Over the last decade, teams have taken significant steps to improve their NHL entry draft approach. To do this, a number of teams have bolstered their analytics staff to identify the current “gaps” in prospect scouting. Whether it’s the Detroit Red Wings being the first team to dive head first into drafting Russian players, and then later Swedish players, or the Tampa Bay Lightning prioritizing small, skilled forwards, teams are looking for any available edge. More recently, the Pittsburgh Penguins have put a premium on overage players, as Namita Nandakumar found that overage players make the NHL faster. What’s the next big market inefficiency?

A picture is worth a thousand words. Yes, it’s a cliché, but when it comes to visualizing data, an individual can tell a story via the choices they make when presenting their data. One of the most common visualizations is a plot showcasing the frequency and distribution of an event. Data like this are often presented in a histogram or box-and-whisker-plot. However, a limitation of both of these types of plots is that neither shows the individual where each data point falls. On the other hand, a beeswarm plot allows the user to see where each individual point falls across a range. A random jitter effect is applied to maintain a minimum distance between each point to minimize overlap.

Inspired by the wonderful graphs from Namita Nandakumar and Emmanuel Perry, I thought I would attempt to visualize how goaltenders have fared in goals saved above average over the course of their careers.

Continue reading →