How often do you get the feeling that as soon as you drop a player in your fantasy league, his stats sky rocket? All too often I’d say. Well, I set out to do a post mortem analysis on how effective my add / drop decisions were now that the regular NHL season is over.

The aim of the visualization is to plot the performance of each player that ever was part of the fantasy team, highlighting the period when he was part of the team. The visualisation plots the total number of fantasy points of each player per week (using a sliding window weighted average to smoothen the curves). If the player was on the roster during that time period then the line is highlighted in red. If the player was not on the roster then there is only a blue line (and the red line on 0). Injuries are shown with a discontinued line (i.e. the player did not play any game that week).

The visualisation is aimed to help analyze player adds and drops, to see where the player was picked up based on his performance. For instance one can see examples of good decisions - adding Thomas Vanek towards the end of the season and dropping Paul Stastny towards the end of the season. From the charts one can also see the variance of each player with mountains and valleys (Gaborik, Havlat,Sharp) and the respective consistency of other players (Henrik Sedin, Christan Ehrhoff and Niklas Kronwall).

The data extraction, from the yahoo sports website, was automated using Excel’s data capture and a few macros. The visualisations were generated using Google charts.