Coyotes' Splashy Hire of 26-Year-Old GM Will Be Referendum on Analytics in NHL

On one hand, some people are going to feel good if John Chayka succeeds right away in his new role as general manager of the Arizona Coyotes. Most of them will probably tilt toward the 35-and-under demographic.

On the other hand, some other people will feel good if Chayka fails. Many of them will be your "Get off my lawn" demo, some of whom probably have ties older than his 26 years.

The Coyotes made history Thursday in making Chayka the youngest GM in North American pro sports history. Though he played junior hockey, he otherwise looks like your classic young startup computer data wonk, the kind of guy the older guard of the sport probably no doubt are snickering at and saying, "What the heck does this guy know about running a hockey team?"

We're about to find out, and it should be fascinating. 

Chayka's story would be a dime-a-dozen in Silicon Valley: 20-something still in college starts tinkering around on a computer with numbers and algorithms in the family basement. Soon, he devises to make a new business from his experiments and catches the eye of the bigger business world. He gets funding for his startup, the business takes off, and another success story is made.

Except, that's not the typical hockey success story, especially in coaching and management. This is a sport whose tradition is to require many painful dues-paying years in the bushes and lots of hard work up the corporate rungs of the ladder.

Chayka, a native of tiny Jordan Station, Ontario, has now taken a sledgehammer to that ladder. He becomes the first GM in NHL history hired in his 20s, becoming the youngest since Toronto hired Gord Stellick in 1988 at age 30.

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While a student at the University of Western Ontario in 2009, Chayka, along with business partner Neil Lane, founded Stathletes, a hockey analytics company that claims to record and analyze more than 20,000 pieces of data from every play of every hockey game. According to the Toronto Globe and Mail's James Mirtle, Chayka's father, Terry, became his son's first "tracker" of data, and by 2012 the Vancouver Canucks became the first team to exclusively use Stathletes' exclusive data as part of a three-year contract.

According to the Globe and Mail, Stathletes employs 55 people and earns more than $1 million in annual revenue. Chayka's sister, Meghan, works at the St. Catharine's, Ontario, head office with her husband, Neil. She is listed on the company's website as director of research, while Neil is chief executive officer.

The hiring of an "analytics guy" into a top NHL management position is not new. In 2006, the Minnesota Wild stunned the sports world by hiring a 24-year-old former Boston Globe Red Sox beat writer, Chris Snow, as their director of hockey operations. In 2007-08, the Wild did something they had never done before, which was win a division title.

But in 2009, the man who hired Snow, GM Doug Risebrough, was dismissed after the Wild failed to make the playoffs. After another non-playoff season in 2009-10, the team also fired Snow. Since 2011, he has held the title of director of statistical analysis for the Calgary Flames.

In 2014, the Toronto Maple Leafs hired 28-year-old statistics specialist Kyle Dubas as assistant general manager. Other analytics types with no previous NHL management experience, such as Tyler Dellow in Edmonton and Eric Tulsky in Carolina, now serve in front-office capacities.

But Chayka is the first from a pure analytics background to receive the title of GM, and the rest of the hockey world will be watching his moves closely in the coming months and years. If the Coyotes regress even more record-wise (they've missed the playoffs four straight seasons, which led to the firing of previous GM Don Maloney), those who don't believe hockey is a game for sabermetrics will be sure to pounce all over it with schadenfreude. 

There will be no shortage of those types. Sure, you can measure a shot on goal, but what if that shot came from a player who dove head-first into a pile of bodies in front of the net, while another shot from the same distance was made by a soft floater? Who hung his head on the bench after a tough goal against and wasn't a factor for his team after that, as opposed to the guy who fired up his squad with a big hit or a verbal blast in the dressing room? 

In talking with many around the league, one common refrain from analytics scoffers is that "hockey is played on an ice sheet, not a spreadsheet."

But if Chayka proves to be a boy wonder who gets the Coyotes back to being a contender, a tidal wave of young stat whizzes armed with their spreadsheets is sure to flood NHL front offices, just like it has in other sports. That prospect probably has already sent a shudder up the spines of pro scouts and old-school hockey types who believe, as Flames president Brian Burke once said, per the Toronto Star, that hockey is an "eyeballs sport."

Chayka is not brand new to the league. He held the title of assistant GM last season to Maloney. In a small sampling of some GMs around the league by Bleacher Report, however, they knew almost nothing about Chayka.

"Never met him," one Western Conference GM said.

They figure to know him soon. As even Burke told a crowd at the PrimeTime Sports Management Conference in 2014, per the Star, "You either evolve with it [analytics] or you will be unemployed."

Adrian Dater covers the NHL for Bleacher Report.