National Hockey League Data Scraping and Hiding
Explore how to scrape and analyze National Hockey League data using Python. Learn to extract player birthdates from the NHL API, filter for Canadian players, and plot birth month trends in a histogram to understand the impact of birthdate cutoffs on athlete success.
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Some argue that youth sports that divide participants by age and set the yearly cutoff at December 31 unwittingly make it harder for second-half-of-the-year players to succeed. That’s because they’ll be compared with players six to ten months older than them. Those months can make a huge difference in physical strength, size, and coordination at younger ages. Whom would you choose if you were a minor league coach looking to invest in talent for a better team in a stronger league? And who would likely benefit more over the long term from your extra attention?
It is where the well-known writer, thinker, (and fellow Canadian) Malcolm Gladwell comes in. Gladwell wasn’t the source of this insight, although he’s the one most often associated with it. Instead, that credit goes to the psychologist Roger Barnsley who noticed an oddly distributed ...