Just how good was Gretzky?
Today is Gretzky’s 50th birthday. With all the stats being talked about the one that stands out for me is how much farther ahead of all other players he is in terms of total points.
Stats from NHL.com
"Your whole team should be built for 16 games."
“My whole philosophy of building teams, I owe to Bill Torrey (legendary Islanders GM). After we won (in Anaheim), I called him and thanked him. I asked him once, you won four straight Cups — people can argue that might have been one of the greatest teams ever — I’m a young GM, can you educate me on this? He said, it’s very simple. You have to win four playoff series to win a Stanley Cup, 16 games. He said, your whole team should be built for 16 games. He said, in the course of those four series, you’re going to play a big team. You’re going to play a really fast team. You’re going to play a team that relies on special teams, more like a trap team might in Jersey, a team that has great special teams. Then you’re going to see a hybrid of one of them. In no particular sequence. You’ve got to be big enough to beat the big team. Quick enough to beat the speed team. Special teams have to be good so you need power play specialists and PK specialists. Then, the hybrid, you need a blend of all it. And goaltending, obviously they had great goaltending.”
TreeMap Progress
The following two images show the changes to the TreeMapping project as I refine the code.
The grid of smaller images below shows the different stages of the image as I add colour coding for each team’s players (red and blue) and green/black for hockey specific terms.
The hockey specific terms are somewhat subjective, for example, I specified ‘period’ as being a term that has specific mean when used in a hockey story. I have used 183 terms which are listed at the bottom of this post. I’m sure there’s room to add a few terms and some that could be removed, however the point of this project is to play with TreeMaps, not hockey terminology (but hockey makes it more fun!).
Click to see the image on Flickr
Click to see the image on Flickr
The next steps for this project might be to create a version with roll-over states.
The following is the list of hockey terminology:
- penalty
- shot
- skate
- goal
- goalie
- assist
- plus
- minus
- coach
- player
- players
- line
- roster
- play
- puck
- points
- point
- advantage
- backcheck
- backchecking
- blocker
- boarding
- body
- check
- breakaway
- butterfly
- cage
- centre
- cherry
- coast
- coincidental
- penalties
- net
- cross-checking
- dangle
- defence
- offense
- first
- second
- third
- grinder
- fourth
- deke
- delay
- game
- offside
- dirty
- player
- pass
- dump
- chase
- faceoff
- face
- wash
- fan
- five
- four
- three
- five-hole
- freeze
- freezing
- garbage
- gate
- goon
- grinder
- hash
- hat-trick
- stick
- advantage
- hooking
- hip
- icing
- left
- wing
- winger
- right
- rush
- timer
- beard
- box
- poke
- whistle
- ref
- referee
- post
- pipe
- roughing
- block
- blocked
- saucer
- screen
- screened
- shorthand
- shorthanded
- shutout
- shutdown
- slapshot
- wrist
- slashing
- slewfoot
- slot
- snap
- snapper
- pads
- stickhandling
- stoned
- trap
- zone
- zamboni
- kill
- killing
- period
- Game
- score
- scored
- regular
- season
- playoff
- playoffs
- overtime
- death
- one
- two
- three
- four
- five
- six
- seven
- tie
- save
- lead
- victory
- goals
- assists
- series
- turnovers
- defenseman
- Stanley
- Cup
- pad
- scrum
- team
- trailing
- trail
- shots
- crowd
- video
- opener
- killers
- replay
- crease
- NHL
- hockey
- linemate
- scorers
- misconduct
- NHL’s
- rebound
- contact
- pond
- fans
- supporters
- netter
- career
- games
- sweater
- scoring
- teammates
- horn
- Arena
- arena
- jersey
- boards
- defenceman
- ice
- bench
- dive
- minor
- major
- assistant
- captian
- hat
- trick
I created a TreeMap from the words in CBC Sports stories written for each Habs / Caps game in Round 1. The TreeMap graph shows the most commonly used words. I removed the 15 most commonly used non-‘hockey’ specific words such as “the”, “it”, “a” etc…
There’s a few player names that pop up, Halak and Ovechkin for obvious reasons. This is a function of their popularity and the length of their names’ relative to the size of the box.
Here’s the page with links to the stories:
http://www.cbc.ca/sports/hockey/stanleycup/round1/e1vs8.html
Created with Processing and the Wattenberg/HCIL TreeMap lib for Java
