I am at the Prime TIme Sports Law and Marketing Conference in Toronto. I will blog during this two period on high lights of the conference.

First Panel, Doug Boies, Indianapolis Speedway, Tim Leiweke, Brian Burke, Calgary Flames, Chris Lencheski, Comcast, Bruce Popko, Buffalo Bills.

What is consistent here is the need to constantly improve the inpark experience to make attendance relevant in the age of HD tv.

They all speak of media as the driver and that is the way they intend to get to young users.

All speakers are now dealing with the need to deal properly with the media. Essentially, media people need to be tolerated and also need to “remember some papers are only of value to people who own a puppy or a parakeet.”

Last major topic was on marketing and the advice is to market something else than winning, as winning will not happen enough. Focus on fun etc.

Now Gary Bettman is being interviewed. Says league recovered very fast and after lockout.

Teams need deal with real problems and make changes even if that means short term labor pain. Now they have a good system and ten year deal. Nothing works unless you have the right system.

Revenues will grow by $1,000,000,000 òver the next three years.

The program I participated in was on drug use. I said that drug use can be traced to 776BC in Greece where herbs and other stimulants were used along with eating gonads and hearts. I then went through the years with the evolution of doping. From the Greeks to Lance Armstrong

Steve Fehr said baseball player’s association did not catch on to the extent and danger of steroids until late and should have embraced it sooner.

Sara Moore on marketing the Grey Cup/ Says need to go to the grass roots to get people to play football. continuum of interest from non-fans to most rabid fans.

Now we move to advanced analytics moderated by Dr. Dana Sinclair who says data used today is ridiculous:
From the speakers, Kevin Abrams, Kevin Chevaldayoff, Patrick Morris, Dave Nonis, Alex Rucker. Abrams says scouts make most decisions in football. Intelligence counts and they do research into character. Cheveldayoiff Hockey still split on analytics, still in infancy. Says he looks at data and finds new things that help analyze. Looks for unseen factors. This guy may get it!! Says no one variable looks for multipletrends.

Morris says NHL is really into data. Corsi, Fenwick, names? Time on ice. This is an agent, I would think.

Dave Nonis GM Maple Leaf. You stats, not sure they are valid. But thinks something there of value. Gets stuff regularly. Gets poluted stats. Not generated by person who uses standard to determine blocked shot for example. hard stats are time on ice shots etc. Still prefers to see player.

Alex Rucker cameras allows for total analysis of everthing that happens on the court. Analytics only one part of the story. Character, intellect, mental toughness cited as important, if not most important feature. How do you analyze that?

Anton Thun says that analytics is only codification of scouting data. Same thing, he says.