Animal Collective’s Brian Weitz lends a helping hand on Flyers tracking project
By Charlie O'Connor Jun 24, 2020
It was November 2017, just a few months after I had accepted a job covering the Flyers for The Athletic. One morning, I noticed an email in my inbox with a generous but unfortunately timed offer: If I was planning to start a full-scale tracking project, a fan named Brian said he would be happy to help.
I’m good for now, I responded. Nothing was in the works, as I was still finding my footing as a beat writer. But I promised him if a large project came up, he’d be the first to know.
The following summer, with the 2017-18 season in the books, I resorted to my favorite time-waster when there’s no Flyers hockey to watch: tweeting random music thoughts. On this occasion, I mentioned my inability to truly click with the music of Animal Collective, one of the biggest and most critically acclaimed indie rock bands of the previous decade.
Not even a week later, Brian responded to the months-old email thread: After my offer to spend some downtime on tour tracking hockey games, he joked, you trash my band on Twitter?
“Brian,” as it turned out, was diehard Flyers fan Brian Weitz, also known as Geologist, electronic sound manipulator for (and one of the four core members of) Animal Collective.
“I just assumed (that) there’s (not) a lot of crossover between hockey fans and Animal Collective fans,” he said in a phone interview this month, explaining why he didn’t reveal his identity from the start. “It didn’t seem worth it.”
We struck up an occasional email correspondence in the aftermath of the amusing misunderstanding. So when the NHL season was paused because of the coronavirus pandemic, and I made the decision to launch an in-depth tracking project centered on the Flyers’ forecheck, Weitz was logically the first person I asked to participate. As it turned out, Weitz was just as excited to try it as he had been in late 2017.
“I was just curious — what would I learn from actually doing the tracking?” he said. “Would I see things differently when I watched the games? It just seemed like a good use of time and a way to learn.”
Animal Collective, for the less musically inclined, is one of the indie rock community’s best-known bands of the past 20 years. The four primary members met in Baltimore County in high school and, after years of working together on various projects, officially constituted the group in the early 2000s.
They quickly earned a growing fan base and critical acclaim for their sound, which spanned multiple styles but often was placed into the catch-all genres of psychedelia and experimental pop. By the mid-to-late 2000s, they were one of the biggest indie rock bands in the world. Their commercial peak, the 2009 album “Merriweather Post Pavilion,” hit No. 13 on the Billboard Top 200 chart, topped numerous “best-of” lists and even ranked 14th on influential webzine Pitchfork’s 200 Best Albums of the 2000s list.
To date, Animal Collective has released 11 albums under its moniker, with Weitz part of the active personnel for eight of them. But long before Weitz adopted the Geologist nickname, and long before his family moved to Baltimore County and he met his future bandmates, he was already a hardcore Flyers fan.
It was the goalie position that first intrigued Weitz. Ron Hextall, in part because of his unique ability to score goals despite being stationed at the opposite end of the rink, was an early favorite. By third-grade summer camp, Weitz was playing street hockey, and by the 1988-89 season, his family and two others were splitting Flyers season tickets. In his younger days, Weitz played at the Bucks County Ice Sports Center (then called The Face Off Circle) in Warminster, Pa. Hockey had hooked him, so much so that after his family relocated in 1993 after his eighth-grade year and he could no longer catch Flyers games on television, Weitz would check the box scores every morning to keep tabs on the Orange & Black during the early Eric Lindros years.
Weitz’s fandom held up as he entered adulthood and dove into a career as a full-time musician. He even wrote briefly for Sports Illustrated about the intersection between hockey and music. But it wasn’t until he appeared on a May 2016 episode of the “Puck Soup” podcast — then hosted by Greg Wyshynski (now of ESPN) and Dave Lozo — that he resolved to start paying attention to the sport’s burgeoning analytics movement. Off-air, the topic of advanced stats and Corsi came up. Weitz joked that he didn’t know what those words meant, and that he had considered diving deeper but probably was just going to stick with plus/minus.
“Those two guys, who are both older than me by a couple years, I think, and I expected were old-school hockey fans that grew up watching in the ’80s like I did, they just laughed at me,” he recalled, laughing. “They were just like, ‘Get the fuck out of here, you serious? Plus/minus?’ And I was just embarrassed.
“I was like, ‘I never want to be around hockey people again where this comes up and I can’t at least hang in the conversation,’ and I get laughed out of the room for saying I still believe in plus/minus. So that was a watershed moment, where I (said), ‘All right, I’m just going to go home and look up these words.’”
Weitz began to pick up the concepts, largely through Flyers-centric, advanced-stats-filled articles on Broad Street Hockey written by one Charlie O’Connor. Which was why, after subscribing to The Athletic and seeing a comment of mine saying that certain questions about players and teams could be answered only through time-intensive tracking projects, Weitz offered his services via email.
Three years later, Weitz remained interested. As his knowledge of advanced stats had expanded, so did his curiosity about the tactical side of the game, as he explored writers such as Justin Bourne, who in between writing gigs had worked for two years as a video coach for the Toronto Marlies.
