Inline Analytics Doesn’t Mean What You Suspect it Means, w/Ryan Spahr

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello friends, we've got a fun one for you today because today we welcome someone who lives two lives. By day, Ryan Spahr is an attorney, owns his own practice, fights the good fight. But by night, Ryan or Spahr, as most of us call him, runs the company that is the private enterprise half of a collaborative effort with Indianapolis Parks and Rec that historically has employed, no wait, served a nearly 200 person community called Indy Inline Hockey. Indy Inline Hockey is a vibrant and supportive community, not just a sports league. And I wouldn't just say that. I've actually seen this in practice. This is a community, almost like a big family, and it has revitalized a local Indy park. It has channeled community league fees into actual capital improvements in this local neighborhood hockey rink, which is now used for much more than just Indy Inline Hockey. The revitalized rink has hosted roller derby, lacrosse, a ball hockey league, played on sneakers instead of skates. And this most recent Halloween season also hosted an Indy Parks haunted house.

(00:01:14): Now, this episode kind of follows the same format as episodes recently where we've had some of our customers on. It's just that Indy Inline Hockey is not a paying customer. Over the holidays, I just took the opportunity to do what I could to give something back to the community in the form of, "Hey, give me access to all of your historical data and let me see what I can do." And the results turned out kind of miraculously well. Even compared to your usual export to Excel situation, the data in this case is incredibly gross. Nothing but PDF files of differing formats, and sometimes even buggy internal formats. But the fact that it was possible at all is a testament to how far the tools have come. And I'm looking at you Power BI specifically, amazing. Not possible to do even a few years ago.

(00:02:03): And because these reports, dashboards, visualizations, whatever you want to call them, because they're not sensitive, it's one place where we can differ from our usual format. We can share them with you. These are published to the open web, interactive in your browser. We will put the link in the show notes. I highly encourage you to take a look, kind of follow along at home if you will. At parts in the conversation, we're actually talking about specific reports. You can be looking at them while we're talking about them.

(00:02:29): If you want to play a little bit of Where's Waldo, you can try to find me or my wife, Jocelyn in the reports. Hint, sort, and look near the bottom. I'll tell you the URL here out loud one time, but definitely look in the show notes.

(00:02:41): The link is p3ada.pt/indyinline, one word. In addition to the data fund, I think you'll see there's just a really positive good human vibe in this whole conversation, and that's reflective of the way Spahr is day to day and reflective of the way the entire league operates.

(00:03:07): And in my limited experience, it's also the way that he conducts himself in his day job. He's a good person. He's created something very special. It's enhanced a lot of people's lives. It's been very gratifying for me to do just the little bit that I can to give back to that. And along the way, create an excuse to have him on the show. So let's get into it.

Speaker 2 (00:03:30): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?

Speaker 3 (00:03:34): This is the Raw Data By P3 Adaptive podcast with your host Rob Collie and your co-host Justin Mannhardt. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data By P3 Adaptive is data with the human element.

Rob Collie (00:04:00): Welcome to the show, Ryan Spahr. How are you this fine, frigid morning?

Ryan Spahr (00:04:06): I'm good, Rob. It's a beautiful minus five.

Rob Collie (00:04:09): Yeah, I mean at least. And just yesterday, I braved those elements and made the trek across town to deliver you the audio gear for this session. What's the word I'm looking for, for that kind of effort? I think it's heroic. You look good. I mean, I know that this is an audio only podcast. The listeners can't see, but it looks like you've always had this podcast set up. Are you sure you're not running a sports talk show on the side or something? It really looks like you've been dialed in for a while.

Ryan Spahr (00:04:36): I'm not. I'm glad it looks that way.

Rob Collie (00:04:38): I think you're the first, maybe we've had someone on the show before with a law degree, but I think you're the first practicing attorney we've had on the show. You're probably running some sort of legal podcast is what you're doing on the side, right?

Ryan Spahr (00:04:50): I am not running a legal podcast. I will tell you, I have the timer going for this one. We're still on the first billable hour here.

Rob Collie (00:04:57): Oh, fantastic. P3 has gotten some light advisory work from you and your firm. Not only are you Spahr Law.

Ryan Spahr (00:05:07): Spahr Law Office, LLC, but I can tell you there's only three other Spahr lawyers in the state of Indiana. So if you say that Spahr lawyer, you got a 25% chance.

Rob Collie (00:05:18): Pretty good. And Spahr with an S-P-A-H-R.

Ryan Spahr (00:05:22): Superfluous H. That's right.

Rob Collie (00:05:24): You're one of those people that almost everyone knows you by your last name, so it's just going to happen. I can't even think of you as a Ryan.

Ryan Spahr (00:05:31): There's too many Ryans. I had three Ryans in my kindergarten class. Class of 15 people, there are three Ryans. Unbelievable.

Rob Collie (00:05:37): You're a solo practicing attorney, is that right?

Ryan Spahr (00:05:41): Yeah, that's correct. I own my own firm. It's a firm of one. So firm sounds a little more grandiose than it is.

Rob Collie (00:05:46): It does, yeah. But it's an army of one.

Ryan Spahr (00:05:48): That's right. Sole practice attorney would be the more honest way to put it, I suppose.

Rob Collie (00:05:53): Here's how I know you, right? Your claim to fame as far as I'm concerned. I follow your legal career very closely. I think you're excellent. That's not how I got to know you though. I got to know you as co-founder, COO of one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in my life. Just amazing communities, the Indy Inline Hockey League.

(00:06:15): Which I just read the sense that this thing that you and others have built that I've only sort of recently joined on with is damn near unique. So inline hockey is, we'll call it roller hockey, but we don't play it on quad skates. We play it on rollerblade skates. And it's a sport that goes through these phases of, it seems like for a while it was trying to die. No one was going to be playing it anymore. And to discover it alive and well in such a vibrant way here in Indy was really kind of a shock to me.

(00:06:50): Indy Inline has an actual rink, and it's not a commercial rink. Some places are lucky and have a hockey rink that's not ice. It's not like you built the rink, but you kind of, in a way, you've made some capital improvements. It's kind of amazing. So can you give us a little bit of a history of this thing called Indy Inline?

Ryan Spahr (00:07:11): Sure. To touch on the first part of what you said, it's kind of the sport that refuses to die. When everybody hears inline hockey or roller hockey, they think in the '90s, and kids in JNCO jeans and Billabong t-shirts in their cul-de-sacs playing roller hockey, which to be fair was exactly me. Hockey on quads has been around almost as long as the NHL has.

Rob Collie (00:07:35): I didn't know that.

Ryan Spahr (00:07:37): Behind my desk, I actually have old Harper's Weekly covers and an old whiskey ad that's, they called it roller polo, but it is essentially roller hockey on quads.

