Pascal Poupart, a professor at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada has spent the last year working alongside HockeyTech, a data provider, to automate recognition of events during a hockey game using machine learning techniques.
It takes substantial effort to accurately track puck possession, time on ice and even the number of shots a player takes. It requires even more manpower to render that information useful.
Scorekeepers manually score each game, assistant coaches break those games down into individual events for analysis, and scouts rate and review individual players.