As the Edmonton Oilers and the Florida Panthers faced off in the first games of the National Hockey League’s Stanley Cup finals earlier this month, the league’s technology team tackled one of its biggest challenges of the year: the NHL Draft.
Representatives from the NHL’s 32 teams will converge on the Sphere entertainment arena east of the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada, to select the next rookie cohort on June 28 and 29. It will be the first sporting event held at the Sphere.
Thanks to a major modernization push executives won’t need to attend in person.
“A big in-person event with 12 people gathered around each team’s table with laptops and all of the back-office IT support you need for that isn’t necessary,” Grant Nodine, SVP of technology for the NHL, told CIO Dive.
Decentralizing the selection process for the league brass without sacrificing the pageantry of the event for fans required a major technology overhaul, a shift to cloud and complete modernization of the draft application.
“We didn’t copy one single bit of code,” Nodine said of the AWS-based hybrid cloud solution his team built with digital services provider Presidio. “We reimagined the database, too.”
Presidio helped the NHL roll out the refactored app for the 2023 draft, which was held in a familiar league location — the Nashville Predators’ Bridgestone Arena.
Transformation goals
Digital transformation takes planning, patience and a clear business objective.
The NHL’s shift to hybrid cloud followed the same trajectory as many other enterprises. The move was spurred by the need for a more streamlined, platform-centered foundation to support an increasingly complex, dispersed operating model.
“It started when the pandemic happened, which forced us to start thinking about our older applications and the technology debt that any organization accrues over the years,” Nodine said.
The front office reassessed its tech stack and looked at what it would take to free the draft from the bounds of legacy infrastructure.
“We always felt more comfortable running the draft in a venue that we had control over,” Nodine said.
The comfort level was dictated by the limitation of the league’s now retired technology. Nodine described the original system as “a client-server application of an older ilk built on top of an older piece of groupware … It did one thing and it was not ‘containerable.’”
The hybrid cloud solution freed the league to expand its comfort zone beyond hockey arenas to a pure entertainment venue like the Sphere. “The architecture gave us the flexibility we needed,” Nodine said.
One of the keys to easing any modernization effort is cross-enterprise stakeholder buy-in. The NHL put together a team that included non-technical users in the development process.
“We did not have a group of IT people sitting around a table doing mock drafts,” Nodine said. “It was a mix of technical people and everyday users. We get our best solutions when we include people from the business side of the equation.”
The solution has to fit the use case, Phil Filippelli, head of innovation at Presidio, added.
“When the teams come in, they’re worried about picking their players,” Filippelli said. “They don’t want a training class or a manual they have to study.”
