How analytics have fueled Travis Konecny’s breakout season with the Flyers

Travis Konecny is still waiting for his growth spurt, the 5-foot-10 winger joked.

Since the moment his parents threw their unwilling 3-year-old onto the ice, Konecny, now 25, has been one of the smallest players out there. But instead of sitting and waiting for something that may never come, Konecny listened to his dad Rob’s advice and used his brain to overcome his lack of size.

Even when Konecny’s speed and skill could have carried him, he kept his dad’s words in mind.

“He was always making sure that I was mentally tough, that it didn’t matter how big I was or who I was playing against, as long as I competed and worked hard, you could do anything you want,” Konecny said.

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Outwardly, Konecny has developed a reputation as a pesky mischief-maker (or a “rat” as Kevin Hayes describes him), but his teammates who see all the moments in between know just how dedicated he is to his craft, said defenseman Travis Sanheim, one of his closest friends. While Sanheim thinks he’d probably “want to kill” Konecny if they were ever opponents, he knows that edge is what fuels the rest of Konecny’s game.

With his combination of feistiness, which comes from his mom; mental toughness, which was taught by his dad; and drive, which he learned from his parents and brother, Konecny unknowingly made the perfect candidate for an ambitious project spearheaded by special assistant to Flyers general manager Danny Brière and director of analytics Ian Anderson.

For the first time, the organization, led by Brière and Anderson, created a comprehensive plan centered around data and analytics in an attempt to adjust an individual player’s performance. A year after they undertook the project and nine months after they approached Konecny with their proposal, Brière and Anderson reflected on their progress.

The results so far? A banner season for Konecny, who has already equaled his career-high in goals with 24 and is on pace for 50 goals and 94 points.

After two standout seasons with the Ottawa 67′s of the Ontario Hockey League, Konecny was selected by the Flyers with the 24th pick in the 2015 draft. A year later, the diminutive forward broke into the NHL as a 19-year-old with the Flyers. While his rookie season had its ups and downs, Konecny then embarked on three straight 24-goal seasons, punctuated by an All-Star selection in 2019-20.

Then came the slump.

In the season following his All-Star campaign, the goals dried up for Konecny, as he managed just 11 in 50 games (0.22 per game). But due to COVID, the 2020-21 season was strange for the whole team and the whole world, so outside factors could be excused.

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Konecny came back determined to be better. Unfortunately, his play and numbers continued to plummet. At his best, Konecny played with confidence and swagger, Brière said, but it was clear that he was now hesitating and second-guessing himself as his shooting percentage dropped to a career-worst 7.3%. How bad did it get for Konecny? His shooting percentage ranked 67th among the 68 forwards to take at least 200 shots.

“I came in with expectations of one-upping the year before and constantly trying to better that, and I was just overthinking it,” Konecny said.

Meanwhile, Brière noticed a change in the conversation surrounding Konecny.

“We talked about TK, and TK had the big season, and then he had a little dip there,” said Brière, whose NHL career as a 5-9 center spanned 1998-2015, including six seasons with the Flyers. “Every player has that, and it’s not a big deal. But then he kept going. We kept looking, and we were like, we’ve got to find what’s going on.”

Last January, Brière approached Anderson with a request. Brière had noticed some things in Konecny’s game. He wanted to know if Anderson would find the same things in his numbers.

“When you look at your numbers, can your numbers back up what I see, or are my eyes out to lunch and it’s really not the case?” Brière asked.

Anderson confirmed that Brière’s eyes and the numbers aligned, so the two began to dig deeper. As they worked side-by-side, Brière, who only had a cursory knowledge of analytics, would tell Anderson how much he was learning. Anderson said he was learning just as much from Brière’s perspective as a former player.

At one point, Brière said he wished this type of information had been available to him as a player. At the end of his career, they were just starting to look at individual video clips on the computer after games.

That wish was a defining moment for the project.

“As soon as he said that, we kind of looked at each other and were like, I wonder if we could actually take this to him [Konecny]?” Anderson said. “If we took it to him, what do you think the reaction would be?”

It was a novel idea. The organization had always used Anderson’s team to help them evaluate players. They’d never been asked to take what they found and use it to help players improve. They certainly had never done it on a one-on-one level. Anderson realized that if this “foray” into individual work went well, it could be something they eventually expanded.

However, neither Brière nor Anderson was in a position to just approach Konecny with their information, nor did they want to step on toes. So they went through a long process of clearing it with all departments, making it clear that they weren’t trying to coach or mess with systems.

At the same time, they continued to spend hours gathering information and getting feedback from other departments. Over the next few weeks, they accumulated so much information, Brière joked their presentation could have lasted three days.

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That wasn’t going to work if they wanted to sell Konecny on their project. So the hardest part began — distilling all their information down to a few points. Then came the biggest question — could they get Konecny on board, or was all their work for naught?

By asking Konecny to work with them, Brière and Anderson were essentially asking him to open himself up to a whole new level of critiquing.

“We didn’t know how he was going to react when someone is completely breaking down your game and looking at all the little details and nitpicking,” Brière said. “You need to have someone that’s willing and really open or ready to open up.”

They made him their pitch, emphasizing that they weren’t trying to coach and that they also needed it to be a “three-way partnership,” with Konecny providing feedback. To their relief, Konecny was all-in.

Konecny left the meeting “a little shocked,” Sanheim said. He wasn’t quite sure how to take it or what it involved. But he did know that Brière, a player he’d always looked up to, was trying to help him out of a season-and-a-half-long slump, and if “Danny B’s asking to look at your game, you say yes 100 times out of 100 times.”

