Corsi, Fenwick and Gramsci: How bloggers and advanced analytics are changing the National Hockey League

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, an ever growing online community of bloggers and amateur statisticians has been developing a new set of advanced analytics and performance metrics for the National Hockey League. Many of the people who are driving innovation in this field are not data scientists but, rather, intellectually curious fans of the game, who are playing a significant role in reshaping the way the game is consumed and understood. Yet, despite the body of knowledge created online, only within the last few years have the National Hockey League and the mainstream sport media begun to take notice of these innovations. I argue that the analytics movement is being driven from the fans up, rather than from the National Hockey League and other professional leagues down, and that the drivers of this movement are examples of what Antonio Gramsci calls ‘organic intellectuals’ – the analytics camp is locked into its own ‘war of position’ against the hegemony of traditional hockey fans, coaches, management and sport media. My research explores the resistance Internet-based content creators have experienced from established hockey media personalities (‘Hockey Men’) and the National Hockey League itself, connecting this resistance to a growing trend away from evidence-based discourse in the current Western media landscape.