Weekly Viz 2018-12-31

NHL Attendance

About Makeover Monday

MakeoverMonday is a social data project: “Each week we post a link to a chart, and its data, and then you rework the chart. Maybe you retell the story more effectively, or find a new story in the data. We’re curious to see the different approaches you all take. Whether it’s a simple bar chart or an elaborate infographic, we encourage everyone of all skills to partake. Together we can have broader conversations about and with data.”

Starting from Jan 08, 2018, I decided to put aside one hour on Monday weekly to create some visualization and find some insights from the data.

The datasets are published each week at: MakeoverMonday Datasets.

Makeover Monday 1231

This is the last MakeoverMonday of 2018, and today is the last day of 2018! Time flies. Cannot believe that I have already completed 53 MakeoverMonday :) For everyone who are reading – Happy New Year! Wish you have a fantastic 2019!
This week, the dataset is about all NHL team ranking and their game attendance since 2000. The orginal viz focus on YoY change of attendance of each team. I personally am not a NHL fan, so I would like to use the data to verify a very basic assumption I have – does team with better performance also attract more attendance?

My Visualization

To answer my question above, I narrowed down to only the Canadian teams in NHL to control some external factors and make the viz easier to understand. I made two bump charts comparing the game ranking trend and attendance ranking trend over time of each team. Please note that the attendance here is ranked by the average attendance per game, as I noticed that sometimes, some teams may play one or two fewer games, and due to the 2012–13 NHL Lockout, all the teams only play around half of the numbers of games as usual.

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Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.

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Insights

• The two bump charts look very similar, indicating teams with better game perforance are more likely to have higher game attendance as well;
• For the game ranking among Canadian NHL teams, Montreal has been the best team since 2000, and Winnipeg has always been the 7th…
• But the competition of 2nd and 3rd place has been very fierce – Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Ottawa all have won the 2nd place since 2000;
• Though the Toronto team has never won the first place, but kept itself as a strong 2nd place competitor, it always has very high attendance, sometimes even higher than Montreal – this may be because that Toronto is the most populated city in Canada;
• Actually when I was looking at the whole dataset with all the NHL teams, I also noticed that teams in the North generally outperform teams based in the South – this totally makes sense as Hockey is an ice game.

Follow this link to find more weekly vizzes :)