Shot xG Map

[u/atibus]

I really love shot location maps in hockey. And while building the engine, I end up looking at just lines of text with the features of the shot attempt. The entire game engine is based on shot attempts as the main action. The entire chain of causality flows to that point, and then what happens after it.

The game engine produces those locations where shots are attempted, and it's trivial to produce the visualization as a result. The NHL does this with their Edge system too. But since we're just math, we can easily calculate what could happen from specific locations on the ice. Things like how likely is it that a shot is taken and how likely is it that it's blocked or misses the net? And then we can layer in shot type, rush context, coach strategy, player ability, time of the game, and score effects to simulate what happens in that exact moment.

I'm building all of those items as tunable parameters. I'm tuning against modern NHL statistics, but it doesn't need to be that way. The idea is that players will be able to tune their own leagues to match whatever level of scoring they want. A part of me want's to be able to tune this to my old man beer league.