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Hi everyone, I'm Maggie McGrath, senior editor at Forbes. We're here today at the NHL headquarters in Manhattan. I sat down with Dave Leahhansky, the vice president overseeing technology innovation and business development. In the US, all major sports leagues are experiencing financial growth, but none more so than the NHL. I talked to Dave about what's driving that growth. Let's dive in. Dave, thanks so much for sitting down with Forbes. Thank you very much for having me. It's great to be here. You are responsible for tech and innovation. I'd love to dive into some of the levers that you're pulling in these areas and I'm going to start by
asking about Poly Market and Khi. The NHL was the first major US league to partner with these prediction markets. What made you take that leap? So, I think we're constantly trying to determine how we can build the best possible experience around the game for our fans. Uh, I think one of the things that makes our game so great is the speed at which it moves. Uh, not only the speed of the players and the puck, but the pace of the game. It's 60 minutes of actual play. There's very little downtime. And so that puts a lot of pressure on us and our partners to think about what are the ways that we could create sort of these secondary or complimentary experiences that can help fans really um enjoy the game on another
level. Betting, gaming, fantasy in general is an area that um we've uh kind of identified as sort of the posing the potential for significant upside from a fan experience standpoint. And we'll talk a little bit about the technology that has to go into that to create that for the NHL. But part of the reason for establishing those partnerships was to create more opportunity for fans to engage with our game. Um, which has been difficult to do from a betting standpoint specifically for hockey from a knowledge standpoint or an awareness standpoint. So speed of the game. So, um, if you are watching an NFL broadcast, there's about 17 minutes of actual play and two and a half hours of storytelling, downtime.
Uh, you're waiting for the next play to begin and the broadcasters putting up bar charts and graphics and maybe probabilities for what might happen in the next play or what's the likelihood for someone to run a certain play. We don't have that our game. So, it's difficult to do for hockey and it's easier to do for these sports that have um maybe you know more of a series of discrete events. Baseball, there's a pitch, there's a stoppage, you recalculate, there's a pitch, there's a stoppage, you recalculate. Football, the same thing. Hockey, um uh we're the only major professional sports league that has personnel changes occurring live within play. That doesn't happen for anyone else. So just think if you're
trying to create a bet type for something, it's a lot easier in your other sports because you know exactly who's on the field to be to calculate that players are coming on and off the ice in real time. So we need to lean on the sort of community there, the betting community, the gaming community, the fantasy community to help us create the best possible experience for hockey. When you talk about real time data, I'd love to talk about the dasher boards because it was in 2022 that the NHL debuted the digitally enhanced dasher boards. I have to tell you the first time I saw this on TV, I thought I was going crazy watching the boards change. So, can you talk about that decision? How difficult was it to create
this new program? There are sort of two areas where the difficulty presented itself. There was the technology difficulty of how do we figure this out and do it? The solution uh existed in other sports uh European soccer, the back wall, right? there was sort of a dynamic advertising um experience that they had, but it really was um not as connected to the game because it's sort of so far back. If there was, you know, pixel degradation around the silhouette of a player, you didn't really notice it on a soccer pitch, you know, when it's sort of so many feet away. In an ice arena, when everything's bright white and the player's right up against that wall, if there's any pixel degradation or
inconsistencies, you can see it really clearly. So here too, we'll go through maybe a lot of experiences where we'll tell you if you could figure it out for hockey, you could figure it out for any sport. This was one of those, right? Speed of the game, proximity to the ad surface. Um, and there's also a thing with the reflection off the white that always presents a problem when you're dealing with video capture. So all that to say, it was very difficult to figure out, but we got there. And then the other part of the sort of difficulty or the challenge with it was you know really just sort of um initiating change in a dynamic you know business model that's sort of you know kind of been in place for a really long time
um that nobody really for had you know the ability to foresee coming. So explaining to people why this was going to be beneficial uh people on the club side, people with our media partners um took a little bit of time but not that much once they saw it really working. And so like many of the technologies that are out there today, many of the ones that um are really being deployed within sports, there's this net uh result of customization and personalization that is now really uh an opportunity for us all to leverage. And that's what we saw in this, the ability for every team, for every media partner, and for us to really create a custom experience for the audience that's watching that game. And you should see
something a little bit different if you're watching in the US versus Canada or somewhere in Europe. What kind of difference has it made for the league's finances? Incredible. I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, which is great, but equally as important is along with a better experience by way of what our fans are telling us, right? And so I think, you know, like you when you first saw it, you were sort of like, "Wow, what is going on here? I can't believe it." There was that with our fans too, like ah, I don't know if I like all this motion here. But once they had time to sort of really settle in with it and see
that the advertising was a relevant to them in their geography, so it's companies that they're aware of or they know about to some degree, and two, that there's a connection between what you see in the game that's happening. If a team goes on the Power Play and the Power Play is sponsored by a brand, that's going to come up on the boards. It's all sort of calibrated to be a uh a truly connected experience. Um, and so through that, you know, we even have future opportunities that we're now just starting to get into with regard to leveraging that system to present data and analytics and stats and different components of the game to the fans who are watching. When you talk about measuring speed and
measuring all of the number of statistics we've been talking about, you have a number of technological partnerships. You have Sony for puck tracking, Prescidio for ref's watches. Can you talk about how you assess new technologies and maybe give a preview of anything that's coming? We are very focused on what we do. Um, we cast a wide net, but maybe not as wide as some of the other leagues. Uh, we're very specific to the use cases that we believe can have the greatest impact. And so to get there, there's a tremendous amount of research, uh, a tremendous amount of collaboration with the players association, our clubs, our media partners to get to a point
where we truly can sort of have a really strong level of confidence that these are the ideas, these are the solutions that we believe can have a dramatic impact. But we're a test and learn company, so we're all about piloting, learning. We got to go through some betas before we can get to an actual launch. So our process generally looks like that. And then once we get there, we're looking for world-class technology from the biggest and best in the world. So, do you have examples of what that has done for the NHL's business or finance? Is there one that comes to mind? Is 1 plus 1 equals 3?
