The Maple Leafs are making the same mistakes despite their public embrace of analytics.

We are back to our old Contrarian ways this week, looking at James Mirtle's September 12^th article in The Globe and Mail titled "Tim Leiweke on the Leafs: 'Analytics makes us smarter'".

It is not Mirtle I am going to argue against but what Tim Leiweke says to a group at Ryerson University earlier this week. The link to the webcast prompts for a password so I am left only to use what Mirtle extracted from it.

But first we need context. That is also provided by Mirtle in his article first published on November 11, 2013, called "Mirtle: Nonis not yet a believer in hockey's statistical push".

Nonis was quoted at the PrimeTime Sports Management Conference as saying:

"The last six, seven years, we've had a significant dollar amount in our budget for analytics and most of those years we didn't use it."

"We couldn't find a system or a group we felt we could rely on to help us make reasonable decisions."

"The biggest thing we use is going to watch a player play. I haven't seen anything that's going to stop that from being the primary source of our decisions."

"People run with these stats like they're something we should pay attention to and make decisions on, and as of right now, very few of them are worth anything to us."

James expands on Nonis' logic behind those statements, "[Many] statistics rely on data that is 'polluted' by poor record keeping by the various arenas, that 'hard stats' like ice time and points are more useful and reliable, and that many advanced statistics being used are 'not accurate' or 'relevant.'"

He does end that article with a bit of foretelling thought from Nonis, "That will change. I predict this [SportVU type of] technology is going to help us. There will be a stat that will help us make some decisions; I think that is coming."

Oddly enough Mirtle's column had a link to ExtraSkater.com showing back then the Leafs' poor puck possession numbers. A little ironic now that the Leafs hire Darryl Metcalf (founder of ExtraSkater.com) along with Assistant GM Kyle Dubas to run their analytics department.

Back to the present and Leiweke's words.