RALEIGH, N.C. — Eric Tulsky had a problem to solve.
The NHL had released tens of millions of points of new data with the introduction of player and puck tracking, but it was such an enormously complex dump of information that it would take a special skill set to turn it into something he could use.
In 2021, Tulsky was the Carolina Hurricanes assistant GM and had built a small analytics department in the organization, with a web developer, a data engineer and a neuroscientist helping him lead the team’s push into new frontiers for the sport.
But because of what he saw in the tracking data, Tulsky believed his next addition needed to be someone who was working on autonomous vehicles — perhaps “a robot submarine,” he says now — and had an advanced mechanical engineering background.
“I knew that that was the kind of problem that put people thinking about the kinds of data that we had and the kinds of problems we faced,” Tulsky explained.
It goes without saying that there aren’t many robot submarine engineers working in NHL front offices. So Tulsky began a deep search through universities’ mechanical engineering departments.
He would scour the faculty listing and professors’ research interests to see if they might align with what he was looking for, then reach out to learn more about their work. He started with the top schools in Canada, reasoning that there was a greater chance he would find someone interested in working on a hockey problem.
And that was how an NHL team came to fund the PhD research of a young engineering student named Jonathan Arsenault at McGill University in Montreal.
His thesis, the first to be backed by a professional hockey team? “Quantitative Analysis of Hockey Using Spatiotemporal Tracking Data.”
When it was finished, Tulsky quickly hired Arsenault as a data scientist, adding another unique contributor to what’s quickly become the most interesting front office in the NHL.
Tulsky began his career far from the hockey world. A Harvard grad who also holds a PhD from UC Berkeley’s prestigious chemistry program, his first career came as a nanotechnologist, a role that involved manipulating tiny particles to develop cutting-edge materials.
After nearly 20 years as a scientist, Tulsky ultimately passed up a position with Apple to become the Hurricanes’ lone analytics person a decade ago.
Today, he is the general manager of the Hurricanes, the first person with anything close to his academic and scientific credentials to ever cross over to hockey in that role.
To date, his approach appears to be working. Over the past five years, the Hurricanes have the best record in the league, with a .676 points percentage that’s the equivalent of 111 points over an 82-game season.
Carolina made the playoffs for a seventh consecutive season and is considered one of the favorites to win the Stanley Cup when they open the first round on Sunday afternoon against the New Jersey Devils.
Every NHL team has increasingly invested in analytics in a statistical arms race over the past decade, but the Hurricanes are doing things slightly differently — primarily because they have Tulsky, a scientist, as a longstanding and significant influence.
If his approach ultimately works and the Hurricanes win a championship, it may usher in a new era for a sport that has always lagged the other Big Four sports in statistical analysis.
One of Kim Tulsky’s early memories of her son is being woken up one Sunday morning by Eric, at four years old, to hear his thoughts on a math problem he had solved.
His father, Rick, recalls taking Eric to birthday parties and, at a preschool age, him preferring to read books to the other children.
Tulsky grew up in Philadelphia in an accomplished academic family. Both his parents went to law school and later attended Harvard for postgraduate work.
His father became an investigative journalist and won a Pulitzer Prize with the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1987 for work exposing wrongdoings in the court system. His mother had a long legal career, including as a healthcare compliance officer.
From a young age, they could tell Eric was different. He began skipping ahead in math as soon as he started school, but the family didn’t want him to move too far ahead of his peers for social reasons.
Tulsky was analytical and embraced intellectual challenges, gravitating toward strategy games like chess, Dungeons & Dragons and his father’s Strat-O-Matic baseball league. He also became a huge sports fan, attending Philadelphia Phillies games and yelling “Charge!” at the top of his lungs when the call came out to the Veterans Stadium crowd.
High school proved challenging. But not for Tulsky.
“They struggled to keep up with him,” his father explained. “They were always trying to find ways to enrich it because Eric would devour whatever subjects he was studying.”
Eventually, Tulsky fell in love with advanced chemistry, as it fed his desire for a high level of problem solving and analytical skill. As a Harvard undergrad in the mid-1990s, he studied “metal chalcogenide clusters, ligand exchange and multicluster assembly” and played on the ultimate frisbee team.
That led him to Berkeley, considered one of the most prestigious chemistry programs in the world. Even there, he stood out.
“Eric was really clearly one of these brilliant critical thinkers that we sometimes get,” Professor Jeffrey Long, Tulsky’s PhD advisor, said. “He was a real standout academically and in terms of thinking deeply about problems he was working on.”
It was at those unlikely confines at Berkeley that hockey caught Tulsky’s attention. Two of his close friends at the school were die-hards from Minnesota, so they began to watch and attend games in the rare moments they weren’t putting in endless hours in Long’s lab.
