Namita Nandakumar is a senior quantitative analyst for the expansion Seattle Kraken, which begin NHL play in the 2021-22 season. Namita came to Seattle from the Philadelphia Eagles, and she’ll talk about…

• The excitement around the Seattle Kraken franchise
• Building a hockey team and an analytics team from scratch
• The state of hockey data in the NHL and beyond
• What she’s looking forward to about player tracking data
• Differences in working in football and hockey analytics
• Differences between doing public analytics and working for a team
• Her public work on drafting perfectly in the NHL and the effect of player size
• Her pitch for using the programming language R
• Advice for aspiring sports analysts
• Getting more women and underrepresented communities into sports analytics

Show Links - Follow Namita on Twitter: @nnstats - Profile on NHL.com - Namita on Hockey Graphs and The Athletic - Namita’s Twitter thread for people with sports analytics aspirations - Hockey analytics starter kit - What Does It Mean to Draft Perfectly: NESSIS poster and slide presentation - Hockey Graphs mentorship program - Measurables Office Hours program, Twitter, podcast - Follow @TruMediaSports on Twitter