Become an Armchair Scout with our Draft 25 Dashboard
At a Glance
- Evaluate NHL 25 draft prospects like a real scout from your laptop.
- Download the top 100 prospects dataset and Power BI dashboard from our GitHub repo.
- Explore the Armchair Scout dashboard and customize for your own use.
Introduction
This is the fourth newsletter in our series exploring the Draft 25. Below are the first three posts in this series:
In this week's post, we're going to walk through the Power BI dashboard we built for you to use for this coming weekend. With this dashboard, you can play the part of an armchair scout and evaluate the incoming draft prospects.
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What Is the Armchair Scout Dashboard?
The Armchair Scout dashboard gives you an analytical view of the top prospects in the NHL Draft 25. For this year's dashboard, we took the top 100 prospects and then created six reports:
- Overview of the top 100 prospects
- NHL Equivalency (NHLe) report
- Analysis of the feeder leagues
- Player efficiency report
- Player profile report
- Team offense and defense report
You're welcome to use the dashboard as a personal learning instrument, a tool for you to use during the Draft 25 or a place to start to create your own prospects dashboard.
The dashboard is interactive and tracks basic statistics and calculated metrics. You can also filter across the reports on things like nationality, league, ranking, and player.
You can download the data and Power BI dashboard from our GitHub repo, which is here.
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Why This Dashboard Matters
The dashboard is a fun and easy way to track the top talent that is coming into the Draft 25. More importantly, though, it's a learning tool for those of you wanting to learn data analysis for hockey. Feel free to extend or customize the dashboard for your own needs.
Using the dashboard, you can track future stars before they break out. You can also discover the underdogs or places where specific players might be strong or weak. In the least, the dashboard gives you a point of reference during the draft so you can better understand the data behind the player.
For example, in the following NHLe Report, you can filter on forwards (F) and league (OHL) to see the relative performance of players in those leagues. Below, we can see that Michael Misa and Porter Martone are two high-performing players when pivoting NHLe by GPG (meaning they have higher goal-scoring capabilities within their NHL equivalent point production).
How to Use the Dashboard
To use the Power BI dashboard:
- Download and install Power BI from here. (There is a free install.)
- Download the Armchair Scout dashboard from here.
Once downloaded, explore the different reports. Within each report, you can:
- Use the filters to narrow by league, position, ranking and player.
- Hover over charts to see more information about a specific data point.
- Visually explore which players are in higher-margin positions (e.g., above-average point producers).
- Extend the dashboard to add your own reports.
If you're new to Power BI, take a few minutes to check out the demo video below. (The demo starts at 04:12 of the video.)
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Summary
This was the fourth newsletter in a multi-part series on the NHL's Draft 25. In this edition, we introduced you to our Armchair Scout dashboard, which you can use as a learning instrument or to follow along at home during the NHL Draft 25.
In our final newsletter for the series, we'll do a recap of the NHL Draft 25 and make sure all of our datasets and analyses are posted for your use.
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