(00:07:50): And then yes, it essentially disappeared for decades. And then with the invention of the rollerblade, you get this with extreme sports and all that stuff in general, this rise of it where any suburb in a good part of America, you go in a cul-de-sac and there's kids playing roller hockey. But unfortunately, like a lot of other, I don't want to call it a fad sports, but I think it's fair to say that's what it was in the '90s, it faded. But there's this whole generation of people where they grew up playing it in some degree and then it just completely went away.

(00:08:22): When I was in middle school and high school in Fort Wayne, Indiana, there were summer leagues with seven divisions and four to six teams in each division. And then fast-forward to now, and Fort Wayne where I grew up playing has three divisions, which each have about four teams in them.

(00:08:42): And then in Indiana in general, we are Indy Inline, and I'll talk about that in a second, but we are the only roller hockey program in Central Indiana. We operate out of an old Indy Parks ice rink. Is it Ellenberger Park. It's on the east side of Indianapolis. And in the '70s, it was an outdoor seasonal ice rink. In the '80s, they built a real thin metal shell around it. And then I played there as a kid actually on ice hockey. And it was the coldest rink in Indiana.

(00:09:14): So there's a rink called the Icebox in South Bend is the second coldest, but Ellenberger Park, not by design, but just by underfunded city construction was the coldest rink.

(00:09:27): But it operated well beyond its lifespan, was not maintained. And then in 2008, the city of Indianapolis shuttered the building. I've gotten ahold of some of the financial numbers, it's public, but they did something like $8,000 of revenue in the last year that they operated that ice rink.

(00:09:45): Now I don't know what their operation costs are. And they're the city, so they don't have to operate at a profit. But think about utilities alone. To operate an ice rink for a whole year, you make $8,000.

(00:09:55): So the building sat empty. There was a little bit of futsal, which is sort of an indoor soccer type thing two nights a week. But otherwise, the building sat empty until 2015, when we went in there and started revitalizing the property and forming it around what we needed it to be, to be an indoor roller hockey facility.

(00:10:14): So it is a weird hybrid relationship because we are a private, very small company. I mean, it's a company of two. One of us lives in Texas and is no longer actively involved. And we run this growing vibrant league out of this city property. We pay them rent and they let us kind of do what we need to do to run the program.

Rob Collie (00:10:35): It's really amazing. This building just sat there with a concrete floor. It still had all the boards, right?

Ryan Spahr (00:10:43): Yeah. The boards, the glass, the netting. I mean, it's literally like one day they flip the switch, squeegee all the water out the back, and just let it sit.

Rob Collie (00:10:51): Yeah. So there's long disused chiller equipment below the concrete slab. Is that right?

Ryan Spahr (00:10:56): Yeah, think of it like a radiator almost in a concrete slab, and it all runs into this completely mothballed room. It looks like you're going into the boiler room of a turn of the last century factory. Very scary room. And actually, the funny thing is the last time the city did any kind of work in there, they were like, "We'll tear that out." And they started ripping out some fittings and they realized the whole thing is still full of glycol, so they never even drained it. So coincidentally, they decided they're not going to rip it out, and that building's just going to continue to be a monument to what it used to be.

Rob Collie (00:11:28): So cool. Okay. So I moved to Indy in 2015, my wife Jocelyn and I, and we had played some inline hockey in Seattle and I'd not played hockey since then. In 2015, we're driving along and we see some people basically skating around a tennis court at a neighborhood park, and we drop in and we say hi to y'all, and that's where you were in 2015, playing outdoors on a tennis court. We said, "We're going to be right back. We're going to be joining up with y'all next week."

(00:12:02): It was seven years later that we decided to actually come out and start playing with you. But that's where you started. It started as just a bunch of people hanging out, playing at a park. And now, you play at this facility that I know that the league doesn't own it, but the company behind the league, right? It has made tremendous investments in this facility to improve it, in a very sort of collaborative nature with the city, which in itself is I think a very, very unique relationship. What year did Indy Inline start playing in this park facility?

Ryan Spahr (00:12:37): Spring of 2015.

Rob Collie (00:12:40): Okay. So in 2015 you just approached the city and said, "Hey, I've got an idea"?

Ryan Spahr (00:12:44): So you mentioned we were playing on a tennis court that bike polo, which is also a thing that has kind of gone. These bike polo guys turned these tennis courts into these two very small sort of rinks with pallets and plywood, but it was just good enough or just similar enough to a "rink" to play hockey there. So we played there in the summers for a couple of years.

(00:13:09): And one of our players lived in the Irvington area of Indianapolis, and he for years had been driving by the building that we now play in. And one day he saw people walking in there, so he just stopped and walked in. And what they were doing was they were playing futsal or soccer basically, but he pulled the park manager aside and asked about hockey. Park manager said, "Well, we haven't played it here in a long time and we don't have any nets, but sure, have somebody give me a call."

(00:13:36): And so we got ahold of him. And to their credit, all these city employees, they're all very excited about having people in there using these facilities. The problem is that they don't have the budget or really the manpower to do anything themselves. So a lot of the for-profit rinks, they pay people to build these programs and maintain them, and the city just doesn't have that capability.

(00:14:00): So the deal kind of was that we would cover things like insurance. We brought nets in. And it's not like there's somebody from the city checking people in. I mean, we basically rent the entire facility and all the operations that go with running something out of that. And they started renting it to us, and we started just blasting out invites, and Facebook posts, and whatever we could to get people there. For as much as the building is still an old, it's a hockey term. It's still an old barn. Back then it was a pretty gross barn. There's so many people who love hockey and grew up playing roller hockey. And just like you guys, hadn't had anywhere to play in so long.

(00:14:40): So we grew numbers quickly. And within six months, we ran our first league, our pilot season. And within a couple years we were running leagues. And my partner Leo and I decided that we would try and make this even better.

(00:14:57): And so we increased the rates and started saving up money. And we've done a couple things that, the most important for the roller hockey purposes is we purchased a sheet of what's called sport court, which is an interlocking plastic tile system. Perfect for roller hockey, but you can use it for soccer, lacrosse, roller derby, any of that kind of thing. And that made the whole facility one, brighter, but two, just way more user-friendly and more useful.

(00:15:27): And then speaking of brighter, the lights that were in the building were these probably '70s, they were metal halides. Ancient, ancient inefficient technology. The lights pre-exist the building actually. When they first built the thing, it was just an ice pad and then they put a roof over it. And then in the '80s they put the walls around. Well, those lights were there when they put that initial roof over with the sides open. So we paid to have that retrofitted with modern LED lighting.

(00:15:57): And the funny thing about that was all we ended up paying was labor, because the utility credits to get rid of those old lights paid for the fixtures themselves, which is of course funny because the city could have done that for free. But we had the motivation and the interest to get it done.

