by Benjamin Wendorf

A few years ago, while working as editor-in-chief of the 2011-12 Maple Leaf Press season preview for the Winnipeg Jets, I came up with an idea to express player shots as a percentage of team shots taken in the games the player participated. Calling it Percentage of Team Shots, abbreviated %TSh, I used it in the historical almanac portion of that magazine, and found that it was a nice, well-controlled measure of a player’s contribution to team offense. I did a similar process with team assists (look here) that should show up on HG in the future. Whatever the case, %TSh has brought the opportunity for some very interesting data visualizations (see here, and here) as well as some interesting insights into historical performance (see here). With the data from 1967-68 to 2012-13 squirreled away for a couple years, I decided it wouldn’t take much to throw it together into an interactive data visualization for HG. If you click on the grey bar, then select “Filter”, you will be able to select/deselect a large number of players for comparison, going back to the mid-1960s. Have fun with it, and feel free to download the data. An additional note, these aren’t all the players from this period, but a selected set to focus on players with lengthier careers (to capture development arcs) as well as players lower on the depth chart and of player types that provide interesting comparison. For the sake of the measure, I omitted player seasons with fewer than 20 games played, and separated forwards from defensemen.

P.S. Some of the limits of the display are really just the limits of the embed and WordPress. If you have an Office Online account, you can click on the bottom right icon below any of the graphs to see the data; if you don’t, you can still download the document by clicking the left-most of the icons in the bottom right.

If you need help with learning how to use the graphs, or troubleshooting, or have questions, suggestions, or data requests, please check out our tutorial.

Forwards:

Defensemen: