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Alexandra Mandrycky Sets The Stage For NHL Seattle’s First-Ever Scouting Meetings

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The National Hockey League’s still-unnamed Seattle expansion franchise reaches another important milestone this week, as its professional scouts gather at the team offices to compare notes in person for the first time.

“We’re really excited to finally all be face-to-face in one room,” said the team’s director of hockey strategy and research, Alexandra Mandrycky. “(The scouts) are in their hometowns, so you talk to people on the phone, but it’ll be good for everyone to meet each other.”

The club has five scouts out in the field, watching games and building a player database under the guidance of general manager Ron Francis and assistant GM Ricky Olczyk. This week’s meetings will mark the first time those ‘eye test’ observations are stacked up against the data-based assessments of Mandrycky and NHL Seattle’s new quantitative analyst Dani Chu, who was hired in November and joined the club earlier this month.

“I’m happy to have company at the office now,” said Mandrycky, who added that she’s hoping that her department will grow to four analysts by this summer. “He has already been pumping out some great stuff for us and has really hit the ground running.”

Mandrycky joined NHL Seattle after spending four seasons as a data analyst with the Minnesota Wild. Working with an expansion franchise is a very different experience.

“One of the exciting things about being a part of this franchise is that you’re building everything from scratch,” she said. “We’re kind of doing it all over again in terms of accumulating the data on the analytics side of things but also, we’re building up our scout database as well. We don’t have anything there, although it’s grown a ton since the beginning of the season.”

When the puck drops for NHL Seattle’s inaugural season in the fall of 2021, the team’s off-ice staff will be housed at its new practice facility north of the city center, which is expected to break ground soon. For now, the front office is working downtown — and keeping a close eye on the ambitious renovation of the Seattle Center arena that will be the hockey club’s home.

“My office is literally right across from the arena site,” said Mandrycky. “It’s exciting, because every time you walk out the front door you’re basically staring through the empty arena, with just the roof being suspended.

“It’s been kind of phenomenal to watch that happen over the last few months — just the progress made. And we’re certainly excited to play there, too.”

While working with the Wild, Mandrycky was commuting back and forth to Minnesota. She moved to Seattle in 2013 as her husband Christian began his doctoral studies in bioengineering at the University of Washington.

Like many early employees at new businesses, Mandrycky is finding that her responsibilities have expanded beyond her initial job description.

“I’ve been joking that I feel like I have about 10 jobs right now,” she said. “Until a few weeks ago, I was the only hockey operations employee really here in Seattle full time. You get pulled in quite a few different directions, which is really exciting because you get to learn about different sides of the business that I wasn’t necessarily exposed to that at the Wild. 

“A typical day? I guess it depends what hat I’m wearing that week. But it is a lot of just trying to formulate the strategic plan and get the data in place so that we can start working on these projects.”

Raised in Atlanta, Mandrycky has a degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech. In her younger days, she thought she’d pursue a career in law. “I grew up wanting to be Elle Woods from Legally Blonde,” she said.

After breezing through calculus and physics in high school, her plan shifted. “I realized, I’m pretty good at this. The career path was appealing to me from a stability perspective and technology — obviously, a growing field there. I didn’t touch anything related to computer science until I went to college.”

Pursuing a career in a traditionally male-dominated field like engineering didn’t faze her.

“I was fortunate,” she said. “Georgia Tech graduates the most female engineers in the country and my specific discipline, industrial engineering, is over 40% female, so I guess I never felt alone.

“It was easy to have these role models throughout my career that I looked up to and knew that if you were able to carve a path forward and people were there to support you, that I would have success.”

After graduating in 2013, she started working with War-On-Ice, an early public hockey analytics site. Two years later, she was hired by the Wild.

Now, she’s working for a club that has prioritized diversity and inclusion as part of its hiring mandate. At the level of vice president and above across the Seattle Arena Company and NHL Seattle, 54% of the staff members are women (seven) and two of those women are of color.

“It’s definitely apparent,” said Mandrycky. “A lot of meetings, it’s a majority of women at a high level, making important decisions for the franchise. I think that’s really important when you consider who our fanbase is and who we want to be supporting this team.

“I know that it’s making us a better organization for it and we’re going to definitely continue as we can, especially on the hockey side — really looking outside of the traditional pools of candidates to ensure diversity in our group as well.”

One non-traditional hire came in September, when Cammi Granato became the NHL’s first female pro scout.

Mandrycky’s responsibilities this week will include getting Granato and the rest of the scouting staff acclimated.

“Part of this is just introducing the scouts to our franchise,” she said. “We’re going to introduce them to the rest of the staff, allow them to really learn what we’re doing with the arena and different sort of initiatives on the business side.

“Then, we’ll get down to the fun part — talking through different teams, talking about the players they’re seeing and those sorts of opinions, and then we'll talk through the expansion draft logistics and do our first real runthrough.”

A lot will change between this week’s first mock draft and NHL Seattle’s real expansion draft in June of 2021, but Mandrycky says they’re grateful for their long runway.

“Honestly, now that we’re in it, I wish we had even more time to prepare,” she said. “It feels exciting.

“We’re in 2020, we start playing in 2021. So even though we’re a year and a half away or more, it feels closer now.”

The week’s agenda will also include some activities around the city.

“We’ll definitely take them to downtown Seattle and make sure they can see the city and the arena,” Mandrycky said. “We’ll take them to our preview centre, which is a pretty neat spot, and let them get to know the rest of the staff as well.”

On Tuesday night, Seattle hockey fans will be able hear directly from the scouts for the first time at a ‘Science of Scouting’ talk at the Pacific Science Center.

“The Science Center is on the Seattle Center campus, which is where our arena is located,” said Mandrycky. “We see them as partners and this is something that we’re putting on together, jointly.”

The event is part of an ongoing series. In November, the focus was on the engineering challenges of keeping the arena’s 44 million-pound roof suspended during construction. In September, Mandrycky, Francis and Olczyk spoke about hockey analytics.

“Our first event, I think we were all so impressed by the quality of questions from the fans, who were really interested in the behind-the-scenes sort of building of the franchise,” said Mandrycky.

“We had some, like ‘How do you evaluate a goaltender?’ We had different sorts of — I would say, ‘nerdier’ questions than your average fan would ask.”

Mandrycky says the scouts should expect a warm reception from people all around a city that’s bubbling with excitement about pro hockey.

“If you’re wearing NHL Seattle — any gear — a barista, the teller at the bank, they immediately ask about it,” she said. “It seems like everyone you talk to, either they have a deposit down for tickets or are on the wait list or they know someone who they’re hoping to be able to snag some tickets from.

“So the energy is real. It’s definitely not just among the hockey community here. I think it’s all sports fans in this town.”

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