I could tell you that the investment in our puck and player tracking system has uh generated a massive return for us and in ways we honestly didn't fully envision when we set out to do it. I think um as we were discussing, you know, the game moves so fast, there's not a lot of time to tell stories. Uh we were a little bit behind some of the other leagues. This is going back about uh maybe a decade where uh with regard to stats, analytics, the advancement of those from a nextgen standpoint or everything that's been happening in baseball with money ball starting back in the 80s, uh hockey statistics hadn't changed that long. So, um, we set out to build a system for tracking the movement of the players, the movement of the puck
multiple times a second in every game. And from day one, uh, a key criteria for that solution was it had to operate in near real time because we knew if we were going to try and use it to tell stories within the context of a live game broadcast, it would have to be by putting a bubble over a player that shows you 27 mph, how fast they're skating. we're not going to have time to say it or integrate it as a graphic. So all of these new statistics born from all this new data turned into new visualizations and all of that led to an incredible amount of new storytelling. So we have new stats section on nhl.com and the NHL app that we built that's driving a lot of engagement, a lot of new advertising, a lot of new
sponsorship. We've built new data feeds from all this tracking that we're doing that we're now um monetizing with a variety of new partners in the betting communities and the gaming communities and the fantasy uh hockey communities. So, in every possible way almost across our business, the data is being applied and in some way, shape or form, we're monetizing it. New coaching solutions, new media partner solutions. So, um, that's tfold on the investment that we've made, and that's how we're looking at sort of the next pipeline of, uh, of, uh, solutions. Talk about enhancements for broadcast, but there are also technological enhancements for in-person attendance, some of the new arenas that are either being built or renovated. Can you talk
about some of the cutting edge technology that you're deploying in some of these new or renovated arenas? Absolutely. There's there's sort of two areas there. our clubs um are really the ones who are responsible for that game day experience as it pertains to the onetoone relationship with their with their fan base. And so they're incredible investments that are being made there to create almost transform that experience. Um uh frictionless entry through facial recognition, cashless concessions, um uh 5G networking to allow for second screen experiences. that's all in play right now across all sports, but certainly from a hockey standpoint, it's pretty profound. You know, we've always referenced the arena
as being a theater where we believe we're putting on the best live competition show in the world, but now it's also a studio where we need to capture that show and be able to process it and distribute it in various formats to various platforms um in ways and scale like we've really maybe never thought about. We're leveraging that arena infrastructure to capture the game and we distribute highlights in Roblox. So you could go in there if you have an avatar with your friends and you could walk into our NHL universe and you could actually see highlights from the games that are being played the night before. So in every possible way that arena is a studio and then from an operations standpoint it is insane the amount of technology and
infrastructure we have in every arena to capture every game. We have dozens and dozens of cameras around the upper bowl, the lower bowl, under the video board, in the nets, above the nets, on the blue line, and then there's the game on the ice, the coaches and the players and the officials themselves, and from the iPads that are positioned behind every bench for every game. There's a an app we built with SAP and Apple that delivers real-time video highlights, real-time data. Um, the coaches have a real- time video review system that connects them with our office in Toronto where we have an incredible video review room. They're talking to each other.
They're looking at the same thing in real time. All of these technologies are managed by the league. And so, when we think about the arena, it's what's happening on the ice and then how do we take what's happening on the ice and get it out from a consumer standpoint? I'm surprised to hear you mention the second screen. I would think that someone in your position wouldn't want someone looking at their phone while they're at one of these new arenas and you have the big screen. You have so much already in the arena. Yeah. So, is that a risk? It's a delicate balance. I don't think it's a risk because um typically when the game is being played, nobody takes their eyes off of it because it's so fast. You never know when the next thing
is going to happen. You never know when the next big hit's going to happen, big goal, big save. So, we're pretty confident um in our research and findings and how people consume the game when they're live that's not gonna that's not going to be um an impediment or it's not going to cannibalize experience. But what we do know is because it moves so fast, I mean, yeah, and even some of these focus groups, it's stories like I bent down to like get something out of my bag and I looked up and I missed the play or my child was talking to me or I had to go to the bathroom or I went to get more chicken fingers, whatever it might be. So giving people the ability to kind of like see
maybe what they missed, whether it's just because time has elapsed or, you know, admittedly, you know, puck's really small, things can happen on the other side of the ice that you may have seen, but you want to see it better. You want to see another angle of it. That's an additive experience for someone in arena. But um we are pretty confident that it won't affect the live game experience. It's a fair example. I was trying to stream a Flyers game while walking the streets of New York City and I looked away for more than a minute, but the Flyers scored twice in the time that I looked away and it was my friends texting me that I had missed.
I caught up the oldfashioned way. You caught up the old fashioned way. Exactly. We all have those stories and as much as they can disappoint us in the moment, we they kind of make us happy because we know that's one of the great things about the game. We've had a whole conversation about technology without using the two hottest words in two hottest letters in tech which is AI. So, I would be remiss to not ask, how is AI changing the way the NHL collects data, analyzes fan data, distributes that data to individual clubs and its members? To some degree, like every other company, we're looking at workflow optimization through AI and automation. And there's a uh there's a whole team of people here that are focused on that.
Separate from that, like more maybe tied to sports and or hockey, we talked a lot about content. And I think a lot of the drivers for where we're going to go with regard to the creation of new content, the distribution of new content, and the consumption of new content will be directly tied to AI um to some degree. So, you know, using the game data as an example, right now, if you're a broadcaster um and your play-by-play person's calling an NHL game, we talked about how fast it moves, how few stoppages there are. something may happen in that game and they want to be able to sort of know when was the last time that happened. I just saw a rookie do something that I don't think I've ever seen a rookie do before, but
they have to keep calling the game and then the commentary person is sort of there. Um, they've got to call down to the truck, ask them to look into it. By the time they get the answer, most times we've moved on and we've missed the moment. But we could certainly leverage AI, right, to look at all the data that's coming in from our tracking system and our official recordkeeping system in real time and to automatically detect and populate storylines based on what's happening in the game. And we've done some piloting here and it will recognize the last time a rookie even go beyond that. last time a rookie uh a left wing from Canada scored what did whatever that thing was 1986 it was blah Joe Sack or
something like that and be able to enhance the broadcast experience by just applying AI to the data that we're getting so we could tell better stories in the context of a game. So that's one example, but you could think how we sort of can expand that to fans and so they can create their own experience. And you know, you've heard it too, like the term talk to, right? Allows you to talk to data and talk to video and talk to everything. Well, that's a little oversimplified, but it's kind of true, right? That's that's the opportunity we now can put in the hands of our fans. You'll pick certain camera angles. I may pick different ones, different audio, stats, no stats, graphics, no graphics,
social media, talk to my friends, maybe, maybe not today. Betting, fantasy. We'll be able to curate that experience. And that without getting into the details, will mostly be born from the artificial intelligence and the automation that would be required to give us all the opportunity to do that in real time while we're all watching the same game. The different angles thing as a journalist I worry could create a few more bar fights because if we're watching from different angles I think we'll never agree on a ref calling a certain decision. But I think we're nearing the end of our time and before I let you go I do want to ask we've been talking about a lot of exciting developments, future opportunities, but what is next for the NHL and what
excites you most? There's so much. Um, I really believe in the technology driving customization if not ultimately personalization and that we have the ability to benefit from that significantly. Um, without getting into too many details, you know, most of the fandom that we've had traditionally has come from markets where hockey is obviously part of the culture where a lot of people are playing hockey. That means that there's a lot of places where that doesn't exist because not every town has a rink in it. But we see these types of experiences as being the way for us to expose the greatness of our sport to everybody in a way that really more than ever feels like the real thing. It feels like what it is to be in
an arena and experience a live NHL game uh through a screen, through a device, through a piece of technology. And that's new and that's never existed before. And that's giving us incredible excitement about all the upside that we have to bring on new fans throughout the world um to some degree. So, you know, it's kind of a broad way to answer your question, but technology is the enabler for creating new fans and driving incremental engagement. Um that's probably at the top of the list. Well, Dave, thank you so much. This has been so informative. Yeah, thank you. Really appreciate it.
