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
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
