Using analytics to plan a (sports) trip

My latest effort into analytics of sports-related data has been a little bit different than usual.
The goal was to plan a trip around Europe to watch hockey games.

The EuroHockey website has schedules for possibly every hockey league around the world (yeah, not only Euro), thus I grabbed data about matches in the top continental leagues scheduled between September and December.

Then I opened my friend R.

As a first pass, I calculated distances between each pair of games scheduled in consecutive days and filtered down to those within reasonable travel time--thus, sorry Admiral, I'm not gonna come to Vladivostok.

Then I recursively combined the pairs to obtain longer trips and added some subjective scores to rank the calculated trips to my likings.

The main parameters I used to rank my trips were:

• Short travel distances between cities;
• Trips with games from multiple leagues to be preferred;
• A ranking of the leagues (e.g. priority to KHL games);
• Starting and ending point of the trip possibly close to home (so that I can go just by train/bus).

After letting R do its job, some interesting solutions came up, but in the end I stuck with the one mapped below.
Clicking on the icons will show games (and make sure to zoom on Prague, as I'll be there both for KHL and Extraliga).


View Max EHT 2013 games only in a larger map
Thus, starting from December 1, I'll be around 5 European countries to catch 8 games in 8 days, featuring 14 teams from 5 leagues, in 7 different cities.

Maybe I'll blog about it. Or maybe not.

Baseball effect on hockey

In case you missed it, there is a website named Open Source Sports which contains databases for various sports, including the Lahman's for baseball.

Since in this blog, other than baseball I have dealt with basketball, soccer and football, it's time to do a short post on hockey. (The fact that the Hockey DB is one of the currently available at OSS helps too.)

This post is based on a single query on the Master table, the one containing players' bio info.
And reports something that I believe is widely known—so it's just a warm-up on the hockey database.

Percentage of left-shooting skaters by country

Slovakia       80
Sweden         78
Finland        76
Russia         75
Czech Republic 68
Canada         63
USA            55

The above numbers are for countries with at least 40 skaters in the database.

So, while for the Europeans the percentage of righty shooters is slightly above the population of lefthanded people (which should be in the order of 15%), the North-Americans lean way more on the right.

One likely explanation is Americans grow up playing baseball where the righthanded batter position is on the same side of the right-shooting hockey player. USA being more extreme than Canada would support this.

An American friend of mine who coached Team Sweden (baseball) said everyone seemed to bat lefthanded over there—which would support the case the other way around.