Data is sourced directly from the NHL API. Visualizations are done with GeoPandas and Canva
Just a short post today as I spent all my time making the graphic.
Ontario mints a lot of players, and they play a lot of games. If you noticed the color bar is log scale, this is because of Ontario. A linear scale would leave everywhere looking purple, with Minnesota, Quebec, Alberta, BC, and Michigan being slightly less purple. No other team would be able to supply enough man-games to field 2 teams across 82 games, but Ontario could do almost 6. Ontario is ridiculous!
This is not to say that all these other places are undeserving of an NHL team as they are diluting the talent pool. If anything, these places would be great markets as they have so much more room to grow.
Although, I can’t lie, I came up with the idea for this graphic because of all the expansion talk back in March. There was a lot of talk about dilution of talent, and I was curious which places with NHL teams are actually diluting the talent pool. Answer: almost all of them.