Tulsky excelled in nanotechnology and was hired to work in the tech industry as a chemist who managed teams of scientists. Over the next decade, he worked on everything from single molecule DNA sequencing programs, nanoparticle ink for low-cost solar cells, developing quantum dots and advanced battery design.
Some of what he did was so far advanced that the companies that employed Tulsky kept it top secret. He was at the cutting edge of developments in using nanoparticles for new applications and to this day holds 27 U.S. patents from his work in those years.
But it was his work on batteries that caught Apple’s attention, leading him to an unlikely career crossroads at 40 years old.
By the time Tulsky entered the workforce in Silicon Valley, analytics based on shot attempts like Corsi and other possession stats were creeping into hockey discussions.
The sport’s small blogosphere exploded around the same time, and many of those new websites had a statistical slant, one that offered an alternative to what was being talked about in the hockey media at the time.
Tulsky by this point had become a big Philadelphia Flyers fan, and his introduction to hockey analytics came by way of a Flyers blog called Broad Street Hockey. He began jumping into the comments to help explain some of the new numbers and statistical theories that were becoming more prominent, something that eventually led to Tulsky writing about hockey as a hobby.
Given hockey’s analytics were so new and few people with his credentials — and abilities — were discussing them publicly, Tulsky quickly gained a profile.
“I stepped in as a translator (for other fans), from math to human, to explain that this is what that says and what it means about the players we’re following,” Tulsky said. “It was early enough that there was a lot of low-hanging fruit.”
Unlike sports like baseball, hockey’s analytics landscape was relatively uncharted. And the puzzles Tulsky ran into with hockey statistics immediately appealed to him, given many of the challenges were familiar. Much like chemistry, the data could be messy, and the conclusions weren’t always certain.
But he took a scientist’s approach to sorting through the various debates that were percolating among hockey fans and analysts. And it turned out he had a knack for being able to synthesize and present complex information in a digestible way.
“A lot of what you’re doing in hockey is taking pieces of information that tell you a small piece of a story,” Tulsky said. “And sometimes those pieces of information conflict. Sometimes they’re missing things you need to know, and you piece it together and try and figure out what the underlying truth is, and that is an interesting puzzle to try to solve.”
He had, rather inadvertently, found his calling.
It didn’t take long for Tulsky to catch the attention of NHL teams. The “summer of analytics” hit hockey in 2014, with many teams making significant, public investments in hires unlike anything seen before in the sport.
The Hurricanes quietly brought Tulsky on as a part-time consultant, which then led to a full-time offer the following summer. He agonized over the decision but ultimately reasoned that he could always go back to the tech world and get hired by a company like Apple down the road.
He moved his family — wife, Karen, and son, Seth, then 9 years old — across the country to North Carolina, a place they had never been.
The team Tulsky joined was mired in a deep struggle, both financially and on the ice. The Hurricanes were a small market, in the American South, and at times, under-resourced. They had missed the playoffs for six consecutive years — and were about to miss for three more.
All the losing led then-GM Ron Francis and his staff to seek out new answers, which is where bringing aboard hockey’s first nanotechnologist came in.
Initially, Tulsky admits he felt like an outsider in the front office, but he was warmly welcomed by Francis, who often sought his input when they were making decisions. While some NHL teams had hired analytics personnel simply to try to keep up with the Joneses and struggled to integrate them into their staff, Carolina’s small front office involved Tulsky in what they were doing right away.
“They worked pretty hard to make me feel like I was part of the team,” Tulsky said.
One key to Tulsky’s early success was his ability to make his complex assessments accessible to members of the front-office and scouting staff who were less familiar with analytics.
“He would be in the back of the room and Ronnie would say, ‘Well, Eric, what do you think of this or that?’” recalled Mark Craig, Hurricanes director of pro scouting. “And Eric had a way of explaining it to all of us scouts that made sense to us. Most guys that talk analytics struggle to share it in a way that we understood.”
Off the ice, Dallas billionaire Tom Dundon bought the team in January 2018 and began pumping money into the organization. From the start, he was fascinated with the work Tulsky was doing and began to mentor him.
Dundon had a reputation as being something of a numbers-driven maverick. He had made the bulk of his wealth in financial services and believed in doing things differently to get ahead.
In Tulsky, he saw what he was looking for with his new investment and took him under his wing.
“From Day One, he told me he thought what I was doing was very important and part of how you get an edge,” Tulsky said. “And that I should be looking for ways to bring that beyond the scope of what I had been doing.”
Dundon began asking Tulsky to help the front office with things like player contract valuations, which had previously been handled solely by the salary cap department.
By then, after nine consecutive years out of the playoffs, Francis was fired, and Don Waddell took over as GM. It fell to the longtime executive to make Dundon’s unusual and evolving front office work.
A big part of that involved mentoring Tulsky.