(00:16:14): And the big key in all of this was we've had for the last five years or so a park manager who has just been an incredible partner, and she is super motivated to have the space used to its best use. And on top of what we've done on the ground, she has then filled every day with other renters who are using our improvements, but we want that because we want the building to have the use and to be valuable to the city. And frankly, we want the city to not tear down and build something else. So it helps if we're making it more attractive.

Rob Collie (00:16:45): This is really a theme that runs through the whole thing from my perspective, is just the good human side of all of it. The whole thing, the entire enterprise. It's just such a feel good and positive thing. The idea of this partnership with the city, this close collaborative interaction, there's something really special to it.

(00:17:08): The park itself, when you drive by the park on a hockey night on a Wednesday Indy Inline, that parking lot is full. I wonder how often that parking lot is full. I mean, I've never been there on a non hockey night. But it just seems like this is a pretty big deal for a sport that in Seattle, our facilities, the professionally run facilities that had leagues closed it all down and turned everything into indoor soccer. And that pushed us to playing on a basketball court. It's just a sport where you're constantly scrounging for a place to play.

(00:17:42): Ellenberger seems like deluxe in that sense. You know when you go camping, how every bit of food you eat when you're camping tastes 20% better than that same food would taste if you were at home? Ellenberger seems like the Taj Mahal. I completely can see the reality of it. It is a barn, but it seems like a temple once you've experienced what it's like to be chased out of everywhere.

(00:18:06): I learned to skate playing inline hockey in the parking garages at Microsoft in 1996, and eventually Microsoft facilities ran us out of there, because uninsured, right? We didn't have a place to play, and then eventually those other places opened up, and then eventually they closed down, and we were just constantly being chased off of wherever we went. And you're now in, entering the ninth calendar year operating at Ellenberger.

(00:18:39): So appears from the stats, 171 players have appeared in the stats, right? I'm sure that every now and then, there's a little bit of leakage where someone shows up for a game and doesn't get entered into the stat. But 171 named players have appeared in the statistics for Indy Inline. That's a lot of people.

Ryan Spahr (00:19:01): Yeah, I didn't know it was that many.

Rob Collie (00:19:02): Where this takes a bit of a data turn is there's a fantasy football league that is adjacent to the Indy Inline hockey league, and I-

Ryan Spahr (00:19:13): Shoehorned your way in?

Rob Collie (00:19:14): Yeah, I kind of wedged my way into that this year. I'm like, "Oh my God, you guys are doing that." For the people who are listening, I am bad at hockey. I keep joking to people that I know sooner or later, I need to find a hobby that I'm really good at. Turns out I'm pretty good at fantasy football. I was like, "Here's my chance to be better than average at something around these people that I play hockey with." That turned out well for me.

Ryan Spahr (00:19:34): Go ahead and work the brag in.

Rob Collie (00:19:36): Yeah, I did win that league. And so I hear that we're in discussions now as to whether I'm invited back next season, which is fine.

(00:19:42): In the aftermath of all of that, I just decided to feed our fantasy football stats into Power BI and share some screenshots of things like who had the luckiest season in terms of scheduling luck and who got screwed over, unluckiest season, things like that, and share that in our Facebook group that's just for the fantasy football subset of the Indy Inline subculture. And you looked at that and remarked, "I need to get you the hockey stats from all of our years of the league."

(00:20:12): I'm so used to me being the only one who's interested. At work, that's not the case. Right? At work, everyone I'm around is interested in data, and statistics, and visualizations, and things like that. But out in the civilian world, I'm not used to that. It's usually the opposite. I'm the only one who cares. I mean, I used to be the person who would try to explain the VLOOKUP function to people from Excel at parties. A real name, you needed me at your party. I slowly got that beaten out of me. I've been holding back. But I mean to be asked, it's like the vampire. You were going to invite me. Yeah, let's do that.

Ryan Spahr (00:20:54): In fairness, you didn't know exactly how messy and complicated I think that was going to be on the front end. I did.

Rob Collie (00:21:02): Did you? Optimism is the thing that gets me in trouble over, and over, and over again. You've seen the t-shirt going around or the banner that said, "We do these things not because they're easy, but because we thought they would be easy"? That 100% applies to this. I knew that PDFs, you gave me access to this site, and I was able to download a detailed per game PDF. What is it, hockeyshift.com.

Ryan Spahr (00:21:31): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:21:32): And I was like, "Well, it's in PDF form. That's not ideal, but let me just see." I fed that into Power BI, and wouldn't you know it? Power BI could digest that PDF format, at which point I turned to you and texted you and said, "Hey, this is going to be easy." The narrator steps in now and says, "It wasn't easy."

(00:21:57): It's a good thing that's happened over the holidays. I had some downtime. Turned out I needed a lot of that downtime. When we're talking about these dashboards, for a change, and we're often talking about dashboards, and reports, and analysis on this show, but we're talking about it with customers, etc., and it's obviously private. It's very, very highly sensitive information. In this case, dear listener, you can play along at home, because we've published this to the web. This is wide open, unrestricted.

Ryan Spahr (00:22:26): You can look up your favorite Indy Inline hockey player's progress throughout the season, through prior seasons.

Rob Collie (00:22:33): You can follow along, and every Thursday you can dash to this website and be frantically pressing refresh, just waiting for the hot, fresh data to come out of the oven. Anyway, the link is in the show notes, folks.

(00:22:48): And I just want to tell you first of all, Spahr, that just in general, these reports are a technical marvel that they even can exist. The noise in everything about the data flowing into this, it's like throwing rocks, just raw ore into the side of a building, and the other side of the building, automobiles are coming out, steel sculptures. It's unbelievable what the technology can do now.

(00:23:22): If we were using any other tool set, any of Power BI's competitors, this wouldn't have happened. There's no way. No other tool on the market can do what we did at the price that we did, which is free. Sweat equity from you and me.

Ryan Spahr (00:23:39): Mostly you. But yeah.

Rob Collie (00:23:41): You were important. I think there's no way I would've done the things that you did. So from the outside, from your perspective, you wouldn't have the perspective to know what a miracle this is, and what a gift from Microsoft it is that we could do this. I mean, this is just the most hideous setup for a problem. Here, have a folder, a couple of folders, a bunch of folders of all these PDFs, which are meant to be looked at. They're meant to be printed.

(00:24:13): And furthermore, just to make things more fun, halfway through the history of all this stuff, y'all started entering the data in a different way, even on HockeyShift. So there's two completely different formats of PDF, and so all the import routines have to be written twice completely differently and then spliced together.

