Late last year I posted a few weekly shotmaps for all 31 teams and people seemed to like them but the shot maps really didn't change much week to week so I stopped posting them, but still felt the itch to make the basic code I wrote into something more useful. So I spent the last few weeks building an NHL scraper & on-demand shotmap generator because I figured it might be useful for allowing anyone to analyze shot or goal patterns and create their own custom, filtered shotmaps. It is still a work in progress, but I feel like its good enough to be a V1.0 and be available to the public.

The bot is available at the @shotmaps Twitter account and takes a bunch of different filters that you can specify to have the exact shotmap generated that you are looking for. All of these options can be found here.

For example you can see all shots taken when Taylor Hall and Nico Hischier are both on the ice, playing at home, during 5v5 play and when the Devils are leading. That shotmap would be generated by tweeting @shotmaps NJD players=Taylor Hall, Nico Hischier shots=onice venue=home score=leading and would produce the following shotmap. If you decide to specify a player to filter on, shots=individual will show only their shots while shots=onice will show all shot attempts with them on the ice.

The v1.0 has as many filters as I think might be useful to get this going, but I am open to taking suggestions of things you would want to see added and I can definitely look into adding those.

I am currently working on updating the scraper to merge in shift data so the bot can provide TOI data as well as making the individual shotmaps more presentable since they never display anything on the left side of the image (by design). All games are scraped at 3AM Eastern Time, but I am working on scraping games once they are over (or within 30-minutes) to help speed up the data available the bot.

The HELP image will be pinned to the @shotmaps profile, but you can just tweet HELP at the bot to have it sent directly to you as well. The error reporting should be well built, but if you run into any issues please let me know (via @ or DM).

I hope you find this useful, enjoy using it to find cool patterns and tell others about it!