“I’m not going to ever claim to be an analytics guy, at all,” said Waddell, who left Carolina to become the president and GM of the Columbus Blue Jackets last spring. “When we first started off (with Tulsky), I used to use the expression ‘dumb it down for me.’ And then after time, you figure out what everything means. Certainly, I learned a lot.”
Tulsky did, too. Dundon had invested a lot in the Hurricanes, but Carolina continued to employ one of the smaller front offices in the league — and still does to this day.
Three years after moving to Raleigh, Tulsky was made director of analytics and vice-president of hockey management. In his first season in that role, the Hurricanes surprised the NHL by putting up a 99-point season and going to the conference finals with a youth movement led by Sebastian Aho and Andrei Svechnikov.
What Tulsky calls a “lean” approach to staffing, meanwhile, led to him taking on more and more duties, especially once he was promoted to Waddell’s assistant GM in 2020. Tulsky noted that some of his peers from that summer of analytics were still in their original roles while he continued to move up, in part because he had so much opportunity to learn more of the business.
Waddell, 66, became a trusted mentor, even if he chuckles a little now at Tulsky’s Silicon Valley ways: the hybrid car, love of diet soda and technical emails sent in the middle of the night.
“Well, he’s a very smart guy,” Waddell said of the learning curve Tulsky overcame. “He figures things out. You give him a problem, he’s going to come up with a solution.
“The game’s changed a lot over the last 20 years. It was mostly — not all — but a lot of GMs came from (their) playing days. That mindset has gone out the window here the last 15 years. Now somebody with that kind of (academic) experience can learn as the assistant GM for so many years. There was no reason I ever thought he wouldn’t be a GM.”
One piece of advice Waddell gave Tulsky early on was to be himself. Learn and progress, but don’t be someone you’re not, even if that means you are very different from the norm in the hockey world.
“The thing I always said (to him) is we all manage differently,” Waddell said. “Don’t try to change who you are to be part of the manager group. You’ll adapt as time moves on. Obviously he’s been able to do some pretty neat things there as we watch from afar.”
Remaining different hasn’t been an issue for Tulsky as GM. Hurricanes staffers point to how calm and encouraging he has been, for one, which is a contrast from the sometimes combative environment in other front offices.
They also said they feel open to expressing dissent, as Tulsky interprets disagreement as a healthy part of getting to the right answer. He often seeks out multiple opinions from different people before making a decision, even if he initially believes he knows the appropriate path.
“As everyone will say, he’s incredibly sharp,” Hurricanes associate GM Darren Yorke said. “What doesn’t get talked about is his business experience and experience managing people. And his understanding of how people feel valued and trying to get the most out of them.”
Where Carolina is likely the most different from other NHL teams, however, is in who they hire and how they go about it. Arsenault — the mechanical engineering student turned Hurricanes data scientist — was one example of the different hiring approach Tulsky has taken, but he’s far from the only one.
Margaret Cunniff is another good example. She studied brain and cognitive science at MIT and then researched anxiety in mice by analyzing their brains as part of a PhD in neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco.
When she saw a job posting from Tulsky looking for a data scientist on social media in 2019, however, it shocked her how much it read like it was a job tailored for her.
“It literally said something like. ‘We’re looking for people with experience working with spatiotemporal tracking data … people who’ve worked on self-driving cars or computational neuroscience,’” Cunniff said.
Tulsky’s explanation of why neuroscience overlaps with NHL tracking data — as best as we can understand — involves firing neurons, electrical currents and data points that are mapped out using electrodes.
“I was delighted to have her application because I knew that a lot of neuroscience work involved real-time signal processing that is not that different from our tracking data,” Tulsky said.
Cunniff, 33, is now in her sixth season with the Hurricanes and can often be spotted knitting in the Lenovo Center press box while watching games. While she has taken the lead on interpreting the NHL’s messy tracking data, she doesn’t believe she would be working in hockey without someone like Tulsky.
“He’s fantastic,” Cunniff said. “He’s been a really great mentor. We come from somewhat similar backgrounds, so I think the transition for me has been much simpler. We have this shared language of academia, and how you think about problem solving, and the nature of research, and how it can be slow and progress is non-linear, especially when we’re trying to tackle new problems. Sometimes it’s a bumpy and unpredictable road. Since he comes from that background, he knows that.”
Other differences in Carolina include the fact that their senior management team — led by Yorke, new assistant GM Tyler Dellow (a former contributor to The Athletic) and new VP of pro player personnel Chris Abbott — didn’t play in the NHL.
It’s a fairly young group, by league standards, as Tulsky, at 49, is the eldest of those four. They have varied backgrounds in scouting, legal work and team management, as Tulsky aimed to spread their skill sets around to handle different front-office duties.
Tulsky has prioritised considering people from different backgrounds when hiring scouts and other front-office personnel, a process Craig said felt jarring at first. Now that he’s seen the more non-traditional scouts at work this season, however, he is a believer.
“Our process opened my eyes to things that I would not have thought,” Craig said, explaining how they used blind testing that led them to hiring candidates who previously wouldn’t have even been given interviews, including some with zero experience with a team.
Some of those hires have become Carolina’s best scouts, he added.
Carolina has looked for edges elsewhere off the ice, too. Waddell points to the internal website that Hurricanes senior developer Kevin Kan created as the best resource of its kind in the league, as it integrates all of the team’s scouting data with its analytics, tracking data, meeting notes and other proprietary information they can use to make decisions. Everyone in the organization uses the site and can ask for improvements or revisions.
Kan — a Toronto native who previously worked for IBM in a design role — was Tulsky’s first hire after he discovered his hockey analytics website, datarink.com, in 2017.
Similarly, Earl Schwartz, the team’s compliance assistant, was hired after he gained a reputation as a CBA and salary-cap savant on social media.
The uniqueness of the Hurricanes front office — including Tulsky’s background — has raised some eyebrows around the NHL the past few seasons. So, too, has Dundon’s reputation for getting involved in things like contract negotiations, an unusual role for an owner.
The conversation around the team is such that when Tulsky was promoted to GM last summer, he told his parents to stop looking at social media. The level of criticism he would receive as a GM would be much different than when he was in a supporting role, he explained.
There ended up being some truth to that, as skeptics have been quick to highlight Carolina’s perceived missteps this season. Tulsky’s first year involved navigating some difficult player personnel decisions, including losing three high-profile players to free agency — Jake Guentzel, Brett Pesce and Brady Skjei — and the two Mikko Rantanen trades that saw the superstar join the ‘Canes for just 13 games midseason.
In both cases — last July’s free agency and then the March trade deadline — Tulsky and his staff went with somewhat unorthodox solutions for replacing the players lost. But even with the turnover, the Hurricanes finished this season with a top 10 record and are considered a strong favorite for the Cup.
What stands out about Carolina’s roster more than anything is its impressive level of depth. While the Hurricanes didn’t have a single player top 75 points this season, they are also one of the only teams in the league with a dozen 30-point scorers.
They are also set up well to make a splash in free agency this summer, with one of the best salary-cap situations and a strong prospect pool to build off, including top Russian defenseman Alexander Nikishin, who is expected to join the ‘Canes for the playoffs.
The Hurricanes staff say the criticism never seems to bother Tulsky or change his approach to making what are sometimes considered unusual moves. They also push back on the idea that what they’re doing won’t work simply because many of them took different paths to get to where they are.
Waddell may have moved on to a division rival, but his time working with Tulsky made him a believer. When Tulsky was first promoted to the top job, other executives came to Waddell asking what to expect.
He told them not to underestimate their soft-spoken new counterpart. Waddell had worked with Tulsky to fill his gaps, teaching him how to approach things like negotiating with player agents, for example.
Even though Tulsky didn’t play the game, he always had a way of figuring things out.
“I think what happens in our business is franchises have success and people start to look at ‘How is Carolina doing it?’” Waddell said. “I’m certain that’s why a few teams reached out and talked to Eric (about their GM openings in the past). Once you have success, you can’t ignore that.”
“At this point, Eric has, what, 10 years in the NHL?” Dellow added. “At some point, he becomes a hockey guy. He may not be an ex-player, but he’s been around long enough and he’s a bright guy who understands the way it works.”
Hurricanes players are also quick to endorse their new GM, including rising star Seth Jarvis, who negotiated a new eight-year contract extension with Tulsky last summer to stay in Carolina long term.
“I think everyone here has all the confidence in the world in him,” Jarvis said. “His decision making has been good and everything has a purpose. His perspective’s different from maybe the norm and what it’s been in the past, but he’s a very smart man. And I trust his decision making.”
Tulsky, for his part, knows he has more to prove. He has spent much of his first season in the big chair on the road, meeting with other GMs, executives and agents around the league to build the relationships that didn’t come naturally in his previous roles.
But he sees a direct throughline in his life between his various pursuits — in chess, chemistry and now hockey — as the result of a desire to take on difficult challenges and solve complex puzzles.
That’s what drew him to hockey analytics in the first place. But what keeps him motivated is wanting to be the best.
“For as long as I can remember, I’ve just liked thinking through how the pieces fit together and how to make something work,” Tulsky said. “And in sports, it has the added advantage of engaging my competitive side. In chemistry, I got to think through how to make something work, and I got the reward of making it work. Here I get the reward of winning. That’s even more fun for me.”
When it’s pointed out that the Hurricanes have yet to win the ultimate prize, Tulsky doesn’t hesitate.
“And that’s why we are still continuing to take big swings,” he said. “We are not satisfied and not where we want to be.”
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic, Photo: Josh Lavallee / Carolina Hurricanes)
