You Can Take The Blogger Out Of The Basement…Well, Maybe Not

Wow, guess that was a bad time to take a couple of weeks off, what with bloggers getting hired by real life NHL teams. I hope I didn’t miss any calls.

But in case you’ve been living under a rock, the advanced stats coming out party continued this week with news that Tyler Dellow (aka @mc79hockey) was hired by the Oilers to consult directly with head coach Dallas Eakins over the coming season. This is an interesting development for several reasons, not the least of which is that it’s now a little bit safer to give Twitter a try.

More on the other, less snarky, reasons after the jump.

No, the really interesting aspect of this hire is that in working directly with Eakins, Dellow will be applying his statistical analysis at a much more tactical level. We have typically seen advanced stats being applied to compare, contrast and evaluate players, which would make them much more applicable at the managerial level. The idea being that you can use this type of analysis to identify players that may be under- or over-valued in the market place, and use that information to build a better team.

But it will be interesting to see how well statistical analysis techniques can be married with video analysis, which is what Dellow has spent the last year focusing on, to produce insights that can help coach individual players on their deficiencies, or inform the overall defensive and offensive systems. Or both. Applied at this level, advanced statistical analysis has the potential to directly impact on-ice performance.

That being said, despite the fact that Dellow was already consulting with Eakins last year, his contributions to on-ice success clearly pale in comparison to those of the blogger hired by our very own Vancouver Canucks:

That’s right. The greatest passer in Vancouver Canucks history will be doing re-caps for canucks.com next year. Well deserved for one of the most prolific bloggers the Smylosphere has ever seen. Heck, if it was up to me, he’d be in the Ring of Honour.

Not sure how the Canucks are going to fit @TheStanchion in under the salary cap, but I’m sure Gilman will figure it out.

Speaking of salaries, remember back during the lockout time we will not speak of ever again, when both Donald Fehr and Gary Bettman said they would not be taking a salary for the duration of the work stoppage? Well, funny story…

Somehow, Bettman managed to get paid $500,000 more for the lockout shortened 2012-13 season than he did for season before. That works out to a cool $8.8 million. For all the talk about closing loopholes with this new CBA, there seems to be a big one that was missed: