Meet the BSH writer: Brad Keffer

Hello everyone! I’ve joined Broad Street Hockey to contribute to the coverage of the hockey team the Phantoms. I will be writing monthly stat-heavy recaps along with some special teams and neutral zone play analysis.

I started watching hockey when I was 6 years old and my first hockey game was a playoff game against the Devils back in 2004. After experiencing a game live, I was hooked for life. I grew up going to minor league hockey games and eventually got into hockey analytics in 2014 after wondering why everybody hated the Andrew MacDonald extension. That was a sad day of realization.

My favorite hockey memory by far was watching the Phantoms lift the cup in 2005. As a seven year old and a new hockey fan, I don’t think I fully grasped that experience at the time but it’s so cool to look back on now. When the team moved to Adirondack, I had lost interest in following them for a while. They were no longer a local team, they didn’t have any big name prospects, and they weren’t winning. Their resurgence to relevancy under Ron Hextall has been great to see, and it made me want to know more about both the team and individual players’ performances. That’s where the idea for my tracking project began.

Public data is scarce when it comes to the AHL, so this season I decided to manually track 5-on-5 corsi/shot attempts, faceoffs, penalties, and blocked shots for every Phantoms game. You can look at the data yourself on my website, Phancy Stats, if you’re interested. I also track zone entries, zone exits, and zone entry defense, but that’s not publicly accessible at the moment.

I hope you enjoy what I write, and I am excited to get started!