(00:24:31): So I have loved it. It's sort of like a triumphant feeling to it. I've definitely nerded out on the fact that we can chew up a mountain of ugly nasty PDF and spit this out the other side. It's really cool.

(00:24:44): So what were you expecting? All you'd seen was a few screenshots of some fantasy football related stuff from me. Did you have any expectations going in?

Ryan Spahr (00:24:54): The fun thing for me was I had no idea what the output could look like. What I knew was... So Indy Inline has had 23 total seasons. We're in season 22, which is our 23rd season.

Rob Collie (00:25:10): It's zero indexed is how we described that in the computer science world.

Ryan Spahr (00:25:15): That makes us sound better than how we actually got there.

Rob Collie (00:25:17): It's a zero index league. It's okay

Ryan Spahr (00:25:20): For the first half of those seasons, I made a goofy little score sheet in Excel. We filled it in, and then after every game, I had a different Excel spreadsheet I punched everything into. And just so everybody at home knows how fluent in data analysis or data entry even I am, I learned how to use the sum feature as part of that initial project on Excel.

Rob Collie (00:25:44): Well, this is how everyone comes to Excel. You encounter a need.

Ryan Spahr (00:25:48): And I'm pretty bad at it still. So then we started feeding it into this subscription service that we pay for, which is our stats website. It'll give you your standings. You can use it to make a schedule, and it'll give you the really dumb stats, like who scored the most goals and who had the most assists.

(00:26:09): But that doesn't really tell you much, and it doesn't tell you really anything season over season. Unless you're one of those top five in any of those categories, it's kind of a who caress type thing. It's relevant for the specific season you're in, because you care how your team's doing.

(00:26:23): So I sent all that stuff off to you and mucked through getting it all off that website, because they don't make it easy, and I got the impression that the output on those PDFs isn't very good either.

(00:26:35): So to get back what we have that, my favorite thing about it, if I'm being completely honest, is the first working dashboard thing you sent me had my name up towards the top, because the first category it sorts by is games played, and that is the only statistical category that I lead in. But I had no idea, one of the first stat categories yearly worked on, if I remember right, was assist to goals ratio, which is such an interesting stat. It kind of tells you a lot about the player.

(00:27:06): So if you're really high on that assist to goal ratio, that means that you're more of a passing player than a scorer. A one ratio means for every goal you score, you have an assist and vice versa.

(00:27:20): So it's really interesting to see, "Okay, I'm more of a passer. I have a 2.3 goals to assist ratio," and that's really interesting to know. I mean, it means I have about to assist every goal. And also for a middling player like me, it makes you feel good, right? It doesn't matter exactly how many goals or how many assists you had that went into that. It's one of those things where it doesn't matter how good of a player you are-

Rob Collie (00:27:40): It's not volumetric. You're not going to lead the league in either category, right?

Ryan Spahr (00:27:45): Right. Never.

Rob Collie (00:27:46): But the ratio, you're in the hunt.

Ryan Spahr (00:27:49): Well, the other thing that's fun about it is that stat in particular, one of the reasons I like about it is I'm high in that one. And then you've got some of the best players in the league score just a ton of goals, but maybe don't pass that often. And so their bar in the relative bar graph statistic is very small, and my bar is bigger, and that makes me feel better.

Rob Collie (00:28:07): And by the way, listeners, you definitely got to check out the goal and assist bubbles chart because, this one graphically conveys this ratio. You can sort of see that there's clusters and then there's outliers. The ratio line, the one-to-one ratio line is on there as a dotted line. That's a fun one to look at.

(00:28:24): So a couple of things here. First of all, the importance of sponsor buy-in. So if this were a paying client relationship, you would be our primary sponsor, and a lot of your effort, you're putting a lot of effort into making sure that the data's available to me, like getting me access and things like that. I can't do really anything without your assistance, without connecting me with the right things.

(00:28:48): But also, I need your input on what would be valuable, and this number that I'm coming up with seems kind of like an anomaly. Is that a problem in my logic versus, is there actually something real there? I need that tribal knowledge of what people would find compelling, but also of what's real.

(00:29:08): The moment, you said that first thing you went to was games played. Well from that point forward, I'm like, "Well, games played, it's going to be the first column on a lot of these reports." And there was a version of the goals and assist bubbles chart. You're like, "I like that one too because I'm on that one." And I had to filter that chart because once there's too many dots on there, it just becomes a mess. So I had to filter it by the top N point scorers period. So I don't think you even know this happened.

(00:29:37): So that earlier version didn't have a lot of games in it. Once I got a bunch more games loaded, the threshold I set, Spahr disappeared from the chart. I'm like, "This aggression will not stand." So I kept changing the threshold until you were back. That's how you do it.

(00:29:54): You've got to keep people engaged. This is one of the things that we, even in business, there used to be a lot of gatekeeping around what makes good report design, some things that are novelties that people like. There's science that indicates that those novelties aren't really good for clear perception. So for example, we don't use any of these, but we could if we wanted to. I can put the equivalent of engine gauges visuals on these reports if I wanted to. I don't know what we would use them for. And the science behind this says, "No, don't do that. That's just pandering. And a bar chart is much more effective. Human beings know how to compare the lengths of bar charts much better than they can compare two gauges side by side."

(00:30:36): And that's true. I believe that's true. It's just that if the difference between having the gauges and not is people would engage with the report versus not, then you should do the gauges.

Ryan Spahr (00:30:49): Exactly to that point, you mentioned the bubbles, and you have another sheet that I believe is total goals or total goals historically. They are, I'm going to use the word roughly scientific. It's a graph with a one-to-one line. It's at the 45 diagonal, and then you've got goals and assists, or it's just a bar graph.

(00:31:14): You do have the feature in there where you hit a play button. All it's doing is showing you over time. I mean if you freeze it at any given point, you're getting useful data for where it was at that point in time. But it's also a lot of fun to watch some people's bubbles go, shoot off into the goal direction. Some people stay right on that goal to assist one-to-one line. And it's also fun to watch yourself and slowly drift, not very high in either direction.

Rob Collie (00:31:40): If only I didn't have to set the filter threshold so generous for me to show up. The bottom left of the chart would be just a blob. You wouldn't be able to see anything.

Ryan Spahr (00:31:52): In your defense, you're still "competing" against guys who've been here for hundreds of games more than you have.

Rob Collie (00:31:59): More importantly, people who actually are good at hockey, because they grew up playing it. I was scared to get on skates of any kind until I was 22 years old. 22 years old is when I had the courage to put skates on for the first time. It's funny, it's my favorite sport to play by far. Wouldn't it just happen to be the sport where you can't even just run?

Ryan Spahr (00:32:21): There's a big entry barrier for any kind of hockey in that you have to be able to skate.

