For me at least, hand tracking is 99% of the time born out of necessity.
The only way I am ever going to get location data for shots is if I break out a multicoloured pen and write down all the locations and numbers myself. Its isn’t however exactly the quickest process to deal with.
I actually really enjoy hand tracking is the thing, It keeps me focused on the game at hand and stops my mind from wandering. The issue comes when it’s time to digitise that information for analysis. I have written about this before over at The Ice Garden, back when I tracked an entire season of the Australian Womens Hockey League. That season it took me around an hour of straight work to plug in every piece of information so that tableau could process it and as my life got busier, the amount of free time I could dedicate got less and less.
The idea to force a shiny app to do something it has no right to do came out of necessity. Partially because I wanted to be able to show heat maps to the Head Coach of the local team I work with during intermission, but mostly because my Masters project consists of getting school kids ages 11+ involved in sports analytics and I really wanted them to be able to produce their own heat maps and yet I really did not want to attempt to explain the complexities of Kernel Density Charts to a collection of 12-year-olds.
So here we are.
Hockey Graphs 