“Just in a weird alternate-life story in my head, I thought, what would it have been like (to be a hockey video coach)?” Weitz said. “Maybe you have to play hockey (at a high level) to do that. But that’s an interesting job. I would like to do that for a year. I’ve bounced around to different careers in my life, and it just sounded like a fun one.
“And when you offered the tracking project, it sorta sounds like what I imagined a video coach does. Let’s live that life during the pandemic.”
Weitz started in late March and quickly took to the tracking project. Originally given the option to merely record the times of each Flyers dump-in during his assigned set of games, Weitz ultimately chose to track every data point in the project. He discovered it was an ambitious undertaking.
“(There were) those moments when you see an event, but you say, ‘Oh, but I didn’t catch who F3 was, I have to rewatch it,’” he recalled. “I made some system with my hands; my left hand tracked shots and my right hand tracked failed exits. My wife would just see me moving my fingers around, and I would have to pause it with my elbow and look at my fingers.”
In addition, tracking games wasn’t Weitz’s only duty during the pandemic-driven lockdown. Weitz lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and two children, a fourth-grader and a kindergartner. During the lockdown, Weitz’s wife — a schoolteacher — spent the bulk of her days teaching students remotely. That left Weitz tasked with guiding the remote schooling of his two children.
“I’m a terrible teacher,” he said, laughing. “It’s such an irony that my kids had to be homeschooled, and my wife is an incredible teacher and she couldn’t teach them at all. They just had to be left with me.”
Music, of course, remained a focus. But with all four band members confined to their homes, practicing in the same space was impossible, as was recording Animal Collective’s planned 12th full-length album in the studio. As a result, music productivity was limited to composing in isolation, long-distance collaborations and virtual improvisation sessions.
Tracking hockey games, strangely enough, filled a glaring void for Weitz as a de-stressor, which was especially important during a stressful time.
“My wife had a phrase for it, (that) I felt very present but also very turned off at the same time (while tracking),” he explained. “I meditate every day, (or) I tried to when my family was out of the house and I was just working from home before the pandemic. And I haven’t been able to do it since the quarantine, and I really missed it. And this almost (replaced) my meditation practice.”
Weitz also eventually found a tracking system that worked for him. At the start, he felt obligated to set daily goals for himself — such as tracking an entire game. But soon he discovered a healthier and more efficient way of completing the project: He’d use tracking as a way to decompress after a draining teaching session with his kids or a frustrating music session.
“There were moments when I would work (on music) for an hour and I would hate everything I did, and be really down on myself, and, in the past, I would go in the backyard and pace around or something,” Weitz said. “But I found that the tracking was super helpful in resetting my brain — my creative side of my brain.
“Instead of getting upset with myself, I would just be like, ‘All right, just go track. Just do a period. And then come back to music.’”
By the project’s conclusion in late May, Weitz’s sense of earned accomplishment belied a strange feeling of sadness that the tracking had ended.
“It was very meditative. … It really helped replace the practice of breathing and trying to be present,” he said. “Tracking hockey is insanely calming for me.”
With the project complete, Weitz is back to serving as a long-distance musician and, with homeschooling finished (for now), summer father.
But he believes he has a better understanding of the team he loves, and potentially, the game as a whole. Over time, previously under-the-radar players began to stand out to Weitz as impact contributors to the Flyers’ success on the forecheck.
“(Nicolas Aubé-Kubel) was in all the time, and just relentless,” he said. “And he’s a great forechecker. If you’re just watching on TV while you’re also looking at your phone or something, you may miss that. I also spent most of the season not really noticing Tyler Pitlick, and he was hard not to notice during this tracking project.”
That said, Weitz acknowledged the inherent limitations of an outside tracking project — namely, odd camera angles, and the knowledge gap that exists between the tracker and the tactical directives of a team’s coaching staff.
“To me, it seems like the positioning of a forward based on where the puck is and where his teammates are and the kind of support he has to give — you can’t always see that from the feed that we’re watching,” he said. “Because I felt like, yes, I would notice a lot of the little things — or, I’m trying to see the little things, and it’s really hard to do with the angle that I’m seeing a lot of times.
“And I think I just need to be more educated, too, on what the coaches are looking for. (I’ve asked), ‘What qualifies as a successful forecheck?’ I’m still not really sure. A goal, great. Shot attempts, great. A lot of zone time, great. But how does that relate to the forecheck? I don’t really know. And I assume it’s related to some kind of system that the coach puts in place. If the puck’s here, F2 does this, F3 does this. But I’m ignorant of those things, at least at the present.”
But don’t take that frank admission as frustration with tracking projects. Not only could Weitz see himself working on another in the future, but he’d also be excited to work on them regularly, with writers in the public sphere or even for teams.
“I love this,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s a second career or anything, but I like having my mind focused on different things throughout the day. (It’s) definitely something I would like to focus more on.”
