People

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IJAY PALANSKY

IJay is a Harvard Law School graduate, Valedictorian of Huron College at the University of Western Ontario, former federal prosecutor in Washington, DC, and former professional high stakes poker player.  IJay has been a hockey fan pretty much since the day he could walk, eventually playing as high as Tier-2 Jr. A in Toronto, where he was born and raised.

The expertise IJay developed in becoming one of the top poker players in the world at the height of the poker boom in the late 2000’s is the same expertise that’s critical for hockey analytics.  These skills include not only advanced statistical analysis, but also an understanding of the underlying game so as to allow proper interpretation of the new fancy-stats – each with its own inherent limitations and weaknesses – together with insight about how those statistics can be combined, refined, and applied in a concrete way to explain, and gain a competitive advantage in, a dynamic game situation like hockey.  IJay’s approach blends his background in statistics with elements of game theory and behavioral economics to consider questions about issues like player evaluation, team composition and cap allocation, draft/trade strategy, and hockey tactics, in ways that others don’t.

When he’s not crunching numbers or just catching a game on TV, IJay is a litigator in the law firm of Armstrong Teasdale.

PHIL CURRY

Phil is a professor of economics at the University of Waterloo. He did his PhD (as well as his BA and MA) at the University of Western Ontario. He has subjected himself to limitless amounts of agony by being a Leafs fan since the Ballard years.

Phil’s training as an economist provides him with the technical expertise necessary to properly work with observational data like the ever-expanding variety of statistics in hockey analytics. In particular, Phil’s experience working with large sets of often multicollinear data is invaluable in teasing out relationships among all of the interactive parts of this dynamic game. Phil’s econometric expertise running various types of high-level regression analyses provides unique insight into the true drivers of various aspects of the game.

While his formal research does not generally involve sports analytics, Phil does teach an economics of sports class at the University of Waterloo.

IAN COOPER

Ian is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School (Summa Cum Laude) and the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto (With Honors).  Born and raised in Toronto, he has followed hockey for as long as he can remember and occasionally believed - despite all evidence to the contrary - that the Leafs might actually end a Stanley Cup drought that began when third last was good enough for the playoffs and two rounds won it all.

After graduating from college and throughout law school, Ian worked as a player agent, representing players at the OHL, WHL, NCAA and professional levels.  During that time he logged countless hours in rinks across North America and learned how to identify and develop talent alongside some of the best Major Junior, College and NHL scouts in the business.  His approach to analytics is to combine intuitions about the game earned through thousands of hours of observation with the quantitative skills he developed while studying Finance at Wharton and during a stint at a major consulting firm where he developed statistical models for financial institutions.

Ian lives in Toronto and has his own law practice, which focuses on entertainment, technology and sports law.

4 Comments

  1. March 28, 2014    

    in the march 28th torstar article u mention to go to the website "for more on methodology and results"
    how do u find these things on this website??

    thanks

    dave

  2. April 15, 2014    

    Hi,
    I am a graduate student at DePaul University and I was wondering if we could use your hockey data for our Multivariate Analytic class this quarter. We are interested i looking not wins but making to the conference finals for all playoff teams. We are still in the early stages of research development.

  3. Jason's Gravatar Jason
    December 9, 2014    

    Really..That is what you came up with as to why Calgary is doing better then Edmonton and that it is just smoke and mirrors. WOW. Not really smart there guys...Rather idiotic actually. Did you take into account games played,when,where, location of city, time between matches, what and where the team ate before the game, where they ate, travel from airport to rink before game, where they stayed, games played over 5 10 15 day spans and where,injuries,overall health of TEAM, coaches health(makes for a +or- attitude in the dressing room that can effect play on the ice)....You people have a lllllllooooooonnnnnnnggggggggg way to go before you understand what you seem to be preaching. If your going to publish something, do it right...This was funny.. Good joke guys...Glad you went to university to come up with this.

  4. David kanarek's Gravatar David kanarek
    April 14, 2016    

    Any way to get weekly updates on your Nhl analytics?

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