More data on NHL.com?

Yes

Thanks to Daniel Wagner’s tweet, I learned there was new data on NHL dot com. Apparently, the league is now offering a short animation of the possession that leads to all goals. Just like any hockey nerd, I stopped everything to find out about that new source of data. We can quickly understand that new source of data involves the recent puck tracking and player tracking data the NHL recently started tracking. It is interesting because it adds a new layer to the NHL data, making it more accessible to the public to dunk on players and GMs to do fun things with it.

Good for us, the NHL did not make it too difficult to access. In about a minute or two, I was able to fetch the data in a Colab Notebook.

Before we go further, I am not a pro or an academic, so the steps I will follow might be questionable or bad or good if I am lucky. My first step is to find a video reference for a goal that I like a lot and that does not bother me to watch a multiple times. So I picked Cole Caufield’s PP goal against the Leafs.

Second step is to quickly replicate it and draw early conclusions.

Here is what I notice :

• the X/Y scale is different from what we usually have in PBP (x = [-100,100] ; y = [-42.5, 42.5]). A rough estimate would be something like (x = [0,2222.22] ; y = [0, 1000]).

• For some obscure reasons, my plot horizontally mirrored. Something to look for eventually.

• It is really easy to identify the puck (1) in the data. For the other ids, I still need to find out if the numbers mean something or if it does not matter.

  

  
  I wish I had more to tell, but I need to go sleep. Let me know if you find something interesting. See you soon for more good NHL data news!