Rob Collie (00:32:26): I can run backwards, I can run forwards, I can change directions. I can do all those things if I'm running. There's probably very little difference between me and say Brad Denney, when it comes to the ability to run. He's still going to be faster. He's still going to be quicker, all those sorts of things. But it would greatly compress the difference between me and the elite players in this league if it weren't played on skates. But skates are an integral part of making it what it is. I wouldn't want it any other way.

Ryan Spahr (00:32:52): That's one of my favorite things about hockey is that if you took the 10 best and 10 worst players in a league and stripped them down to their underwear, and stood them in a lineup, you couldn't pick out who the best hockey players are.

Rob Collie (00:33:05): That's right.

Ryan Spahr (00:33:06): It's not about pure athleticism, or endurance, or age, or anything else. It's a truly kind of a finesse sport where those things can help. Your ability to skate, or to handle the puck, or shoot are not reflective of those things.

Rob Collie (00:33:23): Well, especially inline hockey where the rules of contact are so much stricter. It is a safer game to play than basketball. I'm going to be 50 years old next year, and okay fine. I'm probably have to go get my shoulder looked at here one of these days from crashing into not someone, but probably into the wall.

Ryan Spahr (00:33:42): I don't remember which time it happened.

Rob Collie (00:33:44): Me crashing into walls, that's how you know it's a game. We don't keep that as a statistic, but it could stand in for games played.

(00:33:52): It is amazing that we've got people who played in the minor leagues. We have people who certainly played at the collegiate level. Every week, I see something happen out there that I'm just like, "Oh no, I cannot believe what I just saw." This is the sort of thing that you would pay admission to see. We need the slow-mo cameras out there. We need the replays. We need it all. Yeah, I don't know I want to see a replay of me getting posterized.

(00:34:16): So going back to what you expected, and you said you didn't really know what to expect. Here's the thing. Your business is a one person business. You use spreadsheets for sure.

Ryan Spahr (00:34:32): Way too many.

Rob Collie (00:34:33): Spreadsheets are one of the ways you keep things sane. I mean, even in the hockey league, you're really good at tracking who hasn't paid for pickup, who hasn't paid their dues for the season, etc., right? I tested this one time accidentally. Didn't pay for pickup one time, when you weren't even there. You weren't even there for the pickup that I didn't pay for and I got the email.

(00:34:58): So you're pretty organized. You don't really have a lot of need in your professional business, I wouldn't think, for anything resembling the type of work that we've done here on the hockey thing. Because data is fundamentally a way, and the things that we do, is a way to get visibility into everything that if you were the only person playing in the league, you would've experienced every last little thing that happened directly. You wouldn't have nearly the need for visualization to see things, right? This is a large organization by comparison. 171, let's call them employees. That's a big operation.

(00:35:38): We started with the sortables. We still have this side project where the first half of the existence of Indy Inline, we don't have the per game data. We've got two eras in the stats, which is... So people who are listening, you know this probably as a granularity mismatch.

(00:35:55): We have highly granular data. Not the most granular possible, but we have pretty granular data for the most recent half of the existence, the last 11 seasons or 12 seasons. But the seasons before that, all we have are season long totals. This was the observation I had.

(00:36:11): Being the person who is always nerding out about this kind of stuff. I always find this stuff to be interesting and valuable, and not everyone agrees. The first Wednesday that I showed up at hockey, after we had published these dashboards to the league, I was really, really, really pleasantly surprised at how many people wanted to talk about them. I wanted to not play that night and just keep talking to the people who were coming on and off the court. It was really gratifying to have so many conversations about this.

(00:36:43): Which is what I was hoping for. I was hoping to give this back to this awesome community that you all have created, and it seems to have been so far anyway, quite well received.

Ryan Spahr (00:36:52): I mean, that doesn't surprise me at all. I am very obviously happy to hear that people were grateful, but I knew that people would be looking at it. I think the detail, and the variety, and stuff that I would never would've even thought of that you can track or compare, I think compare is one of the cool parts, is so head and shoulders above what you can get from what I called earlier, the dumb stats.

(00:37:18): Because again, the dumb stats are kind of dumb. You know, "Okay, great. I scored X goals, and Y is this goal." But when you get down to the level of, since I've been playing, since winter of 2019, I have this positive or negative win percentage, something like that's just cool to know. Because even if you're a player who maybe doesn't hit the score sheet very often, I say all the time that I lead the league in blocked shots, which is a defensive thing that no one tracks. And it's kind of a bummer, because that's probably what I'm best at.

(00:37:53): So you take some of these things like the win percentage, and you can say my being on a team, I'm doing something right. There's an inverse there I suppose, that we could analyze if we wanted to of the negatives. But at the end of the day, half the population has to be in the negative. I don't know that that's something to be bummed about, but I'm not surprised that even the folks who may not fall in what I'm going to call the vanity stat categories really engaged with it, because it gives you a lot of cool information that goes beyond those dumb stats.

(00:38:22): And like I said, I really like the comparison angle and being able to sort by some of these things and say, who do I play the most like? And it may not be somebody I expect. It may be somebody who goes in one case, maybe two rounds ahead of me because we draft the whole league every season. Or it may be somebody who goes behind me.

(00:38:42): So that's the other thing that'll be interesting will be to see how our captains who have to draft this whole league every season, we do three seasons a year, if they sneaky start using this to find some of those market inefficiencies with where people are getting drafted versus where they think their value is.

Rob Collie (00:39:02): I know one captain who if he doesn't use this for this purpose, it's because he's got something that he's already built to do the same.

Ryan Spahr (00:39:12): I bet I could guess which captain that it is.

Rob Collie (00:39:16): In fact, Jocelyn's been joking with me like, "Oh no. This is going to be the tool that they use to realize they should never draft the Collies."

Ryan Spahr (00:39:28): Well, the nice thing is once you're in the league, you're in.

Rob Collie (00:39:32): That's right.

Ryan Spahr (00:39:32): So everybody gets drafted.

Rob Collie (00:39:34): We've got incumbent status. I got to look over Austin's shoulder, one of the captains, at his cheat sheet for the draft. That tells you everything you need to know. This guy brings a cheat sheet, and there were nine tiers of players in his cheat sheet. I declared to him that my lifetime goal was to move up one tier on his cheat sheet.

Ryan Spahr (00:39:59): Just for context, to have that many tiers, a hockey team, a roller hockey team is only nine people

Rob Collie (00:40:06): Including the goalie.

Ryan Spahr (00:40:07): Yeah. It's not like this is a 23 man roster. You've got eight skaters and a goalie, and the captains don't draft themselves.

Rob Collie (00:40:14): There's more tiers than there's possible draft picks.

