Oilers Part Ways With Analytics Guru, Tyler Dellow

Mark Spector was the first to break the news this morning that the Oilers have not renewed the contract of their stats man, Tyler Dellow. If you count me retweeting his tweet, I was the second to break the news. 

The Oilers were arguably one of the first teams in the NHL to jump on the fancy stats train. Call it revolutionary thinking, or call it a fad — that has yet to be determined. In 2014, the Oilers hired Dellow, a lawyer/stats writer out of Toronto, to help the team understand a new way of looking at hockey, and to approach the evaluation of gameplay and player skills a different way. 

Two short years later and Dellow’s contract was not renewed. Does this mean the Oilers have acknowledged that analytics are not essential and will be getting out of the fancy stats business, or does it mean Tyler was not a fit for the organization and they are looking for a new analytics guru to hire?

After Montreal fired their analytics man for (in my opinion) being resistant to the Subban trade, one raises the question on whether Dellow’s release had anything to do with the Taylor Hall trade. Though I don’t know Tyler’s stance on Hall, as a stats man, you have to believe that he was Team Taylor for life. 

Tyler Dellow’s skill set makes it easy to believe that another NHL team will pick him up fairly quickly. If this is true, chances of Tyler bringing back his controversial Twitter account, @mc79hockey, as well as his website, mc79hockey.com, is slim.

Fancy stats has taken the NHL by storm in the past few years. Do you think the Oilers will be hiring new analytics staff in the near future? Or are we going back to the old-school way of evaluating players and gameplay, by looking at point production and watching with our eyes?