Hockey Confidential (9 page)

Ferrari and some fellow “hockey nerds” (as he affectionately termed them) were discussing, in or around 2005, the concept of how one might efficiently measure puck possession, lamenting the absence of stats (blocked and missed shots) that would permit data to be collected. Then Ferrari heard Buffalo Sabre general manager Darcy Regier—not Jim Corsi, as legend has it—talk in a radio interview about missed and blocked shots, precisely the path Ferrari and his pals were interested in following.

In a rare—if not unheard-of—telephone interview with me in April 2014, Ferrari explained publicly (for the first time) what happened after that:

I heard Regier on the radio. He had all these great stats about missed and blocked shots that we just didn't have at the time, although they became available [from the NHL] not too long after that. There was a small group of us that had been talking about [the concept] for a while.

I was going to call [Corsi] the Regier number. But it didn't sound good; it didn't seem right. Then I was going to call it the Ruff number [after Sabres coach Lindy], but that obviously sounded bad. So I went to the Buffalo Sabre website and looked at a picture of a guy on their website, and Jim Corsi kind of fit the bill. So I called it a “Corsi number,” and then I pretended it was him I heard him on the radio talking about it—that's what I told people. That's basically [how Corsi got named].

Wait a minute. Pump the brakes. This qualifies as breaking #fancy­stats news.

Was Ferrari actually saying Jim Corsi's only connection to the statistic was that Ferrari liked the look of his photo on the Sabres' website, especially his moustache, and the sound of his name?

From Ferrari's perspective at the time, yes, that's entirely accurate.

“I always prepared myself [that if the stat ever became well known]—hey, it was just a small group of nerds talking hockey—that eventually Corsi or someone would come to me and say, ‘What the hell are you guys talking about and why are you [using my name]?' I figured if it happened, I would apologize and carry on. I was really surprised a few years ago when I read a story in
USA Today
where Corsi talked about how the inspiration [for the numbers] came to him when he was skiing in the Alps, and I thought, ‘[Expletive deleted], it came to me when I saw your picture on a website, because I liked your moustache.'”

But the story gets even better.

Ferrari had no idea at the time—nor even when he gave this interview in 2014—that the metric's name turned out to be fortuitously labelled. One of the reasons Regier was on the radio talking about shot attempts in the first place was that Corsi was, in fact, a believer in measuring a goalie's workload not by just shots on goal but by blocked and missed shots as well.

“Oh, I had no idea of that,” Ferrari said. “I just liked his moustache.”

Seriously, you can't make this stuff up.

But it's true, all of it.

Regier was an NHL general manager who was in on the ground floor of analytics, and his goalie coach, Corsi, was a thoughtful, deep thinker, a former algebra teacher.

“I always kidded Jim that he was the self-proclaimed protector of all goalies,” Regier said. “He was always looking for a stat that would give his goalies their due. [Adding up shots on goal, blocked shots and missed shots] was something along those lines. Jim was always charting shots—where they came from, that stuff. In all the years I've known him, Jim never tried to take credit for [the Corsi metric as it's more sophisticatedly applied now]. He was just interested in tracking shots for his goalies.”

Regier said there was other outside-the-box thinking going on within the Sabres organization at that time, mostly out of necessity.

“Our scouting budget had been really slashed,” Regier said, “so we hired a bunch of young kids to track things [from games] on video. I can assure you, if I was on the radio talking about that sort of [statistical] stuff, it would have come from Jim and those kids and the work they were doing.”

If the story of how Corsi came to be named is fascinating, what are we to make of the story of the mysterious, international man of mystery, Vic Ferrari?

If you happened to be a fan of the 1980s TV sitcom
Taxi
, you'll recognize the Vic Ferrari moniker. A character on the show, Latka Gravas—played by eccentric actor Andy Kaufman—created a suave but obnoxious alter ego who went by that name.

The Oiler-loving, stat-creating Ferrari, though, had two simple rationales for the
nom de plume
.

