Hockey Confidential by Bob Mckenzie

cent.
    It was going to be touch and go for me.
    Math—or science, for that matter—had never been my strong suit. The written or spoken word? Write an essay or make a speech? Bring it on. An equation or formula? Find a solution? Get out of here. My brain is not wired to deal with it.
    I approached Mrs. Uyenaka the day before the list was to be posted and asked her if I was going to make the cut at 55. She looked it up in her book, looked at me and shook her head.
    â€œNo, I’m sorry,” she said. “You have 53 per cent. You have to write the exam.”
    I might not have known what a logarithm was—still don’t, actually—but I damn sure knew if I had to write that final exam, I was not going to pass it. If I didn’t pass the exam, I would fail Grade 12 math. If I didn’t pass Grade 12 math, I wouldn’t get the required credit for my high school diploma. If I didn’t get my diploma—well, if you knew my mother, that was not an option.
    I’d already chosen my six courses for Grade 13—two English, two history, French and family studies—so it wasn’t as if I actually needed Grade 12 math as a prerequisite for anything, other than getting my diploma and graduating in good standing.
    I showed Mrs. Uyenaka my option sheet for the next year, explained to her my innate inability to process numerical data, guaranteed her I could not pass the exam, told her there was no benefit to anyone—least of all me—to my writing that final exam, and then made her a solemn promise in the form of an offer I was fearful she
could
refuse.
    â€œIf you bump up my mark to 55 and exempt me from the final exam,” I pleaded, “I’ll never, not ever, have anything to do with numbers or math for the rest of my life. I promise.”
    She said she would think about it. The next day, she posted the class list with our marks alongside our names: Bob McKenzie 55.
    Exempt.
    I’ve never forgotten what Mrs. Uyenaka did for me that day, nor have I forgotten or broken the promise I made to her back then.
    Until now.
    Damn you, #fancystats!
    We will likely look back one day on the 2013–14 NHL regular season as the proverbial turning point, the year in which advanced statistics in hockey—a.k.a. #fancystats or analytics (Corsi, Fenwick, PDO, etc.)—went mainstream. Maybe “mainstream” is a bit of a stretch, but there most definitely was an awakening. A line was crossed. Advanced hockey stats became more of a talking point, started showing up more often in more prominent places. The debate over their merits, or lack thereof, became louder and longer and more spirited, waged in newspapers and on television, radio and the Internet and social media.
    For that, we can thank the Toronto Maple Leafs.
    The Leafs, and many of their fans, believed their 2013 playoff appearance—the historic third-period-and-overtime Game 7 meltdown against the Boston Bruins notwithstanding, to say nothing of the team’s first playoff date since 2004 coming on the basis of a lockout-shortened 48-game regular season—was a portent of good things to come, a launching pad for a team headed in the right direction. But the purveyors of #fancystats said it before the 2013–14 season even began: the Leafs were cruisin’ for a bruisin’. Their “puck possession” numbers (as measured by tools such as Corsi and Fenwick) were way too low; their save percentage and shooting percentage (PDO) was unsustainably high. It was, the hockey eggheads maintained, a perfect statistical storm.
    The battle lines were clearly drawn. The Leaf season, for better or worse, was going to put #fancystats on trial.
    That this was playing out in Toronto, of all places, only raised the stakes. Next to Mayor Rob Ford (no comment), Corsi and the Leafs might have been the hot-button topic in Canada’s largest city in 2013–14.
    â€œI don’t think there’s any