Ryan Spahr (00:40:17): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:40:17): Highly granularized. So a couple of things that you've touched on, definitely parallel our business at P3. So first of all, the fact that there is a website that has some built-in reports. HockeyShift collects all this data and it has a reports tab. And you go to it, and it is really, really, really disappointing. It is hard to use, uninteresting. If you want to get a lot of detail about a player, you can. In theory, it's not great detail even then, but you certainly can't compare it against other people. Now you're looking at one player. You want to see some statistics for the overall season. It's going to be really, really, really a very cursory treatment of it.

(00:40:58): This is true of every line of business software system in the world. I don't think of HockeyShift as line of business, but it is, it's a way to make things go. It's the place that sort of collects data in a way. There's transactions, you're uploading the scores. And then it doesn't do a lot with it, whereas the average line of business system, you're entering orders and it would go print out shipping labels, and invoices, and things like that. And there would be things that happened down the line in the workflow. Not a lot of workflow happening down the line in HockeyShift. But still, it has this hubris that is going to offer you some built-in reports and they're terrible.

(00:41:39): And that's true again, of an ERP system, an accounting system. It doesn't matter what it is. The built-in reports suck. And even in the case where all you're doing is digesting the data that the site will give you back in an incredibly inconvenient, primitive format, you can take what the site will give you and do orders of magnitude more with it than what they are. It's just kind of over, and over, and over again, you're kind of smacking your forehead like, why not be better?

(00:42:09): And that's because they're not in the stats business really. They're not in the visualization business, they're not in the reporting business. They're in the transactional business. That's all they are. And that's true of every piece of software you lay your hands on that's like this, line of business or otherwise. Another one is the expanded ambitions. So you're coming into this, you're not really sure what can be done.

(00:42:33): And to be honest, fortunately in this case, I understand the game of hockey and I understand the league a little bit. I understand the people a little bit, not as well as you, but I at least know the domain. It's not like I'm going out and talking to people who are in the oil well drilling business for the first time. I remember one time, I visited a client and they manufactured wooden pallets. At one point in the process, I got a 90-minute lesson on the different types of pallets and construction, and what the equivalence classes were like. You think that these three are different, but they're really the same thing. And it was important that I understand that to help them. I have most of that tribal knowledge sort of already in my head because I'm-

Ryan Spahr (00:43:11): Part of the tribe.

Rob Collie (00:43:12): I understand hockey and all that kind of stuff. But what I could do for you, I was kind of going data forward. So I've got the data. What cool things can I whip up from the data?

(00:43:26): Now, that's not really the way that you want to work normally. Normally, the way we want to work is we start with the things that you have to do in your work life, the decisions you have to make every day, the problems that you have, the opportunities where things could be better. And we try to work backwards from that and how the data and the tech serve that purpose and not just be like, "Ooh, check out this balloon animal. Look at this magic trick." Because oftentimes, very often if we go data forward like that, we're going to come up with things that aren't actually useful or interesting.

(00:44:05): Now, the standard here is a little different. This is essentially, the goal here of these dashboards if we're really clear about it, is to increase people's enjoyment of the league.

Ryan Spahr (00:44:17): Absolutely.

Rob Collie (00:44:17): And so from that perspective, going data forward and coming up with cool novelties and things is actually okay. At the same time though, there's this interplay of art of the possible. There is one really big difference between you and I in terms of the tribal knowledge here, which is that you have been around for the whole thing.

(00:44:36): And then the other big difference actually is just the fact that once I put my head into dashboard building and Power BI model building, at least with one foot exit the consumer of that mindset, and now I'm in this builder mindset, and it's hard to flip back and forth between those. I didn't know that assist to goal ratio is going to be interesting. That's just one of those, "Let me try this."

(00:44:58): And now that you've seen things that we can do, over time, I would like to see either actually a mix of new questions and requests. I don't think there's going to be a lot of these. But if we're doing it right and we stay interested in it, new things are going to emerge that we'd want to know. Secondly, workflows. I made the current season record book, which is now the second tab.

Ryan Spahr (00:45:24): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:45:24): It might give you more to talk about. I know that every week you write an update for the playoffs. So there's things at stake, right? But can Drew hold on to his assist record? He's got a one assist lead on Denny for the season. Now he missed a game, gave him a chance to catch up. I noticed that Drew's seven assists in a single game this season, if you go to the sortable tab, you'll find that seven assists in a game is the maximum we've recorded.

Ryan Spahr (00:45:51): Which is an incredible number of assists in a game.

Rob Collie (00:45:53): It's unreal, right? So he's tied the all-time record, as far as we know. If we can get into the old stats... And Justin is interested, we're going to try feeding some old hand scrawled graphical PDFs into some AI.

Ryan Spahr (00:46:09): And it's my handwriting, which is the worst part.

Rob Collie (00:46:11): That's perfect, right? If it's your handwriting, it can learn it.

Ryan Spahr (00:46:14): Yeah, it's true.

Rob Collie (00:46:15): It'd be harder if it was 100 different people's handwriting.

Ryan Spahr (00:46:19): Well, it's that too. Sorry.

Rob Collie (00:46:20): All right. Well, but it's mostly you, right?

Ryan Spahr (00:46:23): A lot of it.

Rob Collie (00:46:24): I want to point out that one of the things that happens with things like this is you sort of accidentally discover places where the source data is bad. We found a couple of places like that. On the duals tab, we have a game on May 25th, 2022 where Shane recorded nine points in a game that was a 6-6 tie.

Ryan Spahr (00:46:43): Oh yeah. That would be something.

Rob Collie (00:46:45): That's hard to do, isn't it?

Ryan Spahr (00:46:47): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:46:48): So I went and I looked that game up in the box score lookup tab, and he's credited with five goals and four assists in a game where his team only scored six goals.

Ryan Spahr (00:46:57): That's very interesting.

Rob Collie (00:46:58): So there's probably something... I don't know if someone actually recorded the shootout goals in that game. That might've been what happened. If you don't know the game, it's impossible to have five goals and four assists in a game where your team only scores six.

Ryan Spahr (00:47:12): Because you can't pass to yourself. I mean you can, but you don't get credit for it.

Rob Collie (00:47:16): We had something else going on, where I tried to start thinking about some of the things that I would do in a business environment, and seeing if I could bring those into the hockey context. Not because it'd be valuable, but because again, in the sense of increasing people's funds.

(00:47:34): So on the 10th report tab, deltas and trends, this is the kind of thing that I definitely do, because oftentimes these are the most actionable things. So if you've got let's say combinations of products and customers, or just products in general or whatever, you want to know what's changing. You want to know which things are contributing the most to the bottom line or detracting the most from the bottom line. There's all kinds of things that are like this, that often get very, very close to the metal in terms of what you can do to improve a business.

