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Five for Writing is The Hockey Spy's way of bringing you some of the great gems with respect to hockey/sports writing.
The perfect petri dish | Ideas@Beedie
Excerpt:
Peter Tingling on the importance of researching business in sports.
"Tingling’s
true research interests lie in decision-making. Over the course of his
career, however, he has discovered that sport, and in particular the
National Hockey League
(NHL), makes for an excellent laboratory to test his hypotheses and he
has become an advocate for using sport data to test organizational
theories.
In the process, he has become something of
an expert, in particular on the NHL draft, an event that he finds a
fascinating phenomenon, with many parallels to other business sectors.
“Everyone makes decisions” he says
“and
while I would love to be invited to compare and contrast decision
making at the big five Canadian banks, so far that has not happened. On
the other hand, however, the NHL has been extremely supportive. I have
been to several annual drafts and seen the 30 General Managers make
hundreds of high stakes career and performance decisions.”
Tingling
says that sports research is important for a number of reasons.
Firstly, and perhaps most obviously,
professional sport is an important
business sector in its own right, with huge sums of money involved at
the top level. Secondly, decisions in sport generate more discussion
than many other sectors, so the interest in sport demands it be
examined further.
The third, and perhaps most important
reason for Tingling, revolves around the transparency and availability
of data in sport, and the consistency among sporting organizations
that allows researchers a proxy for counter factual testing to some
degree.
“In business it’s very hard to compare one
company against another – it is frequently suggested that organizations
are idiosyncratic,” says Tingling. “There is only one HP and only one
Apple, but in the NHL there are thirty teams, all operating under the
same restrictions. It is a lot easier to compare the Detroit Red Wings
to the Vancouver Canucks than it is to compare Intel to Apple. So sport
acts as a perfect petri dish to test business theories.”
***
"Along
with fellow Beedie associate professor Michael Brydon, Tingling has
presented some of his research on the NHL draft at the 2010
MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference,
an annual conference for industry professionals to discuss the
increasing role of analytics in the global sports industry. His
presentation has become one of the top ten most viewed videos on the MIT Sloan website, with over 5000 views.
In addition, his paper, “
Does Order Matter? An Empirical Analysis of the NHL Draft,”
examined the success of NHL teams in choosing which players they
draft. Published in Sport, Business and Management: An International
Journal in 2011, and co-written by Beedie colleagues Kamal Masri and
Matt Martell,
the
research found that NHL teams were missing out on potential gems in
the later rounds of the draft by devoting the majority of their
resources to the early rounds."
Link to full article:
http://beedie.sfu.ca/ideas/2013/08/the-perfect-petri-dish/
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