Shortly after speaking to a crowd of 300 people, Trey Elder was a popular guy.

Elder was one of four presenters during the HALO conference and meetings Tuesday at Ball Arena. Hosted by Arik Parnass, who leads the Colorado Avalanche analytics department, the conference was the largest collection of NHL analytics staffers the league has ever seen. Each of the presentations was a finalist for the conference’s hackathon competition.

A graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, Elder gave a presentation on a metric to better define forechecking success called PRESS (puck recovery and exit suppression score). Shortly after Elder’s presentation, there were several attendees who wanted to speak further with him on the topic.

“It’s been great,” Elder said. “I’ve never presented at a conference before, let alone in front of like, real NHL people. It was very cool. I was a little nervous, like I think everyone would be, but I felt very prepared, so I feel like I did an OK job.

“I tend to think that no one is going to solve hockey, or come up with a singular thing that is like, ‘This is how you win more games,’ or ‘this is how you score more goals.’ I’m very interested in the aspects of the game that are somethings like the game within the game. With forechecking, the object isn’t to score a goal, it’s to get the puck back. That’s an aspect of the game that feels like it could be optimized in some way.”

Elder grew up in Northern Virginia, rooting for the Washington Capitals. His goal after school is to some day work for an NHL team.

As part of the hackathon competition, all of the contestants were given the same set of data — a batch of AHL games from two seasons ago — to work with. Elder and his partner, Jonathan Pipping, went through about 28,000 forechecks, and developed a model for league-average success rates in two components of forechecking.

They were then able to score players against that average. One member of an NHL team’s analytics staff said the findings from Elder and Pipping lined up pretty closely with what his club’s research into forechecking success has found.

Colorado Avalanche forward Joel Kiviranta didn’t spend much time with the Colorado Eagles in the AHL, but he was there during the timeframe of this set of games. He also scored as one of the top-five forecheckers in Elder’s metric.

“I’m sure there are groups that are collecting that data and analyzing it however they want to analyze it,” Avs forward Logan O’Connor said. “As the game evolves, analytics have obviously become a huge part of sports in general, and especially with hockey. It would definitely be fascinating to see the tendencies and player-to-player matchups, how teams do it differently, and what the success is, where the puck is, where the player is, and whatnot.