The hockey analytics community spends a lot of time trying to evaluate players and teams. Innovations include everything from old school plus/minus to medium school Corsi/shot attempts to new school expected goals, HERO charts, and more. This work is so useful that a few of the analysts get picked up by the teams themselves (and we all lose their public data when it happens... sigh).
Much less effort is spent analyzing the game as a game, studying the patterns of how it works, regardless of how good a player or a team is. One critical feature that disappears from most player evaluation metrics is time.