[sakian]

I've actually thought about using those Decawave chips for tracking players in hockey. You could mine a wealth of analytics from this including who wins puck battles and face-offs, zone entries and exits, player acceleration and speed, how player dynamics change through a shift and through the game, etc.

Couple technical issues with this kind of system though, including position resolution (maybe Kalman filter with an IMU to improve?), determine players that are active on the ice as opposed to being on the bench (maybe position based), tracking all players and puck simultaneously, plus making the hardware small enough for placing it in the players clothing and in the puck.

Business problem would be in trying to get teams signed up to collect data. Getting data from one team would be good, but from both teams and the puck would be best. You almost need to get a league to agree to use the system. Then you have to deal with data ownership issues, CBA agreement, etc. Plus the whole barrier of people in hockey thinking this stuff is useless and unless you've #playedthegame you shouldn't be making the decisions.

There are a few companies doing something similar. Zebra technologies is using RF tracking in the NFL (they do warehouse tracking normally). A bunch of others try to do it through IR systems with cameras or video processing of broadcast video, but these methods have their own issues (occlusion, HW needs to be visible, etc.).

In any case, the wealth of data and statistics you could mine would be fascinating to say the least.