This is where the actual work happens. Not polished consulting deliverables — field notes. Experiments run on real systems, with real data, using the full vocabulary of OC16, BG5, and WA theory. No glossary. No softening for a general audience.
The questions I'm chasing here are the ones that keep me up at night: What does a WA field actually look like when you can measure it? What happens when you apply OC16 analysis to a system that's never been looked at this way? What do you find that you weren't expecting?
Some of this will be tidy. Most of it won't be. That's the point.
The National Hockey League is 32 franchises, a players' union, a Board of Governors, billions in annual revenue, and 100 years of mythology. It is also, from an OC16 perspective, one of the most structurally fascinating WA fields in professional sports — and nobody has looked at it this way before. I decided to.
This is not a client engagement. The NHL didn't hire me. No one commissioned this analysis. I chose the NHL because it's a system I know well enough to have intuitions about — and intuitions are exactly what you want to pressure-test with a rigorous framework.
Professional sports leagues are unusually good laboratory subjects for OC16/WA analysis. The data is largely public. The organizational structure is formalized and documented — you know who owns what, who governs what, who the named authorities are. The economic flows are reported. The competitive relationships are scheduled and recorded.
And the mythology is thick. Hockey has a century of accumulated identity, ritual, tribal loyalty, and cultural weight. That makes the WA field questions genuinely interesting: is all that mythology functioning as fuel, or as pressure? Is the energy lifting the field, or loading it?
I didn't know the answer when I started. I'm still not sure I do.
HD analysis of the Board of Governors — the ownership group that runs the league. Who holds authority? What types are making league-level decisions? Where is the sacral energy concentrated?
HD field analysis of the NHLPA Executive Board — the players' union leadership. OC16 Power Base mapping, Penta skill inventory, and the energetic counterweight to ownership.
Each franchise mapped as a WA field — market size as diameter, fan spend intensity as height, total volume as a proxy for sustained seasonal economic output. 32 fields visualized simultaneously.
The full competition network — how WA fields make contact with each other across a season. Line weight encodes frequency. Opacity encodes combined field strength. Division structure as color.
36 of 45 NHL owners and governors charted. Filter by type, profile, authority, definition, and circuitry. Nine pending birth date confirmation. Birth time assumed 12:00 noon for all — noted as an analytical caveat throughout.
The players' union executive board mapped using OC16 Power Base analysis and Penta skill inventory. Four views: Overview, OC16 Power Bases, Penta Skills, and full Roster. April 2026.
All 32 franchises as WA field cylinders. Diameter encodes market size. Height encodes fan spend intensity. Volume approximates total seasonal economic output — a proxy for WA field strength across one season.
Every franchise's WA field mapped against every other across the 2024–25 season. Each line is a sustained competition relationship. Line weight = contact frequency. Opacity = combined field strength of both franchises.
The foundational analytical layer — OC16 Power Base structure visualized as a field map. The underlying framework that makes the governance and union analysis legible. This is the lens the rest of the work is viewed through.
Before you apply the lens, you need to know what you're looking at. Four diagrams mapping how the NHL actually works as an ecosystem — its governance structures, player development pipelines, and the competitive intelligence networks clubs use to find talent others miss. Two threads: how power is structured, and how clubs compete within that structure. Fieldwork prerequisite.
Four diagrams mapping the league as a functioning ecosystem. Governance & power structure, club connector dynamics, the player development pipeline, and the scouting competition networks that operate within it. Two analytical threads: structure and competition.
The league's governance is overwhelmingly sacral-driven. 28 of 36 charted owners carry life-force energy. This is a group that runs on response and sustained output — not strategic direction. The question is whether the league's decision-making structure supports or fights that.
The Heretic/Investigator is built to be projected onto. In an ownership context that means constant external expectation — fans, media, and the league itself expecting the 5/1 to save the franchise. High scrutiny. High pressure. The 1st line needs the research done to hold up under it.
The Original Six franchises generate the largest WA fields by market and mythology. But field volume and on-ice performance are not correlated. The hypothesis: accumulated mythology may be functioning as field pressure rather than lift — the weight of expectation compressing rather than energizing.
Nearly half the ownership group carries Emotional authority — they need to wait out the wave before deciding. In an industry of rapid moves, trades, and roster decisions, that's a structural tension. The league's pace of decision-making may be systematically misaligned with the authority types of its governors.
Is accumulated mythology functioning as negative pressure rather than fuel — the most energized WA field in hockey producing the least on-ice result? Toronto is the obvious test case. A century of expectation, one of the largest fan bases in the sport, and a championship drought that defies the economic resources available. Is this an organizational design problem, a mythology problem, or something the WA field analysis can actually illuminate?
Several franchises sit in large markets with weak field activation — high geographic reach, low spend intensity. The cylinder is wide but short. From an OC16 perspective, what does a latent WA field look like structurally, and what would you actually change to activate it? This may be the most commercially applicable question in the whole investigation.
The NHLPA and the Board of Governors are two distinct WA fields in sustained contact — and the contact is frequently adversarial. HD analysis of both groups is now complete. The next step is comparing the type, authority, profile, and circuitry distributions of both groups and asking: is this tension structural? Is it inevitable? And is there a configuration that would change it?
All charts use 12:00 noon as a default birth time where actual time is unknown. This affects gate-level analysis but not type, authority in most cases, or profile. The methodology caveat is noted throughout. The question is: at the scale of a 36-person governance group, do the noon-default errors randomize out, or do they introduce systematic bias in a particular direction?
I'm interested in conversations with other practitioners who are applying HD/OC16/BG5 to real organizational systems — especially anyone doing work that challenges the frameworks or finds the edges. Also interested in referral relationships and collaborative engagements where the analysis scope warrants it.