A Map of Burton Hockey Player Connections

Kyle KuschJuly 05, 2013

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Using the open source software Gephi, we ran the entire history of Burton Hockey sessions from 2000-2013 through it to see how players relate to each other after 14 seasons of hockey. The software analyses who each person played with in a session and how many times they did so. This was the final result using the Force Atlas algorithm.

You have three very distinct groups: VRH at left, BUSH in an arc roughly at centre, and the Arena League at right.

Not surprisingly, the main hubs are the Koth-Kappus axis and Lee Orr. You'll notice that Ollie is closer than Bernie to the BUSH players since he plays both leagues regularly.

There's a very obvious VRH/BUSH transition zone composed of players who have played relatively even numbers of games with players from both leagues over their career; you can trace an arc beginning roughly at Dorian Turner on top through Tony Sivilay, Joern Hornhardt, Lorne Bilinski, Forrest Harding (all his game were pre-league split, so he played with everyone when they were all playing together), Oliver Koth-Kappus, and Steve Weatherhead.

You can also see a gap forming between Bernie/Stefan Klopp and Joern/Lorne as Bern and Stef continue to play more in VRH. Over time, they will move further toward the left.

There's also a BUSH/Arena transition zone, which is a bit blurrier because of the high crossover between the two leagues. Ryan Struck, Andy Kieran, Dylan Hascarl, Brodie Yano, Andrew Likness, Ryan Bateman, Terryn Stenseth, Mitch Zorn & Dane Olsen form the core of this transition zone.

The early one-off and two-off players from the first two seasons get pushed to the top, while more recent one-offs land in the left and bottom left for VRH and bottom centre for BUSH. Also, and this is rather interesting, players with disproportionate experience at the Fauquier rink from 2003-2006 wind up in the bottom right below Oliver since those sessions had an equal number of players who would go with VRH or stay with BUSH later on.

With not only strong connections to BUSH but a fair amount of VRH, Arena, and Interleague play, the software moves Laird Bilinski toward the top.