Konecny had never been a numbers guy, but in the melding of “eye test” and “numbers test” that Brière and Anderson found, Konecny saw that working with analytics meant a lot of visual learning. Since he’s always enjoyed watching film, it was a good format for him to digest.

“That’s stuff I’ve never really looked at before and having the opportunity to see it on video and on paper really helped me out,” Konecny said.

Konecny, Brière, and Anderson started working together with about 10 games left in the 2021-22 season. At that point, he’d scored 13 goals and 32 assists in 69 games (0.19 goals per game and 0.46 assists per game).

Trying to sum up the hours of work, Anderson described what they were showing Konecny as “broadly speaking, just habits and areas of the ice you want to get to in specific situations that he had had success in, and then some that he didn’t. And then just identifying the differences between the two.”

Konecny said they showed him different situations and where he typically went after making a play and where he funnels after he gets rid of the puck. They showed him what happened if he reacted differently and either went to the net, shot in a different area or made a play so he wasn’t wasting a low-percentage shot. Instead of taking as many shots from the perimeter, they showed him how successful he could be around the net and in the slot.

Over the final 10 games, Konecny scored three goals and four assists. His shooting percentage went up slightly from 7% to 9%. He also had a six-game point streak.

If Konecny wasn’t already sold, Brière thinks that might have been what convinced him to keep working with them through the offseason. They held several reviews and sent him more information and clips to check out once the players took off for the summer.

Without typical games to go through the situations, Konecny tried to simulate them in his offseason workouts in Calgary. Keeping all the information he’d learned in mind took some getting used to.

And once he returned to Philadelphia, Konecny knew he’d have to keep reminding himself of each detail as he went through new coach John Tortorella’s intense training camp.

But instead of trying to one-up his last season, as disappointing as it was, Konecny went into training camp with a different mentality.

“Just [try] to come in and have the mentality of just working hard — and that’s it,” Konecny said. “Honestly. Just put my head down, work hard, and the rest will take care of itself.”

Konecny opened the 2022-23 season with two goals against the New Jersey Devils. He followed it up with a goal and an assist the following game against the Vancouver Canucks. While he didn’t score in the third game, he notched another goal and assist in game four for six points in four games.

Despite missing six games with a hand injury, Konecny has now scored 24 goals and 22 assists. He’s already tied his career-high in goals with 40 games to go, and he’s 15 points away from his career-best of 61 points. After shooting just 7.3% last season, Konecny is firing at a torrid 20.3% clip this season.

Brière and Anderson have been following along with excitement. But they’re not taking credit for the jump.

“I’m not willing to say that [this project] is what’s made that much of a difference,” Brière said. “He’s taken another level by himself that we didn’t think it would get to that point so quickly. But I wouldn’t say it’s what we’ve done. … All we did is set him back on track, and he did the rest.”

The project was all about reminding Konecny of what he can do and getting him back to it, Anderson said. Sanheim saw how the sessions gave Konecny back his confidence, an important ingredient in the forward’s success.

Once Brière and Anderson found the patterns and pointed them out, it was then up to Konecny to put the knowledge to use. In addition to recognizing what he needed to do, he had to break old habits and instill new ones, typically an arduous process.

“The most impressive thing for me is how quickly and how consistently, he’s been able to execute the ideas we discussed,” Anderson said. “Like, anybody’s given something new, it’s hard to get that as a habit, right? It takes time. And what’s been crazy for us to see is he is like clockwork on it.”

Anderson and Brière also attribute some of Konecny’s success to the new coaching staff. Tortorella has worked hard to break bad habits and get players playing within a structure. On an individual level, Tortorella has challenged Konecny to be a leader and to play on the penalty kill, a new responsibility.

Brière and Anderson also had to get the new coaching staff on board to keep working with Konecny. Assistant coaches Brad Shaw and Rocky Thompson are well-versed in analytics themselves, but John Tortorella is a known detractor of the word “analytics.”

“[Tortorella] is a feel person,” Brière said. “That’s probably what he goes off of the most. But Torts is also very smart, and he knows what can help. And so that’s all I’ll say about it.”

With the green light, the two have continued to give Konecny more data and clips to consume and have kept him updated on how he’s trending toward their targets. So far, he’s smashing them.

If the Konecny project was supposed to be the example of a new way to apply analytics within the organization, the three of them have set the bar really high, Brière and Anderson agreed with a laugh. In fact, they’re not sure they’ll be able to recreate such results. Konecny was the “perfect storm.”

“I think it’s important to tell people that what’s happening with him, is not going to happen with everybody else,” Brière said. “We were dealing with a special talent, a special player, someone who sees the game way differently.”

The hours devoted to the project are another holdup. Even within the existing framework, they still have to individualize everything for the next player. They simply don’t have the manpower to do this across the board, although they already have other players in mind as potential future subjects. The other challenge is players have to be open to it, and not all will be as willing as Konecny.

Even if they don’t expect to recreate every future project the same way, it’s still exciting to see the direction the organization can go. Brière and Anderson love seeing how analytics and “feel” can work hand-in-hand, and Anderson hopes more people are comfortable approaching them for help.

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“I never would have looked at those stats,” Konecny said. “They were never available to me. And I think that them coming to me has really helped me. I think them showing me my stats before I was having the success was giving me the confidence that it was coming because the stats were all there. They just weren’t happening.”