SAS Global Forum 2015
The SAS Global Forum is a premier event for SAS professionals that offers educational and networking opportunities. Not only does SAS help bring intelligence to everyday businesses, their technology helps sports organizations understand fans and players. Yesterday we covered day 1 of the event, and today we are in attendance covering the sports topics news coming from day 2 of the event.
Dallas, TX. —Yesterday emphasized how much Visual Analytics can help deliver clear pictures of data and predictive measures. Today we attended a few user group sessions about suggestions on how to use SAS software to analyze hockey players and tickets.
We started the morning off in a session about hockey analytics. In other sports such as football, basketball, and baseball, there are easier measurables to capture data. Baseball is all about the individual impact and tracking the players, where as basketball and football has some team work qualities that can skew the data a bit but individual performance is still measured a lot. Hockey is difficult to measure individual performance and events because of very little goals and so much teamwork. However, the NHL has officially recognized “Advance Stats” to push the sport into more analytical approaches.
Although tracking player performance in hockey is still evolving at the time, this study focused on the frequency of coaches hires and fires and the success rate afterwards. For example, most hockey coaches are fired on the 3rd or 4th year of working with a team. However, when new coaches come in, there really is not a big change in win percentage with the team over the next 3 to 4 years, so maybe it’s not all coaching.
Also, since concussions are a big topic in today’s world, the study analyzed which players are more likely to get a concussion while playing. According to the study, if a player was smaller, he was more likely to get elbowed or checked in the head. Younger players are more likely because they are still reckless and learning on the ice. If a player has more penalty minutes, he is likely to get a concussion for the amount of fouls he is involved in. Also, position matters in this equation, especially for those are involved in more physical confrontation. This research was submitted to the New York Times along with football concussion testing.
SAS technology also has the capability to provide predictive outcomes based on the activity of the game, similar to what SAP is providing.
The other session we attended spoke about dynamic ticketing in hockey. SAS software can be used to calculate the optimal price for each game based on metrics called elasticity models. The elasticity variables help bring the best suggested price for each game.
Overall, the SAS Global Forum has provided insight to how teams could use SAS software to provide predictive data. In the coming years of the conference, there will be more case studies from actual teams about how analytics and SAS is helping their organization and we will be sure to provide those insights.