“I liked Andy Kaufman,” Ferrari said, “and at the time, no one used their real name on the Internet. I still generally don't. Being a bit older [Ferrari was born in 1967], I guess I'm not comfortable with how kids pour out their whole lives on Facebook and put everything about themselves on the Internet. It's a terrible idea, I think. I'm a private person. I also had a professional life and I didn't want people I was working with to know I was a hockey nerd. It's not something you're proud of.”

Ferrari always loved hockey. He played it growing up. He had a deep and abiding passion for the Edmonton Oilers—still does, although the Oilers' streak of missing the playoffs, eight straight years and counting, has pretty much mutilated his heart. It was originally his fascination with gambling and sports betting, though, that got him into blogging and analytics. That was also, in part, what led him to depart—at least in the public sense.

“I came from a sports betting background, that was my initial interest,” he said. “I loved hockey, played it, coached it, but until I got into the [sports betting] industry and saw how they looked at the game, I realized I really knew nothing about hockey. All the stuff I thought I knew was wrong. That changed my life.”

Eventually, though, as much as he enjoyed being a “nerd” and trying, through his site, to come up with ways of understanding how the outcomes of games were determined, it was in his best interest to go underground, to lower his profile.

“I was hurting myself,” he said. “I was helping to make other people smarter, which is good, but not if you make them too smart. Not if you come from my [sports betting] background.”

If Ferrari did any media interviews, other than comments he made or dialogue he had on stats-related websites, there's no record of them. He's been like a ghost to most. So why do an interview with me in 2014, a few years after he'd stopped blogging regularly and mostly dropped out of sight?

“I guess I've become a bit less concerned about [putting myself out there] because lately, everyone seems to be more open about it [on the Internet],” Ferrari said, noting that he still has no interest in revealing his true identity, other than being comfortable in saying that, as of 2014, he was living in Chicago and working as a trader in the stock market there.

The man is something of a #fancystats legend, primarily as a bright mind and innovator, but also because of a well-known salty disposition, acerbic online attitude and, of course, his shadowy, anony­mous existence. Even a fellow analytics legend like Gabe Desjardins didn't know Ferrari's real surname or that Ferrari had moved from Edmonton to Chicago.

“I think I know Vic's real first name and I think I've got an idea of where near Edmonton he lives, assuming he still lives there,” Desjardins said before Ferrari gave the interview for this book. “I honestly don't know his last name or if he still lives where I think he lived or what he's doing or what he does for a living. He once told me, ‘I don't do interviews. I'm from a different generation.' He's a mysterious man.”

Mysterious, yes. Some would say even mythical.

“Mythical?” Ferrari said, laughing. “People can imagine all sorts of shit. I am pretty special, though, don't kid yourself.”

That last part was a joke. He laughed hard.

But when the history of hockey analytics is written, it's no joke: Ferrari and his
Irreverent Oiler Fans
website will almost certainly be identified as the cradle of #fancystats civilization.

This new Corsi concept didn't exactly take the entire hockey
world by storm right out of the gate. It was, however, a topic of much discussion on Ferrari's website. One of the commenters who frequented the site was Calgary native Matt Fenwick, a mechanical engineer with a passion for hockey and the Flames who, at that time, was living in Lethbridge. He had an ongoing Internet debate with another fan, Cameron Thomson (known by the handle RiversQ), on Ferrari's site because Fenwick felt strongly that blocked shots should
not
be included in the Corsi calculation. The two of them would go back and forth on the merits of each other's argument.

Ferrari was posting the Corsi numbers of Oiler players on his site at the time, but in November 2007, he started posting a second column of numbers beside Corsi, simply calling the new column “Fenwick”: shots on goal plus missed shots, but not blocked shots.

“I just liked Matt Fenwick; he's smart and he's a really nice guy,” Ferrari said of why he started posting Fenwick numbers. “I had already made Corsi famous; I wanted to make Matt Fenwick famous. That was pretty much it. I'm not sure it really matters whether blocked shots are counted or not—it's still basically the same thing. It's which way the puck is going. It's all about possession. It was at times, I thought, a nonsensical argument in some ways, but I thought Matt should have his own stat. I really like Matt.

