Things aren’t going well for the Calgary Flames, the professional Canadian hockey team founded in 1972. Despite pushing for a playoff spot late last year, the Flames only have three wins through fourteen games this season, securing an early spot as the worst team in the National Hockey League so far.
Some fans think this may be the sign of early-season tanking — when a team loses on purpose in order to get a better draft pick in the summer. However, there might be an even more galaxy-brained explanation: the team’s coach is getting advice from ChatGPT.
In an episode of “The Chase,” the Flames’ candid behind-the-scenes show, head coach Ryan Huska was filmed telling his players he’d been consulting with the AI chatbot to figure out what the hell was going on.
“So I went down a rabbit hole last night after watching this game here, and I put in — do you guys use ChatGPT?” Huska asked, while grilling the team in the dressing room. During these types of locker-room chats, coaches will typically present their insights or analysis of previous games, and review game tape to understand plays that went right and wrong.
Instead, Huska shared ChatGPT’s take.
“I put in five games,” he told the team. “I gave it a bunch of different things to go in there. People’s career shooting percentage, the amount of shots people have taken over five games, projected over the course of a year.”
“That’s where we end up,” Huska says, pointing to a board. “Which leads to that on the year, 2.36 goals for [a hockey stat indicating the average number of goals per game] during the year.”
His study session with the AI tool seemed to be an effort to come up with a strategy for the Flames to battle back into the playoff mix. As a whole, the team doesn’t have a ton of high-goal scorers, meaning average goals for will likely be low. In these scenarios, it’s not unheard of for coaches to think outside the barn in order to lead their teams to victory — though ChatGPT is likely a first.
“For our team in here — love you all, genuinely hope you know that — but we don’t have a 60 f***ing goal guy in here. So we have to be good with f***ing getting things to the net,” he challenged. “Don’t accept it, I guess is my message to you. People say the Calgary Flames can’t score. F*** that. You can’t score because you’re f***ing okay with it!”
When it comes to building predictions from data or even just doing simple algebra, ChatGPT is one of the worst tools you could pick. It’s a language model, not a calculator, and even its latest versions still struggle to solve extremely simple equations. Beyond that, it’s also prone to reality-bending hallucinations and brown-nosing, making its use to analyze the play of a $1.6 billion hockey team pretty hard to justify.
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