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Puck Possessed Hockey

PuckPossessed Biathlon #6 The Queen of Pursuit

As I’m really liking working in R-Studio, I did my next research in R as well: the Queen of the Pursuit. Unfortunately I am limited to only one season’s data, and a limited season as well. But, as the Dutch saying goes, sometimes you’ve got to row with the oars you got. The full research and R-code can be found on this separate page, and I used another tool I’m quite fond of, Gravit Designer, to create a final result of the research: Here’s the R Notebook including all the code and visuals: I hope you enjoy. Any comments or… Read More »PuckPossessed Biathlon #6 The Queen of Pursuit

Learning R – reading books

After I worked with R in the past and starting playing around with R Studio Cloud recently, I thought it would be a good idea to actually read some books about it. And, as this specific book suggested, make some notes and follow examples in a Markdown Notebook, that can be easily published as an html-file. And low and behold, I can just save that file and upload it here, so that I just need to click once and see the same document. Very cool! So, one book I read through is Data Visualization, a practical introduction, by Kieran Healy.… Read More »Learning R – reading books

Puck Possessed Biathlon #5

For the 5th issue of the Puck Possessed Biathlon series I decided not to use Tableau, but rather give R, R-Studio, Shiny and the ggplot2 package a go. It had been a while that I last used R, but after a few days of struggling, I think I got the basic principles back under control. Well, sort of. First I wrote a script that pulled data from the Biathlon API, for all women that participated in the IBU sprint world cups in the 2019-2020 season. More detailed writing on that process can be found here, while the code is in… Read More »Puck Possessed Biathlon #5

Puck Possessed Biathlon # 4

I made a Tableau report on the progress of the Women’s Sprint standing for the 2019-2020 season, with its climax at the last race in Kontiolahti, where Denise Herrmann was able to just get ahead of Doro Wierer for the Sprint Title! I also looked at the last three seasons to see who got the most cumulative points. The report itself can be found on my Tableau Public account, just look for PPB-4 Biathlon Women Sprint – IBU Points (direct link).

Puck Possessed Biathlon #3

In the third issue of Puck Possessed Biathlon, I want to look at the influence of things like weather and snow conditions, as well as course information. This is all summarized in reports made available on the https://biathlonresults.com/ website as Final Results – Competition Data Summary: From this report, I used the measurements provided, except for the measurement taken half an hour before the race, as it doesn’t seem that relevant. Also, all these measurements should be taken with a grain of salt (how accurately are they measured, it’s only on one measure location, and some “measurements” are qualitative. In… Read More »Puck Possessed Biathlon #3

Puck Possessed # 9

Puck Possessed Issue 9: shot attempts and scoring chances In issue 2 I talked a bit about shot attempts, but the current issue goes deeper, and also looks at, and explains, scoring chances.  The first page of the issue is about shot quality and quality. Is it better to show often or pick and choose only those locations that have a higher statistical chance of scoring? A table compares how teams rank for both shot attempts (abbreviated as SA, not to be confused with shots against) and Goals as a ratio of SAs. These two rankings are then combined, and… Read More »Puck Possessed # 9

Puck Possessed #8

National Pride In Canada we tend to call Hockey “our” game. Although possessing something as intangible as the game of hockey, or any sports game for that matter, Puck Possessed issue 8 looks at National Pride in hockey expressed by players in the NHL representing different “nation groups” in the NHL.  As looking at all individual nations didn’t make much sense, I combined Sweden and Finland, all former Soviet states, and a rest group combining numerous smaller European countries with one-offs like Australia and Bahamas. I should also note that these are based on the Nationalities listed on the NHL web page; I… Read More »Puck Possessed #8

Puck Possessed #7

Power play success expressed through the time it takes to score a PP goal Power play success is typically shown as a percentage: number of power play goals as a percentage of the number of power play opportunities. Nothing wrong with that. But I was curious to see how long a team typically takes to score during the 120 seconds of power play. Yeah, big caveat; see below in the Data section. And pretty soon I realized it would not be as easy as I initially thought. You’d think I would have figured that out by now… THE DATA I… Read More »Puck Possessed #7

Puck Possessed #4

Edition 4 already, and we are looking at NHL team luck, expressed through shot and goal rates. Take Montreal for example, a team that not many people are expecting much from this season, other than the “Presse de Montreal”. But so far they have doing well, and at the time of writing they have a win percentage of over 60%, closely behind Boston and Toronto (to see current standings based on points and win percentage, check Puck Possessed 3). Where other teams show luck, or lack thereof, with a shot ratio and goal ratio that strongly differ, Montreal have actually… Read More »Puck Possessed #4

Puck Possessed #3

Version 3 of Puck Possessed looks at the standings in the NHL, but not just your typical points, but rather winning percentage. I like this much better as it considers the number of games played, so you get a clear idea of what team is actually doing well. The dashboard first starts with the typical standings table and the winning percentage table, but in between them is a chart that shows both, points on the vertical axis and win percentage on the horizontal axis. As this dashboard updates nightly I have to work with a screenshot here but you can… Read More »Puck Possessed #3

Puck Possessed #2

This 2nd version of the Puck Possessed is actually a visual I published on Twitter earlier, before I created Puck Possessed #1. What I tried to look at was not just how many shots a player takes and then compare it to the number of goals, but rather look at all a player’s shot attempts, including shot attempts missed, saved and blocked. To this day I do not know how a “broken stick shot” is recorded, but if considered a missed shot that would be included too. Personally I find it more interesting to see how many goals a players… Read More »Puck Possessed #2