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Wings Make Additions To Hockey Ops Staff

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Dwayne Blais has been hired to work as a player development assistant for the Detroit Red Wings.

The Detroit Red Wings have added some new personnel to their hockey operations staff. Dan Kosinski has been hired as a hockey operations data analyst, while Dwayne Blais will be filling the title of player development assistant.

Blais, 44, is a Hockey Canada Certified Skills Coach. He’s been working as the skill development coach of the Ontario Hockey League’s London Knights. Blais also spent five years serving as a skills coach with the Washington Capitals. He performed similar duties with the Hershey Bears, the Capitals’ AHL farm club. Blais is also the owner of Total Package Hockey (TPH), a player development company. He also owns National Skill Development Association (NSDA), an online video resource helping coaches break down and teach hockey skills.

From Sterling Heights, Michigan, Kosinski has worked since 2006 as a reliability engineer for the U.S. Army. He has a Master’s degree in industrial and manufacturing system engineering from the University of Michigan-Dearborn. As well, Kosinski holds a Bachelors degree in aerospace, aeronautical and astronautical engineering from the University of Michigan.

Hockey Data Analyst Work

On his LinkedIn profile, Kosinski also notes the work he has performed in the area of hockey data analysis.

“As a hobby, I have also done extensive research into what public sources of NHL data are available,”Kosinski writes. “Through my research into the available data, I have identified ways of integrating much of it together to provide more contextual and insightful metrics for team and player performance. Part of this involved writing custom VBA code to interact with the NHL API, parse numerous other NHL data sources, integrate all of these disparate data sources together and then export this processed information into a Microsoft Access Database.

“Then I worked within Microsoft Access to build flexible queries with this processed data to allow for drilling down into which teams and players performed best in different situations. The work that I performed in this area was presented at the 2019 Seattle Hockey Analytics Conference (SeaHAC) in my presentation ‘Utilizing Publicly Available NHL Data to Evaluate Situational Team and Player Performance.'”