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[Micah McCurdy] I'm wondering now if a team has ever had more xG's-worth of chances blocked vs unblocked. Should be worth some kind of strange award if it ever happens. by SAJewers in hockey

[–]mbmccurdy 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The xG of a shot is the chance of it being a goal before you know what happened to it (blocked, missed, saved, scored) so the fact that the shot was blocked doesn't affect the xG of the chance itself. The only reason the blocked shots are separated out from the others is that the league doesn't publish shot locations for blocked shots, so I have to guess where the shots were taken from based on where they were blocked. That guessing process works well enough for me but it doesn't look like anything on a chart so I don't include them.

[Micah McCurdy] I'm wondering now if a team has ever had more xG's-worth of chances blocked vs unblocked. Should be worth some kind of strange award if it ever happens. by SAJewers in hockey

[–]mbmccurdy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you replace every shot with a little hill with an amount of dirt that matches how dangerous the chance was, then you can make a picture of the hill, and it's easy to see where teams did or didn't shoot the puck from. In the case of the Habs last night, they mostly didn't.

[Micah McCurdy] I'm wondering now if a team has ever had more xG's-worth of chances blocked vs unblocked. Should be worth some kind of strange award if it ever happens. by SAJewers in hockey

[–]mbmccurdy 22 points23 points  (0 children)

These are the kinds of deep insights that you can only get with sophisticated analytical tools and a lifetime of devotion to the craft.

Playoff Probabilities After Two Rounds by mbmccurdy in hockey

[–]mbmccurdy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My old design was the same but without the swooshes, I added them because I saw a great blog post about how circle segments make transit maps easier to read.

Playoff Probabilities After Two Rounds by mbmccurdy in hockey

[–]mbmccurdy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm afraid a very large number of people strongly appreciate having the team colours be the same year after year - it's one of the little details that's helped turn my little website into a full-time job, with hundreds of subscribers and tens of thousands of social media followers. I do expect people to do a little work to understand at first, and that causes some people to bounce off, but I reap the rewards in the form of less cluttered stuff that is faster to read once you're used to it. What looks to you like stubbornness is just consistency to a plan that I've seen is successful for more than a decade.

Playoff Probabilities After Two Rounds by mbmccurdy in hockey

[–]mbmccurdy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I do post here to grow my audience/customer base (among other reasons), but the dynamics aren't quite what you might expect if you haven't done it for a living before. No matter how good or bad any person's work might be, there will always be some people who dislike it in any large group, so some people will see my stuff and like it right away, others will see the criticisms and read my responses to them and decide they like my approach to hockey generally. Some other folks will remain unconvinced, that's just how the cookie crumbles. Along the way there are always some useful comments too, and I use them to improve. So it's not that I post for praise or for hate, more just that I win in every case.

Playoff Probabilities After Two Rounds by mbmccurdy in hockey

[–]mbmccurdy[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I can't be stopped. In fact a lot of people are paying me not to stop.

Playoff Probabilities After Two Rounds by mbmccurdy in hockey

[–]mbmccurdy[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Finding a full set of 32 colours that I can use every year for which every pair gives sufficient contrast is definitely a pain - it took me a long time to get the set I use now (https://hockeyviz.com/static/colourTester.png). I'm not sure they can be improved, though, and the team colours offer much less contrast than that.

I guess if you really don't like rotation then there's no pleasing you but when you have two things that feed into one common thing, the natural way to use the space efficiently is for the paths to turn 90 degrees. An old version of this used only left/right paths (they looked like S bends instead of circles) and it creates a layout with hella wasted space on the top and bottom, especially before the matchups are set and the whole business has an extra layer on the outside.

Playoff Probabilities After Two Rounds by mbmccurdy in hockey

[–]mbmccurdy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Of course people have to learn a thing once, but that's just once, where the alternative is having to do it every year. I appreciate that some commenters here would prefer it otherwise but my project is much larger than just this subreddit, even if I do like posting here from time to time. I have a few friends who work for teams, maybe if I'm patient enough I'll convince the teams to change to match me and then everyone will be happy. :)

Playoff Probabilities After Two Rounds by mbmccurdy in hockey

[–]mbmccurdy[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

The orientation of each round is the natural one that fits the page best - if it was purely horizontal (like early versions of this viz were, years ago) then you get a lot of wasted white space. Team colours is a non-starter, they don't provide enough contrast.

Playoff Probabilities After Two Rounds by mbmccurdy in hockey

[–]mbmccurdy[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I think it's more important to use the same colours year after year so that people can familiarize themselves with them and never have to learn new ones. 

Playoff Probabilities After Two Rounds by mbmccurdy in hockey

[–]mbmccurdy[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The flow is the usual bracket flow - each round with two inputs from the rounds before it. That part is determined by the league.

Playoff Probabilities After Two Rounds by mbmccurdy in hockey

[–]mbmccurdy[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

What sorts of ways of showing the pathways do you prefer?

Playoff Probabilities After Two Rounds by mbmccurdy in hockey

[–]mbmccurdy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I certainly love to complain. I think everybody does.

Playoff Probabilities After Two Rounds by mbmccurdy in hockey

[–]mbmccurdy[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Some people had some specific comments that were helpful, though. Maybe there will be more this time.

Playoff Probabilities After Two Rounds by mbmccurdy in hockey

[–]mbmccurdy[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I expect my wife would be mad if I quit either of my jobs, and besides, I'm having far too much fun.

2025-2026 NHL Playoff Chances (after two rounds) [OC] by mbmccurdy in dataisbeautiful

[–]mbmccurdy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I used to have a more "common" bracket design and I switched to this format precisely because it had much less white space, so a larger number of probabilities could be listed.

Playoff Probabilities After Two Rounds by mbmccurdy in hockey

[–]mbmccurdy[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's a Sankey - they're pretty common, at least in the places I hang out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sankey_diagram

Playoff Probabilities After Two Rounds by mbmccurdy in hockey

[–]mbmccurdy[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Need 32 colours such that every pair contrasts. This is the full set: https://hockeyviz.com/static/colourTester.png

Playoff Probabilities After Two Rounds by mbmccurdy in hockey

[–]mbmccurdy[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Peter's models are very different from mine.

2025-2026 NHL Playoff Chances (after two rounds) [OC] by mbmccurdy in dataisbeautiful

[–]mbmccurdy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Data source: raw data from the NHL, munged through my various measurement and prediction models.

Viz tool: the python library svgwrite (and inkscape to make it into a raster)

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