Development Matrix
I’ll preface by saying that this specific tool might not be for everyone. By nature, the development matrix is harder to read than the other visualizations at LB-Hockey. Its main goal is to investigate a player’s efficiency by looking at how often a skill is used, and contrasting it with its success rate. This dashboard, even more so than the others, attempts to convey a lot of details so it is very much intended to be viewed either with the ability to zoom in or on a not-too-small screen, with a little bit of time to analyze & digest. I was inspired to create this after seeing Mikael Nahabedian’s incredible work on women’s hockey data which can be found on his Tableau page here.
The Categories
First, I should note that all the data within this sheet is separated into six different categories: shooting, passing, puck carrying, general offence, defending, & checking. The categorical scores for these are held on the left side. As the legend below them indicates, the top bar above the category name represents the frequency weighted average. The same goes for the bottom bar but with success rate. Meanwhile, the number to the right and accompanying pie chart provide an overall score that is a product of both.
As for which individual skills/stats are included in each section, they are identified at the bottom chart. Their colours represent the category to which they belong, on top of a shape that is used for its legend on the matrix. I’ve provided a zoomed-in screenshot below on which you can click to expand even further.
The Matrix
Moving to the main event of this visualization, the matrix projects all of the aforementioned individual skills onto a frequency-vs-success plane. In addition to the coloured markers, three-letter abbreviations are also shown for each indicator to minimize how often someone might need to consult the legend. The matrix axes are scaled by percentile, meaning that the positional league-wide median for a skill’s frequency is at the halfway point from left-to-right, and similarly for success rate from low-to-high. This allows us to separate the plane into four quadrants, dictating how a player should handle their skillset:
– Tolerate: low frequency, low success (bottom left)
– Address: high frequency, low success (bottom right)
– Promote: low frequency, high success (top left)
– Uphold: high frequency, high success (top right)
As you may have noticed, there is a row below the headshot & bio data section that helps quantify how much of the player’s toolkit falls in each bucket. Lastly, it should be mentioned that the big number in that top left area is simply the SPAR% from the Multi-Year Cards.