(00:48:11): Knowing the overall score, how much money you made this year or whatever, you need to know that. But when it comes to improvement, most improvement happens at a granular level, down in the details to a certain extent, because your overall business performance is the sum of a blend of all these micro trends. Some of those are going positive directions, some are going negative direction. You want to catch the ones that are going in negative directions, and you want to find the ones that are going in positive directions and see if you can replicate those across other categories.

(00:48:46): And so this 10th tab was sort of me putting on that mindset and seeing... So for instance, the first visual on this one is the lifetime lift to teammates win percentage. I filtered this to be only above zero.

(00:49:02): The first rule of Indy Inline is don't be an asshole, which is crucial, especially for people like me who aren't very good at the game, right? If it were a very intimidating environment, which it already is because of the wide skill differential, if people were harsh about it, I never would've showed up. It wouldn't have lasted very long. I decided to follow that same principle with this visual.

Ryan Spahr (00:49:26): So only the people who have positive impacts on their team.

Rob Collie (00:49:29): I don't want to be the asshole report developer that's reporting on someone that's detracting from their team's winning percentage. If we were an NHL manager, we'd want to know that. Not in this case, we don't. We're just going to look at the people who achieve... And this is a really sophisticated calculation behind the scenes. For every single game that Austin Rawlins who's the top of this chart, for every single game he's played, the model calculates his teammate's lifetime win percentage.

(00:49:59): Each teammate has a lifetime winning percentage at the beginning of the game that he's about to play with them. Then subtracts the result, a win one point, or a loss zero, from that average of all of their win percentages. If he's winning games with teams that are comprised of people who have a sub 500, sub 50% winning percentage, he's lifting quite a bit. If he's winning more than half the games and they have a sub 50% win percentage, he's adding lift. On the flip side, if he were taking good teams and they were losing, he would have a negative lift to people's win percentage.

(00:50:37): So this analysis is something we can begin to perform, because every season, the teams get scrambled. Now it hasn't been scrambled an infinite number of times and it's not scrambled by a truly random process. The draft, it's not a random dice roll that reassigns people.

(00:50:57): If someone is constantly being picked sixth in the draft over, and over, and over again, even if they're going to a different team, they're probably landing on teams with similar structures. This is not a truly random exercise. But if we believe that it was, this would tell us that Austin Rawlins adds one win to his teammates every four games.

Ryan Spahr (00:51:18): Which is huge.

Rob Collie (00:51:19): Which is a huge lift. Huge lift. And let's hear. I got filtered out because every 100 games, I subtract one. I think I was negative 0.01. You Spahr, add a win every 33 games. So you're above the line. And I just thought this is a fun one. Not everyone appears in it.

(00:51:43): The next one, your variation of performance against different teams. And so Aaron, who we know is Dobie, top row there. He's 21% above his average winning percentage when playing against gray. He's minus 12% playing against yellow. I think there's a version of this where we could probably sort by... Let's say there are certain teams that have more red in their column than others, right?

Ryan Spahr (00:52:08): Which I guess structurally, it might be worth explaining. The whole league gets redrafted every season. The captains for the most part don't change, unless a captain stops being a captain because he moves or something else. So yellow in particular, it sounds counterintuitive that not randomly, but on a completely redrafted team, that yellow would still be so strong against pretty much everybody. But it's worth noting that they have the same captain every season.

Rob Collie (00:52:41): Yes. And maybe the captain that brings the nine tier cheat sheet. Maybe. So the last one, when I showed this to you yesterday, the last visual on this page, I told you I didn't trust it. This is another one that we would do in a business environment, is compare your recent performance per category, per product, whatever, to your previous performance or your all time performance, or window over window.

(00:53:11): And this is the points per game. So for a player, it's the sum of their assists and goals. That's points in a game. So points per game. In their most recent 10 games, their average points per game in their most recent 10 games, versus their all time average.

(00:53:32): For example, Nick Burton in his most recent 10 games is 1.35 points above his long-term all-time points per game average, which is a significant change. And I told you I didn't trust this chart, because if you scroll it, there's a lot more people in the positive than in the negative. And I would expect that this would be a relatively even mix of people who are above and below their all-time average.

(00:53:59): So then, I want to take you to the final tab that I added today. And one of the things we talk about here at P3 is a healthy paranoia about everything that we're doing, including but not limited to the things that we're building for people. And so when I see something like that, even though I know that I wrote the formulas in a way that's hard for them to be wrong, still go sleuthing.

(00:54:24): And what I wanted to see was, is there anything else that might explain why our league currently seems to have more people above their average, their all-time average than below?

(00:54:35): And it occurred to me in the process that I'd never produced a league trends, season trends visual for you. I originally was calling this tab healthy paranoia, and now it's called league trends.

(00:54:47): And you can see that scoring is not really up this season versus last season, but it is up above its long-term average. And given that there's so many players in the league who've been active for so long, the long-term upward trend in scoring does mean their most recent 10 games is at the end of that increasing trend. They're being compared against their all-time trend. And so winter of 2019, were you all still playing on the concrete?

Ryan Spahr (00:55:20): Yes. That would've been our last season on the concrete.

Rob Collie (00:55:25): Look at the jump in scoring when you actually could get a grip with your wheels.

Ryan Spahr (00:55:33): Yeah, and that's incredible because that's literally the only thing that changed there.

Rob Collie (00:55:38): Yeah. So other things I was checking was, okay, what if the scoring has stayed relatively flat, but there were fewer people showing up per game this season? Because then there's fewer people for the goals and assists to go around through. People are getting more ice time, so they're going to accrue more stats.

(00:55:54): The first four columns are total of both teams in a game, right? So on average, this season we have 13.5 people showing up skaters. That doesn't count the goalies. Two eight person teams. One person's got seven, one person's got six or seven.

Ryan Spahr (00:56:11): Because not everybody shows up to every game.

Rob Collie (00:56:12): That's right. Whereas summer of '22, there were 11 people total, so there was a lot of six on five type of games.

Ryan Spahr (00:56:22): Love those games.

Rob Collie (00:56:24): Yeah. I do want to call out that the goal scoring, the record goal scoring for a season was spring of '22, which is the first season that I played. And this is where we ask the question, you think that's coincidence? And the answer is yes. That's coincidence. The scoring was the highest that season, despite it being my first season.

Ryan Spahr (00:56:47): If only there was a way we could look up how many goals you scored that season.

Rob Collie (00:56:51): We have the technology.

Ryan Spahr (00:56:53): I have it in front of me, I think. I won't put us down that detour.

Rob Collie (00:56:57): That's okay. That's what we want though. We want that ability to follow up. So it turns out that Brad Denney is not only the statistical leader in many, many categories in our league. He's responsible for both of my championships, both the championships that I've won. The first one, he's responsible for it because he was on my team and he showed up. And the second championship he's responsible for of mine, he was on the opposing team and he didn't show up.

