Agreed. There has to be a universal, automated, standardized way to generate and gather advanced data before the advanced stats are truly accurate and most meaningful.
The sad thing is that the technology already exists and is being used in a $400 game system (to an extent). Something like this has to come from the top of the NHL and they could charge a fortune for the data mined from every game to every team to pay for the development. The teams would all line up to pay for it.
With this we could be tracking shot locations, player locations, puck locations, player positioning, even puck trajectories on shots. Just imagine if we knew exactly WHERE, in 3D, a shot was taken and hit (or missed) for every single shot in the game?
It is an epic amount of data to mine, but it is sad that we are probably 25 years away from it with how forward thinking the NHL is
. Technology is not holding them back, it's the thickness of their skulls.
Setup a 3 camera array above the 3 zones. IR Camera, Depth Camera, and RGB camera. IR Camera tracks players (hot bodies contrast very well against cold ice in IR). Depth Camera adds depth overlay for puck and player positioning (standing/prone). RGB (standard) camera has visual overlay for helping identify players (which is probably the hardest thing to automate). I'm sure Microsoft would love to take 50mil to adapt their tech for this, and the NHL could make that back in 2-3 years.