A former player's perspective on how a single acquisition changed the hockey data market—and on the question that the data itself cannot answer: who decides what truly matters to the people in the locker room.

Author: Martin Cibák, 2004 Stanley Cup Champion (Tampa Bay Lightning), CibakHockeyIQ, co-founder & Chief Hockey Officer.

The Day the Map Changed

On January 15, 2026, Teamworks issued an announcement that the hockey B2B sector took immediate notice of. It had acquired Sportlogiq, a Canadian company that at the time served 31 of the 32 NHL clubs—97% of the league. The purchase price was not disclosed; approximately seven months earlier, Teamworks had closed a Series F funding round worth $235 million at a valuation of over one billion.

As a buyer, Teamworks makes economic sense. According to publicly available information, its software manages operations for over 6,500 sports organizations across American football, basketball, baseball, and hockey. Sportlogiq has thus become part of a broader multi-sport infrastructure.

To most of the market, this looked like the closure of a segment. For me, it raised a question rather than providing an answer: when the hockey data layer consolidates under one roof, what happens to that final step where numbers turn into decisions?

"Sportlogiq wasn't lacking anything. The market simply moved on, and with it, the question of who would take the next step."

Sportlogiq · What They Actually Built

Sportlogiq was founded in 2015 in Montreal. Its co-founders are Craig Buntin, a former Canadian Olympic figure skater, and Mehrsan Javan, who served as CTO. Over the course of ten years, they built a team of about eighty people, including ten AI researchers, and according to the company, they are responsible for more than 180 published papers and patents in the field of computer vision. The iCE platform has become the go-to tool for automated video analysis in the NHL.

Let's be clear: Sportlogiq has built an infrastructure that has advanced hockey analytics. What we now take for granted in the league was largely built by them.

Metric (Sportlogiq, January 2026) Value
NHL clubs as clients 31 out of 32 (97%)
Total global clients 220+
NCAA programs in the portfolio Dozens (Sport Stack)
Employees / AI researchers ~80 / 10
Publications and patents 180+
Estimated ARR prior to acquisition ~$32 M (Growjo estimate)

Mitchell Wasserman, CEO of Sportlogiq, put it bluntly when announcing the transaction: "Our computer vision technology and the iCE platform have become the gold standard in hockey analytics across the NHL." The ARR figure is an estimate by the aggregator Growjo; the company has not officially disclosed the amount.

A Wave of Consolidation · Who's Buying Whom

This transaction is not an isolated event. In the twelve months leading up to it, three moves took place in hockey analytics that are collectively reshaping the market landscape:

Date Buyer Target / Event Significance
June 2025 Teamworks Series F $235 M, valuation $1 B+ Funding for a multi-sport operating system
August 6, 2025 Hudl SportContract Hudl's next hockey acquisition following InStat
January 15, 2026 Teamworks Sportlogiq 97% of the NHL under one roof

Each of these companies has built something that didn't exist before. According to public data, Hudl supports over 325,000 teams globally, and Teamworks covers more than 6,500 elite organizations. These are horizontal platforms: hockey is one of their key segments.

Alongside this group stands Stathletes, a company focused exclusively on hockey. It was co-founded in 2010 by siblings John and Meghan Chayka, along with Neil Lane. According to public estimates from Growjo, the company generates approximately ten million dollars in revenue and employs about a hundred people; the company has not officially confirmed these figures. Among Stathletes' documented NHL clients are the Vancouver Canucks, who have been working with the company since 2012, and, more recently, the Buffalo Sabres.

Personnel changes also suggest that this is the direction the entire league is heading. On May 3, 2026, the Toronto Maple Leafs announced that John Chayka would become their new general manager—once again the youngest GM in the NHL and a figure associated with data analysis since his early days in hockey. MLSE President Keith Pelley openly stated during his introduction that he was looking for a "data-driven" general manager.

Economics · Why It Matters

Why is capital flowing into hockey right now? The answer lies in the league's economics. The NHL salary cap has been set at $95.5 million for 2025-26; it rises to $104 million for 2026-27, and the projection for 2027-28 is $113.5 million. A higher price tag for each player means a higher cost for every decision-making error—and thus a higher value for anything that reduces the risk of error.

The league generates approximately $6.8 billion in annual revenue, and budgets for hockey operations outside the salary cap have no statutory limit. ESPN summed this up as early as 2022 in a phrase that has been quoted ever since: "There's no salary cap on hockey operations."

This demand is also underscored by the league's joint initiatives. The NHL/NHLPA Industry Growth Fund was established in 2013; by its tenth anniversary in 2023, the contracting parties had allocated over $180 million to it, and by 2025, the figure had surpassed $200 million. The Hockey Innovation Competition, in partnership with SAP and Take Back Sports, is also underway in 2026. The market is open and growing.

A Question the Data Alone Cannot Answer

Today, we can measure almost everything. NHL Edge, a system of chips embedded in pucks and jerseys, has been fully deployed since the 2021-22 season and has been publicly available since 2023. Tracking, computer vision, expected goals models, zone entry micrometrics. The volume of data has never been greater.

And that's precisely why another question is becoming increasingly urgent. Not "how to measure more," but "who decides what's meaningful among the data collected." The model will say that a center has improved the quality of his zone entries. The person in the locker room needs to know what to do with that information on Monday morning.

Once a year, this moment converges in one place. The Combine in Buffalo, where the league's decision-makers gather, isn't about who has the most data. It's about who can turn that data into the right decision about a young player. Even in the age of models, that final judgment is made by a person.

"When we can measure almost everything, judgment becomes the true value—it's what ultimately decides the outcome."

The Bridge Between the Locker Room and the Data

Two years ago, a father and his son stopped me on the street in Liptovský Mikuláš. He asked one sincere question: does his son even have a chance to make it from Slovakia? I had neither a ring nor a presentation for him. I had only one honest answer: he has a chance if, in addition to his talent, he also gets the tools that his peers in Quebec or Finland have today.

The Slovak context amplifies this question. According to data from the IIHF Survey 2024, the country has nearly 10,000 registered players in youth categories and dozens of full-size arenas, ranking ninth in the IIHF world rankings. Our U18 team, which won silver at the World Championships in Trenčín and Bratislava on May 2, 2026, drew a large portion of its roster from players in overseas and Finnish youth leagues. The talent is there. The question is whether we can build a support system around it that will level the playing field.

That's why at CibakHockeyIQ, we're not selling a ready-made solution today. We're exploring. We're testing hypotheses, listening to the market, and learning from it. We don't yet know whether the final form will be an analytical service, a consulting model, or something else; we only know that someone has to stand between the cold model and the living organism that is the locker room. Someone who understands both languages.

I'm not the kind of person who knows all the answers. I'm a player who's been through the NHL, understands the locker room, and today looks at data with interest. And I ask questions.

Now that we can measure almost everything, who will be the one to decide which of these data points actually matter to the people in the locker room?

Martin Cibák
2004 Stanley Cup Champion (Tampa Bay Lightning)
CibakHockeyIQ, co-founder & Chief Hockey Officer

Sources and Verification

Every numerical and factual piece of information in the text has been independently verified from at least three sources. Revenue figures for Sportlogiq and Stathletes are third-party estimates from Growjo and are marked as such in the text.