Ryan Spahr (00:57:26): Most valuable absence.

Rob Collie (00:57:27): This is the sort of thing that doesn't appear in the dashboards. Head-to-head matchups. This is the thing I was working on last night, was texting you about. And by the way, listeners, this is the longest Spahr and I have talked about this verbally, this whole project.

Ryan Spahr (00:57:41): A lot of text messages.

Rob Collie (00:57:43): A lot of text messages. So we call it inefficient, asynchronous communication. I've been working on something where I want a visual that shows us things like number of times Player X has faced off against Player Y. And I don't mean face off in the face-off circle. I mean played against them, and what their all time record versus each other would be. That's a cool little vanity thing, right?

Ryan Spahr (00:58:11): Yeah. It'd be a fun one.

Rob Collie (00:58:12): This turns out to be very, very tricky. The Power BI platform in its first versions that it released when it was still based in Excel, it was still Power Pivot, in that era, I was the person on the planet most prolifically writing about the platform. I lived in it every day. I was the world's biggest believer in it. And it has a lot more capabilities now than it did back then.

(00:58:35): The thing I'm trying to do with my formulas here to get this head-to-head matchup stuff, maybe it was possible back in the day when I was one of the world's foremost practitioners. But things have moved on and advanced so much in terms of the edge case capabilities. The things that we would need to use on a day-to-day basis, 99% of them in terms of the formula language anyway, have been there from the beginning. These really edge case things, the DAX language, the formula language has gotten a lot more capable.

(00:59:10): This is a problem that I never solved. I never faced the problem of this particular structure, this formula comparison I'm trying to do right now.

(00:59:19): Don't you worry. Last night, I got it to the point where I could show you how many games you appeared in the same game with someone else. It doesn't distinguish between whether you are an opponent or a teammate. There's a timestamp for that game. It's a date and time. And I can tell you all the times that you've appeared in a game with the same timestamp as another person. So originally, I thought that you'd played 74 games against Keegan, which would be hard to do.

Ryan Spahr (00:59:50): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:59:51): It's very difficult to play that many games against someone else. Turns out that you don't get to play them every week, right?

Ryan Spahr (00:59:58): Yeah. You only play them every fifth game.

Rob Collie (01:00:01): When I told you that, "I'm wrong. This includes games you played together," and you're like, "Oh yeah, I was on Keegan's team forever."

Ryan Spahr (01:00:08): Keegan likes me.

Rob Collie (01:00:10): Keegan's the captain. All right. So at least the formula is proven to be working correctly. It just isn't doing exactly what I wanted. Don't worry though, sharper minds than mine at P3. I put this in our sort of help each other out channel, because our consultants support each other all the time when we run into really edge case problems if you've seen something like this before. And people help each other out because it's good human, but also because it's fun. These are puzzles at times. And so if I'd had another hour and a half before we got together today, I might've had it ready. I've gotten some input.

Ryan Spahr (01:00:45): Oh wow.

Rob Collie (01:00:46): Yeah. But yes, that's coming soon.

Ryan Spahr (01:00:48): Excellent. And that's fun even to watch it be developed, because I've got theories in my mind on how some of that's going to look. I'm betting that some of that'll prove out, and then there'll be all kinds of surprises as well that you would never get just from, like I said, just from knowing the guys are looking at the dumb stats.

Rob Collie (01:01:07): I'm going to close with a request and some thanks. Here's the request. Keep thinking about this. Use it. If you sit down to write the weekly blurb for the week's games and you go, "Oh, wouldn't it be cool if I could say something like this?" Let me know. I might not be able to do it. The data might not capture it. I think you'll understand whether the data captures it or not. Inherently, you'll get that part. But whether or not I can... So for example, you asked me if I could add search to the first tab, and so far my first attempt to add search, I don't like it. So let's call that one still an open question. It'd be amazing to have a search that all it did was sort to that person, scroll to that person.

Ryan Spahr (01:01:50): Yeah, just jump down to them.

Rob Collie (01:01:52): Yeah, using a slicer to search on that sortable tab. It's such an obvious thing now, right? When you do find on a webpage, control F on a webpage, it doesn't delete everything on the webpage and just show you the words you were searching for, which is what happens with the slicer. It wipes out everything but what you're searching for. Loses all comparison. Just keep that in mind.

(01:02:13): At this point, we've got you can call it sunk cost, but I prefer to call it pot committed that anything last mile-ish to make this valuable, I'm in 100%. Let's keep it going and make it a valuable thing. By the way, I've been holding out on you.

(01:02:30): We could turn this into its own standalone portal. It's called Power BI embedded. Strip out all of this excess Power Bi Chrome, make it full screen by default, improve the navigation so you're not clicking on these sheet tabs and things. We could do so many things in a way that's just a plug for people who are looking at this going, "Well, I'd like that for my business. Yes, we can do that."

(01:02:50): But then the thanks are, first of all, thanks for doing this. You said going in, "I don't know what I'm volunteering for, but I'm game." So I appreciate that spirit. But overwhelmingly, thank you, thank you, thank you for having created and care taken this thing called Indy Inline. It's so much fun. It comprises a tremendous percentage of the colleagues' social interaction as transplants in a given week.

(01:03:15): We go out to the bar afterwards with y'all, even though Jocelyn can't eat, she doesn't drink. We still go out. It's been really a fun thing. Good for exercise, good for our brains. Just a really, really positive social experience. It's a wonder, and I really appreciate all the effort that you've put into it over the years, so thanks for this gift.

Ryan Spahr (01:03:33): I'm super happy to hear that. Indy Inline is, it sounds so silly to say about what is essentially a beer league, but it is a really special group of people. We've worked really hard to make it a culture first endeavor that goes well beyond the playing hockey part of it. We've got guys who've found their best friends, found their group. It's a ton of people who've found community here, and I can't take all the credit for that by any means because it's the people. But I'm very happy that we've established the place for that to take place.

(01:04:09): We're thrilled to have you, and Jocelyn, and your involvement, and also the great intersection of skillsets. Selfishly, this is an incredible thing you've built for us that kind of came out of nowhere for us, right? I've told you my skillset is barely functional Excel use, and then we've got a crappy paid subscription website that we keep our schedule and stats on. When you're good people and you do things with other good people, good things happen. And so I really appreciate you and your wife being a part of that.

Rob Collie (01:04:44): All right, well thank you very much. Here's to many, many more seasons and amazing visualizations thereof.

Ryan Spahr (01:04:50): Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:04:51): Thanks for listening to The Raw Data By P3 Adaptive Podcast. Let the experts at P3 Adaptive help your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Have a data day.