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Good morning and welcome to episode 537 of Effective Wild.

The Daily Podcast from Baseball Perspectus presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com.

I am Ben Lindbergh of Grantland.com. It's actually an all-Grantland episode today.

Filling in for Sam Miller who'll be back tomorrow is Michael Bauman of Grantland who writes about baseball and has been on the show before. Hello, Michael.

Hey, how's it going?

Good. And today we're going to do something a little bit different.

Long time listeners know that I am not exactly a connoisseur of other sports, but there is one sport that I really regret not knowing better, which is hockey.

And maybe it's just my half Canadian side asserting itself, but every year I see some snippets of hockey that convince me that it is clearly the most exciting sport, and that I am an idiot for not watching it.

But the idea of trying to get up to speed is too daunting for me to dive in. I can probably name more 1994 Rangers than I can active players in the NHL.

Although I know that Jarmier and Jagger is still playing. Beyond that it gets a little bit hazy.

However, I do try to keep up a little bit with the analytics work that's being done, which is fascinating in other sports, as it is in baseball.

So today we're going to try a little cross sport sabermetrics exchange program to find out about the state of hockey analysis and the parallels between sabermetrics in hockey and in baseball to help us out with that.

We have Sean Meckendow, the founder of a great hockey bog down goes brown and also the lead hockey writer for a grant land. Hey, Sean.

Hey, so you wrote an article yesterday or Wednesday at Grantland about the NHL's analytics awakening.

And this is something I've been reading about for the past few months because this were a few days away from fall. So it is still the summer of analytics in hockey.

And all of a sudden, seemingly everyone on the internet who does hockey analysis has been plucked up by teams.

And this is really interesting because in baseball, obviously the the poaching of internet analysts has been going on for a while.

But I don't know that it ever has happened in such a concentrated way. So fast and furious. So why is it that this has happened all of a sudden?

Yeah, it's been really strange. I mean, hockey analytics has been around for a long time. And certainly even over the last few years, there's been a lot of back and forth between the guys who were getting into the analytics.

And then you had sort of the old school crowd. And it was very reminiscent of what baseball went through 10 or 15 years ago.

And the proponents of the numbers and the stats kept saying, you know, we know how this was going to end. We've already seen it in baseball. We've seen it in basketball and football.

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