“I named all the stats after people. I was criticized for that—people said they're stupid names. But I think hockey stats get more talk in regular [non-hockey] circles than any other statistics. I live with nerds, I live in the trading world, I know people who know metrics inside and out and only casually follow hockey, but they know the [hockey] stats by name. That's because they're cool [names].”

So Fenwick, the engineer who fancied himself more a fan of the game than a numbers geek—“I'm not really very mathy,” he said—ended up with his very own stat with his very own name. How cool is that?

“Well,” Fenwick said in April 2014, “it's getting a lot more interesting all the time. It was one thing to see it on the web, on a stats site, but when ]Edmonton Oiler left winger] Taylor Hall is dropping references to Fenwick in his postgame comments or Brendan Shanahan is talking about it on his first day on the job with the Toronto Maple Leafs [as team president], that's not really something I ever could have imagined.”

Again, that 2013–14 NHL season, when Hall and Shanahan dropped Fenwick references will be remembered as #fancystats' coming-out party.

Ferrari's
Irreverent Oiler Fans
site turned out to be Ground Zero not only for Corsi and Fenwick, but also what has become the third element of the advanced hockey stats trilogy: PDO.

PDO stands for . . . well, it doesn't really stand for anything. At least not anything that relates to the statistic, which adds shooting percentage to save percentage to get a numerical value that appears to have great predictive powers. PDO was the Internet name Oiler fan Brian King used when he commented or posted on Ferrari's site. King played a video game on the old Nintendo 64 system, called Perfect Dark. That's where the PD part came from. And the O, to make it PDO?

“It had no meaning,” King said. “I just put down PDO, it means nothing, it has no significance.”

Seriously.

First Vic Ferrari, and now PDO?

Again, you can't make up this stuff.

In late August 2008, the then 20-year-old King and a bunch of Oiler fans, including Ferrari, were batting around Corsi and Fenwick talk as it related to the Oilers when King—I mean, PDO—posted the following: “Let's pretend there was a stat called ‘blind luck.' Said stat was simply adding shooting percentage and save percentage together. I know there's a way to check what this number should generally be, but I hate math, so let's just say 100 per cent for shits and giggles.”

King maybe didn't fully realize it at that precise moment, but he had stumbled upon the embryonic form of what is now widely regarded as the most tried-and-true advanced stat in hockey, PDO: the one number that, in all probability, tells you whether a player or a team is either incredibly lucky or unbelievably unlucky, and in which direction the player's or team's performance is highly likely to trend in the future.

“PDO is great,” said Ferrari, who further advanced King's initial concept. “It's about the role of chance in the game, it's about understanding that relationship with chance.”

In a span of less than two and a half years—from March 5, 2006, when Ferrari first publicly documented his Corsi revelation, to August 29, 2008, when King, “for shits and giggles,” stumbled upon PDO, with the creation of Fenwick's Fenwick tucked in between—hockey's advanced statistics community had been given three building blocks with which to launch an offensive on the sleepy, non-numerical hockey world that had no idea what was coming.

Ferrari, Fenwick and King. Corsi, Fenwick and PDO. The Big Three—the hockey analytics equivalent of Larry Robinson, Serge Savard and Guy Lapointe.

Okay, it's the moment of truth. It's time for a Grade 12 math
fraud to try to explain Corsi, Fenwick and PDO to many who, I suspect, are as numerically challenged as myself.

Remember when I said advanced stats aren't all that advanced? It's true—sort of.

Let's start with Corsi, which is the difference between two teams' shot attempts while playing even-strength, five-on-five hockey: shots on goal plus missed shots plus blocked shots, minus the same items for the opposition.

Let's assume your team had 10 shots on goal, missed five shots and took five shots that were blocked. That's 20 shot attempts for you.

Let's assume my team had eight shots on goal, missed four and took four more that were blocked. That's 16 shot attempts for me.