Scouting young hockey prospects is, at best, an inexact science. Something Lauren Sergio is aiming to change with the help of her trusty “force field-creating robotic arm.”
Science fiction it's not. Since 2003, the York University associate kinesiology professor has spent two days each June running the top 100 NHL prospects through a hand-eye co-ordination test during the league's annual scouting combine.
“We're excited about the potential,” NHL Central Scouting director E.J. McGuire said. “But to this point, we are waiting on some of the longitudinal effects to come in on this kind of research.”
It seems simple enough. Each player must stickhandle a ball through four pylons spaced an even distance apart.
There's just one small catch: the obstacles exist only on a computer screen and the stick is attached to a robotic arm that pushes back against the player, making it harder to maintain control.
In effect, it's a way of measuring whether a player has “soft hands.” But Sergio believes it could become a predictor of whether a prospect will make it to the NHL or spend years toiling in the minors.
“We want to see if there's any way to predict performance,” she said. “It's all about control.”
Even though training camps for the coming season are under way, NHL scouts and general managers are already looking forward to next year's draft, when they will have Sergio's findings in front of them at the draft table.
The device in question is known as a Phantom.
It looks like a fancy desk lamp connected to a computer with a sawed-off hunk of a hockey stick taped to the end of it instead of a light bulb.
It was developed in the artificial intelligence lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by researchers who went on to found SensAble Technologies Inc. Using haptic – or artificial touch – technology, it allows the user to feel and manipulate objects in a virtual environment.
Similar technology is used by scientists at the Canadian Space Agency to manipulate robotic arms and by medical students to practise surgeries on virtual patients by simulating the textures of bones and tissues.
During testing, hockey prospects are told to grip the handle and use it like an upside-down joystick to manoeuvre a digital ball around four circles on the screen. The faster they can do it while sticking close to the circles, the higher the score. Points are deducted if the ball touches an obstacle.
If the Phantom detects a player is changing velocity or getting too close to an obstacle, torque motors embedded in the arm of the device – which sound like the grinding of an old dot-matrix printer – push back, making it more difficult to navigate the virtual obstacle course.
Sergio and her team are currently developing a formula that gauges the success each prospect has early on in their hockey careers – ice time, points etc. – and how those results compare to their Phantom tests. She hopes certain scores will indicate whether a player is more likely to develop into a Dion Phaneuf, a Matt Stajan or an Alexandre Daigle.
“The challenge is to come up with the best weighting factor,” she said. “So that, at the end of the [scouting combine] we can give the scouts all the scores and … tell them that this player has a 68-per-cent chance of being in the NHL in the next year, or two years, or three years.”
Early data indicate forwards perform slightly better than defencemen, mostly because the latter tend to just bulldoze their way through the obstacle course, Sergio said.
Over the past few years, various Staal brothers – Eric, Marc, Jordan and Jared – have been among the better performers in their draft classes, while Pittsburgh Penguins star centre Sidney Crosby would likely have fared better if there hadn't been a barrage of boom mikes and video cameras hovering around him, Sergio said.
McGuire said the NHL is cautiously optimistic about the possible applications for Sergio's research.
Sergio's colleague, Norman Gledhill, has run the fitness component of the scouting combine for the NHL for more than two decades, and was the one who initially suggested Sergio when the league asked for a way of testing hand-eye co-ordination.
“We are constantly challenging ourselves to add more layers of information to what we give to all 30 teams, so in that sense Dr. Sergio's research is valuable,” McGuire said.
Although quick feet, grit and a booming slap shot will always be prized traits among prospects, when it comes to trying to predict the future, NHL scouts are happy to have as much info as possible.
“This gets down to the hair-splitting when all these other factors start to wash each other and you're sitting at a draft table in the fourth round, or even before that, and you're looking to set up your team's hit list for this year,” McGuire said.
