EDA Project: NHL data

Overview

This project will begin on Monday June 7th, and conclude with a 10-15 minute presentation one week later on Thursday, June 17th during lab from 2:30 to 4 PM EDT. The goal of this project is to practice understanding the structure of a dataset, and to practice generating and evaluating hypotheses using fundamental EDA and data visualization techniques.

Deliverables

Your team is expected to produce R Markdown slides (an example template will be provided shortly) to accompany your 10-15 minute presentation with the following information:

Explanation of the data structure of the dataset,
Three hypotheses you are interested in exploring,
Three data visualizations exploring the hypotheses, at least two of which must be multivariate. Each visualization must be in a different format from the other two, and you must have at least one categorical and one continuous visualization.
One clustering example,
Conclusions reached for the hypotheses based on your EDA and data visualizations,

Timeline

There will be two submission deadlines:

Friday, June 11th @ 4:00pm EST - Each student will push their individual code for the project thus far to their GitHub accounts for review. We will then provide feedback on the code submitted.

Thursday, June 17 @ 2:00pm EST - Slides and full code must be completed and ready for presentation. Send your slides to Ron’s email (ryurko@andrew.cmu.edu). All code, visualizations, and presentations must be made in R. Take advantage of examples from lecture and the presentation template, but also feel free to explore material online that may be relevant!

Data

Your team is assigned the NHL shot data. This dataset contains all shot attempts from the 2021 NHL playoffs (through June 5th), courtesy of MoneyPuck.com. The code chunk at the end shows how this dataset was processed in R (note the dataset was originally downloaded from the MoneyPuck site.)

Each row of the dataset corresponds to a shot attempt and has the following columns:

shooterPlayerId: The NHL player id of the skater taking the shot
shooterName: The First and Last name of the player taking the shot
team: The team taking the shot
shooterLeftRight: Whether the shooter is a left or right shot
shooterTimeOnIce: playing time in seconds that have passed since the shooter started their shift
shooterTimeOnIceSinceFaceoff: minimum of the playing time in seconds since the last faceoff and the playing time that has passed since the shooter started their shift
event: Whether the shot was a shot on goal (SHOT), goal, (GOAL), or missed the net (MISS)
location: The zone the shot took place in
shotType: Type of the shot
shotAngle: The angle of the shot in degrees - is a positive number if the shot is from the left side of the ice.
shotAnglePlusRebound: The difference in angle between the previous shot and this shot if this shot is a rebound, is otherwise set to 0
shotDistance: The distance from the net of the shot in feet, net is defined as being at the (89,0) coordinates
shotOnEmptyNet: Indicator if the shot was on an empty net
shotRebound: Indicator if the shot is a rebound, i.e., if the last event was a shot and within 3 seconds of this shot
shotRush: Indicator if the shot was on a rush, i.e., ff the last event was in another zone and within 4 seconds
shotWasOnGoal: Indicator if the shot was on net - either a goal or a goalie save,
shotGeneratedRebound: Indicator if the shot generated a rebound shot within 3 seconds of the this shot,
shotGoalieFroze: Indicator if the goalie froze the puck within 1 second of the shot,
arenaAdjustedShotDistance: shot distance adjusted for arena recording bias - uses the same methodology as War On Ice proposed by Schuckers and Curro
arenaAdjustedXCord: x coordinate of the arena adjusted shot location - always a positive number,
arenaAdjustedYCord: y coordinate of the arena adjusted shot location,
goalieIdForShot: The NHL player id for the goalie the shot is on,
goalieNameForShot: The First and Last name of the goalie the shot is on,
teamCode: The team code of the shooting team,
isHomeTeam: Indicator if the shooting team is the home team,
homeSkatersOnIce: The number of skaters on the ice for the home team (does not count the goalie)
awaySkatersOnIce: The number of skaters on the ice for the away team (does not count the goalie)
game_id: The NHL Game_id of the game the shot took place in
homeTeamCode: home team in the game
awayTeamCode: away team in the game
homeTeamGoals: Home team goals before the shot took place
awayTeamGoals: Away team goals before the shot took place
time: Seconds into the game of the shot
period: period of the game

Note that a full glossary of the features available for NHL shot data can be found here.

Code to build dataset

# Accessed NHL shots from 2020-2021 season from MoneyPuck.com, but will
# simplify the dataset to be easier to work with. Load the original data, and
# then just filter to the playoff game shots (as of June 5th)
playoff_shot_data <- read_csv("http://www.stat.cmu.edu/cmsac/sure/2021/materials/data/xy_examples/moneypuck_shots_2020.csv") %>%
  dplyr::filter(isPlayoffGame == 1)

# Now only select columns to work with for this task:
playoff_shot_data <- playoff_shot_data %>%
  dplyr::select(# Player info attempting the shot
                shooterPlayerId, shooterName, team, shooterLeftRight, 
                shooterTimeOnIce, shooterTimeOnIceSinceFaceoff,
                # Info about the shot:
                event, location, shotType, shotAngle, shotAnglePlusRebound, 
                shotDistance, shotOnEmptyNet, shotRebound, shotRush, 
                shotWasOnGoal, shotGeneratedRebound, shotGoalieFroze,
                # Adjusted for arena locations
                arenaAdjustedShotDistance, 
                arenaAdjustedXCord, arenaAdjustedYCord,
                # Goalie info:
                goalieIdForShot, goalieNameForShot,
                # Team context
                teamCode, isHomeTeam, homeSkatersOnIce, awaySkatersOnIce,
                # Game context
                game_id, homeTeamCode, awayTeamCode, homeTeamGoals,
                awayTeamGoals, time, period)