UPDATED 21:23 EDT / MAY 13 2021

CLOUD

AWS powers new shot and save analytics for NHL’s Stanley Cup

Amazon Web Services Inc. wants to help National Hockey League fans gain a better understanding of their favorite players’ and teams’ performances with two new analytics features that will make their debut in the 2021 Stanley Cup Playoffs.

The company said today it’s leveraging its cloud-based data analytics, serverless compute and media services to deliver new in-game stats, which will appear as on screen graphics and data visualizations during TV broadcasts. The idea behind the stats is to try to do a better job illustrating each player’s effectiveness on offense and their overall performance during each game and, for goaltenders, their success in keeping the opposition at bay.

Specifically, Amazon will deliver what it calls “shot analytics” that will reveal exactly how shot opportunities are created and converted into goals from different locations on the ice. The idea is to highlight which players have the highest shot-to-goal conversion rates from each part of the rink and visualize how players and teams take advantage of even-strength, power-play and short-handed situations based on the number of shots and goals they attempt and score in each scenario.

The shot analytics will allow fans to dive deep into team and player performance for a single game or across a season, AWS said, giving them previously unavailable insights.

The “save analytics,” meanwhile, are focused on goaltenders, calculating and visualizing their save percentages and the volume of shots they stop from each zone on the rink, to better help fans understand their effectiveness. Amazon said the NHL will use the stat to display how goaltenders perform against different team strength conditions, such as when they’re missing a defender during an opposing team’s power play, and during different game phases or events, such as a breakaway by the opponent or in a shootout.

Amazon explained that the stats are powered by real-time data that’s gathered throughout the duration of the game and quickly analyzed to provide insights. These will be combined with more than 10 years’ worth of historical data from the NHL’s Hockey Information and Tracking System, it said.

The new analytics features are the first visible result of a partnership announced in February, when the NHL selected AWS as its official cloud, artificial intelligence and machine learning infrastructure provider.

Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that sports are a great way for cloud providers like Amazon to showcase the power of their technology and increase awareness. “Better insights on a favorite sports team creates an immediate favorable attitude towards the enabling technology vendor, as long as the new insights are valid, valuable and helping to understand competition outcomes,” he said.

Fixing the NFL’s scheduling headache

The cloud company is deeply involved with major league sports, and in a second announcement today it revealed how its enormous computing power was used to help the National Football League schedule its 2021 season fixtures.

In a blog post, Amazon explained that with 32 teams playing 272 games in total across the season, with 17 regular-season games each played over 18 weeks, the NFL has more than a quadrillion possible scheduling options to consider.

Not only that, but the NFL has to factor in tons of considerations when scheduling the football season. For example, there are stadium conflicts to consider, with many venues being used for other purposes such as Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer, concerts and so on.

The NFL also has to ensure that none of the teams plays two consecutive road games involving cross-country trips, and also minimize the number of teams that face a three-game road trip or a road game after a Monday Night Football game on the road. Further, it must minimize the number of teams that have to play two consecutive road games at the start or finish of the season, while ensuring that there are compelling matchups each week for Thursday night, Sunday night and Monday night.

Add to that, the NFL must also try to space out intradivision games throughout the season and maximize the number of late-season division games. In other words, scheduling the NFL season is a major headache and that makes it all the more amazing to think that until just a few years ago, the league employed dozens of people to bang their heads together and thrash it all out with pen and paper.

Amazon’s involvement means the NFL’s schedulers get a much easier time of it. Now, they just employ thousands of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute instances to do thinking for them, taking into consideration those rules to come up with dozens of optimal schedule choices. All the NFL has to do then is select the one it thinks is most appropriate, saving thousands of human hours and around $2 million in expenses.

“It’s impossible to even think we could do this by hand, like we used to not that long ago,” said Mike North, vice president of NFL broadcast planning.

AWS is also partnering with the NFL to deliver more AI-powered game statistics, similar to what it’s doing with the NHL.

The 2021 NFL season will kick off on Sept. 9 with the Dallas Cowboys taking on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Image: AWS

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