels discuss a wide array of topics related to their field and take questions from attendees. Examples of panel topics are sports gambling, golf analytics and referee analytics, among others. What’s interesting is that the conference provided, for the first time, a hockey analytics panel, which consisted of representatives from teams that have had a fair amount of success in recent years. Whether they attended because they value hockey analytics, or because other teams had more important matters to attend to is unknown. It was definitely encouraging to read that professionals and students had an interest in the topic of hockey analytics.

This conference made me think of online hockey fan communities and their connection to the game and active participation online. Using blogs, fans have developed, shared and utilized sports analytic techniques to predict games, measure player performance and analyze season results. At the same time, professional sports teams in the NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL employ their own methods to measure performance to make business and roster decisions. Hockey analytics is important to both the online fan community and the professional team, even though it’s for different reasons. This common interest of hockey analysis and value of the field may be why fans dedicate their time and energy to the cause. It’s a feeling of connection to the sport they follow regularly. Most fans won’t ever become owners or managers of professional sports teams. But to see the game from the eyes of a manager is what connects a fan to the game.

Cullen, S. (2011, March 11). Hockey at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. TSN. Retrieved from http://tsn.ca/blogs/scott_cullen/?id=357614.

Dizikes, P. (2011, March 8). Strength in Numbers. MIT News. Retrieved from http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/sloan-sports-conference-0308.html.

Online Communities – Participation Inequality

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Nielsen (2006)

A study from 2006 outlines participation statistics for online communities. Dr. Jakob Nielsen (2006) found that:

“In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action”.

Would this be the case for online hockey fan communities?

From my experience, there are a small handful of hockey blogs that publish regular posts. Across these blogs, there are numerous comments left by readers and other bloggers to contribute to the ideas of the original posting.

Nielsen (2006) found that blog sites have even worse participation inequality and that the rule is closer to 95-5-0.1.

It would help to know statistics from hockey blog sites compare to Dr. Nielsen’s findings. Some data could provide further insight into the knowledge fans acquire and if in fact it is influenced by such a small number of people in the online community. The challenge would be to find the number of unique hits/reads a post gets that are from legitimate readers. Some blogs do require users to have an account before posting comments, while others rely on email addresses. So far, I haven’t been able to find other research papers that cover a similar issue.

Nielsen, J. (2006, October 9). Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute. Alertbox. Retrieved from www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

Sports Arenas and Social Capital

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Source: Vancouver Sun

The City of Edmonton has published a paper to support its push for a new downtown arena. The arena district is expected to revitalize Edmonton’s downtown and is in the midst of sorting out who pays for what and how much.

This paper supports the idea of a downtown arena and uses the recent development in Los Angeles, Columbus and Indianapolis as example of successful projects. Dr. Rosentraub talks about the importance of sports to a city and why a downtown location can be beneficial to its residents and business community.

Dr. Rosentraub’s brings up the idea of social capital and how sports and sports facilities can play an integral role in its development. According to his paper:

Sports are..part of the social capital of society through their role as socializing institutions that increase stability and as tool to underscore the political values and strength of a society (Wilson, 1994; Rosentraub, 1997; Andrews, 2004). Lefebrve (1991, 1996) has concluded that places within a city the encourage identification with a group facilitate the ability of individuals to build relationships that enhance identities and reduce the stress of isolation that can be endemic in large urban societies.

He mentions the Oilers run to the 2006 Stanley Cup finals as an example of the city coming together, but it had more to do with a winning team than anything else. So I’ll agree that professional sports does increase the social capital of a city. But how does an arena have a similar impact?

According to Nan Lin (2002), social capital is “capital captured through social relations” and is “seen as a social asset by virtue of actors’ connections and access to resources in the network or group of which they are members”. It’s developed by building and maintaining social ties to those within the group and those outside of the group.

According to Putnam (2000), there are two types of social capital. The first is bonding capital, which deals with strengthening the relationships in a specific group in a network. Fans, being the driving force behind professional sports, play a big part in the bonding capital. They engage with the game and other fans in online communities, as well as physical spaces other than the arena. Fans being what they are will find their own space to connect and develop social capital with one another regardless of the arena’s location. Oiler fans in Phoenix, for example, will not be impacted by the arena but will contribute to Edmonton’s social capital.

Bridging capital, the second type of social capital, pertains to the external entities and developing contact with them. This is where hockey meets the rest of the world in the form of industry, government and the rest of the community. A physical arena in downtown would enhance the bridging capital with a presence around the other entities, but there’s no guarantees it would have an impact, especially if the Oilers continue to lose every year.

I would argue that social capital generated by professional sports has more to do with the team’s success than the actual arena and its location. Both the bridging capital and bonding capital is influenced by a successful team rather than the arena location. Locating it in downtown would physically connect it to other groups in the city (ie. industry, education, government), but it’s a team success that will lead to connections. Professional sports itself, is made up of the teams, the managers/owners, sports media and fans, and will develop social capital on its own since it is fan driven.

If the Oilers are concerned with building social capital in Edmonton, they need to turn the franchise into a winner. The team has been awful for the past eighteen years with a history of bloated contracts, average scouting, poor player development and bad decisions by management. Claiming that they face the same challenges that forced the Jets and the Nordiques out of Winnipeg and Quebec City is a stretch, as explained by Tyler Dellow. I like the idea of a downtown arena, but disagree with these claims from both the City of Edmonton and the Katz Group.

For more discussion on the Edmonton arena, check out the Edmonton Journal’s Storify.

Lin, N. (2001). Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster.