shotplot contains functions to help easily visualize NHL shot location data. geom_shotplot wraps geom_point and includes a standard NHL rink as a background image. scrape_shots uses the NHL API to get coordinates, shot type, shooting player, and shooting player's team from a given range of seasons.

To install the latest version of shotplot, use the install_github function from the devtools package:

library(devtools)
install_github("jamesmartherus/shotplot")

• geom_shotplot requires the png and grid packages.
• scrape_shots requires the jsonlite and curl packages.

geom_shotplot() can be used like any other ggplot geom. It takes x and y shot coordinates and plots them on an image of an NHL rink.

geom_shotplot()

ggplot(data, aes(x = x_coords, y = y_coords)) + geom_shotplot

scrape_shots() uses the NHL API to access shot location data, including x and y coordinates, shooting player's name, and shooting player's team. scrape_shots takes two arguments - start_season and end_season. Both arguments are integers and set the range of shots to be scraped.

The scraping process can be lengthy, so I recommend scraping one season at a time. The function includes a progress bar. I tend to use the beepr package to alert me when the process is complete.

scrape_shots(start_season=2014, end_season=2019)

shot_data <- scrape_shots(start_season=2015, end_season=2016)

• Graphic for NHL rink generated using code from War on Ice's excellent nhlscrapr package.