Sunny Mehta says one of the most analytics-curious players he’s worked with was Matthew Tkachuk.
The former Florida Panthers assistant GM, now running the New Jersey Devils, talked about player interest in numbers during an appearance on the Spittin’ Chichlets podcast. Mehta had been asked about Devils prospect Mikhail Yegorov, who recently launched a new platform that takes an analytical approach to goaltending evaluation and puts his own numbers under the microscope.
That question led Mehta into a broader point about how players actually view analytics inside NHL rooms.
"My experience has been that there are defintely some players who maybe don't care and don't want to know, but that has not been the norm to me," Metha started. "I just find that more and more with this generation of players, a lot of these guys grew up playing video games.
A lot of these guys grew up with numbers and stats, and looking at their stats. Looking at stats on the internet and numbers on the internet.
My experience is that players have always been extremely interested in 'what are you looking at, how are you kind of gauging what my performance is.'"
Mehta said that in Florida, Tkachuk was the player who came around most often asking what the numbers said and how they were being used.
"The person who was by far used to pick my brain the most in Florida was Chucky (Matthew Tkachuk)," Mehta continued. "He would constantly be like, almost philosophical discussions about 'hey, when you're looking at stuff in the numbers, what are you looking at when you're looking at this on the ice?
What do you consider when you're talking about scoring chance creation?' We'd get into all these different sort of nuances."
For Tkachuk, that interest tracks with the way he plays. He isn’t a pure burner flying into open ice; his game is built on feel, positioning and reading where the puck is headed next. That kind of player tends to want a clearer picture of what’s working and what can be exploited, and analytics can help provide that.
The results back up the approach. The 28-year-old has posted two 100-point seasons and has 670 points in 673 career games. Naturalstattrick.com shows that he has finished every season of his career above 50 percent in both Corsi For percentage and expected goals for percentage.
It’s another reminder that even for a hard-playing winger like Tkachuk, the numbers matter.
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