Here’s some fun news for your Friday. The as-of-yet-unnamed NHL team in Seattle — a.k.a. the Kraken — have hired big brain Namita Nandakumar as their senior stats person. Namita previously was a quant for the Philadelphia Eagles, who you may remember were recent Super Bowl Champions.
it’s official: I’ve accepted the role of Senior Quantitative Analyst at @NHLSeattle_! it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to help build an NHL team from scratch with some of my favorite people, and I can’t wait to get started next month 😊 https://t.co/qy7goQgwXY
— Namita (@nnstats) February 28, 2020
Namita has long been a leader in understanding and analyzing hockey on the internet. She’s written for Hockey Graphs and The Athletic, and has been active member of the various analytics communities. Her video about using R and Tidyverse to analyze hockey has been extremely helpful to me:
Her thread about getting jobs in sports as a quantitative analyst is just as insightful.
1) ideally you would be great at both the “sports” and “analytics” parts but it’s especially crucial to bring the technical background (i.e. coding, statistical modeling, database stuff) because teams already have a wealth of sport-specific domain knowledge to draw from.
— Namita (@nnstats) February 25, 2020
2) learn by reading then doing. I usually point hockey-oriented beginners to @meta_hockey and @ModernDive, and then I recommend thinking of a question you want to try to answer. you’ll find yourself spending a lot of time googling error messages. it’s all part of the process.
— Namita (@nnstats) February 25, 2020
3) after doing the work, put it out there. it’s by far the easiest way to prove you’re qualified. I won’t pretend that other factors like my degree didn’t matter, but every team I’ve talked to has been primarily interested in my public research and how it might help them.
— Namita (@nnstats) February 25, 2020
4) (if it’s financially feasible) go to sports analytics conferences to see what’s new and meet people. and don’t be afraid to submit talks! presenting at VanHAC a few years ago as a student launched my sports career. last year, I went to RIT, NESSIS, and CMU. good stuff.
— Namita (@nnstats) February 25, 2020
5) be lucky. I’ve been very fortunate so far. I could’ve done all of the above and ended up at a marketing startup because sports job openings are so rare/unpredictable. but worst case scenario, you end up with a bunch of marketable skills that apply to any industry.
the end!
— Namita (@nnstats) February 25, 2020
Congratulations to Namita, and congratulations to Seattle.
Headline photo: @NHLSeattle_
