Bringing back an older concept…a few years ago, I was spurred by Tom Awad’s “Good Player” series to put together these radar charts of player ice-time. I’d always felt, for fantasy hockey purposes, it is important to know the boxcars (goals, assists, points) come from the ice-time as much as anything, and so the initial creation of what I called “Total Player Charts,” or TPCs, was to portray precisely that. It ended up that they gave intriguing portrayals of players that we felt had strong seasons. See Jamie Benn’s above; an Art Ross Trophy, sure, and much of it came from near the top share of playing time at evens and on the powerplay, league-wide. You can also get a sense of just how valuable a defenseman like T.J. Brodie is:

I’ll messing around with these a bit more over the next few months, but as it stands I have these templates and data for all of this year’s skaters ready if anybody wants to request a post for a team or some players.

As I tinkered with these visualizations further back then, I also realized you can put together some pretty intriguing charts of how teams compose their lineups:

The outer, light blue triangle is the team-high by position (forwards, defensemen); the darker blue is the player’s radar chart. I plan on doing the same for 2014-15 teams, but want to see if I can make it filterable.

Finally, the last thing I found with these (and something I’ve shown at this site) is you can put together some pretty nifty progression GIFs with them:

While this is using year-to-year typical change to show the development of a defenseman, I’m just as interested in using them to show the progression of a player’s season. For instance, Calder Trophy nominee Aaron Ekblad’s rookie season:

I used a 20-game moving average of the measures, keeping the league average and high static. As you can see, he moved in and out of the penalty kill over the course of the season, and his scoring numbers were helped somewhat by above-average powerplay time. Regardless, it is an impressive season for somebody making the jump from the OHL.

As I mentioned above, expect to see me messing around with these a bit more, to improve their look and utility. Overall, though, TPCs are an interesting way to capture things like player usage and understand where their scoring numbers come from. Additionally, it can tell us a lot about the depth and usage of an entire lineup, whether by an end-of-the-year measure, or through a dynamic chart like the GIFs above.

2014-15 Data from War-on-Ice.com; 2011-12 and older data from BehindtheNet.ca