Meet the PWHL’s Analytics Hires

Behind the scenes, women’s hockey is known to have a significant amount of analytics buy-in. There has historically been a lack of personnel and time among hockey operations staff and coaches, so analytics and statistics can be a welcome way to fill the information gap that other traditional coaching methods cannot fill. So, with the league’s first season closing out, it is well worth examining what analytics hires each team has made.

Montréal

PWHL Montréal has kept half of the Montréal Force’s analytics department: Mikael Nahabedian as director of hockey analytics, and Alyssa Longmuir as a part-time contractor.

Famously, Mikael Nahabedian spent the 2022-2023 season building the Montréal Force into an analytics powerhouse. Before that though, he spent three years working with the McGill Marlets, as well as a year with AIK women’s hockey. His public work is also well-known throughout both men’s and women’s hockey for distilling scouting, coaching, and analytics concepts seamlessly into actionable and easy-to-understand projects, and most of it can be seen on his substack.

Longmuir herself is one of the founding members of modern women’s hockey analytics as we know it. She has written analytics pieces for The Athletic, FiveThirtyEight, and even for the crew here at The Ice Garden, most of which can be found on those websites or her own site. Her work has also made it onto national television both in the US and Canada during the 2021 Women’s World Championships. As announced on June 23, 2023, the Force was slated to have an analytics department of four people, one of whom was Longmuir herself, prior to the buyout of the PHF on June 29.

In an attempt to help women’s hockey analytics reach more people, Alyssa created the first women’s hockey analytics website to compile multiple leagues’ data, Even-Strength, and also began hosting WHKYHAC annually with Mike Murphy and myself in 2021.

On the team side, she was with the Force for the 2022-23 season as mentioned, and worked extensively with the the Australian Women’s Ice Hockey League and the Newcastle Northstars of the the Australian Ice Hockey League.

New York

Like Montréal, PWHL New York has two official analytics or analytics-adjacent hires.

In November, Christophe Perreault was officially hired as NY’s director of scouting and analytics. Before that, he was a statistician and recruiter with the Carabins de l'Université de Montréal women’s hockey team for nearly a decade. Pascal Daoust also brought Perreault on as a statistics consultant during his time at Foreurs de Val-d'Or.

While Perreault does not have any women’s hockey work to publicly review, his LinkedIn lists him as writing about men’s hockey at 25stanley.com from 2011-2021. The site does not appear to be live at this time, so I am unable to review his work from that period.

Katia Clément-Heydra is also a part of PWHL NY’s front office as a manager of player services and hockey administration. While not an analyst herself, she worked with Nahabedian at the Montréal Force and McGill and also worked on the SARAH project with Nahabedian and myself to help develop scouting analytics for the coaching perspective.

Boston

While PWHL Boston has not been as explicitly focused on analytics as the previous two teams, they have hired an analytically-oriented video coordinator, which is a unique combination in hockey.

Cierra San Roman, Boston’s video coordinator, was the director of hockey operations for women’s hockey at the University of Vermont from 2021 to 2023. She has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Education from Colby College and is currently completing her master’s in Complex Systems and Data Science at UVM, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Additionally, she “has a keen interest in analytics” according to Jim Plumer, the UVM women’s hockey head coach, in a 2021 press release. Plumber stated in that same press release that he was “looking forward to seeing her combine her hockey knowledge with her advanced computer knowledge to find ways to help us move our program forward." Boston’s hiring of San Roman indicates that they are prioritizing bringing these valuable skill sets to the organization to find insights that other teams may not have.

What About the Rest?

Ottawa, Minnesota, and Toronto do not appear to have anyone in an analytics-related position. Both of their video coaches have backgrounds in fields unrelated to STEM, and neither appear to have done any analytics-related work in their career so far or as a hobby.

Despite this, it’s safe to conclude that some PWHL teams have made it a priority to invest early in analytics. This should not come as a surprise, given the league’s partnership with Sportlogiq. This is a welcome continuation from the PHF, which had seven people in analytics positions spread across four teams (including yours truly!).

With further investment in the league on all fronts, I anticipate team interest and investment on the analytics front will only grow in the coming off-season.