NHL Sentiment Analysis

Author

Brooke Aho

CBS Sports - NHL Sentiment Analysis

Over the past few seasons, CBS Sports experts and analysts have developed what they call “NHL Power Rankings”. Each season, they give their two cents on what teams are looking good and those that are not doing so hot. Typically this is done in the middle of the season, prior to playoffs and includes a short review of how they predict the team will do given their current circumstances.

I decided to use the data to get a better understanding of how the analysts’ sentiment differs between the eastern vs. western NHL conferences. I will answer 3 questions being:

  1. What positive and negative words are used the most frequently to describe the eastern vs. western conferences?
  2. In what years have CBS analysts been most optimistic about the eastern conference? What about the western?
  3. How did the emotional sentiment counts of review words differ for each conference?

Collecting the Data

In order to gather the data I needed to make my analysis, I scraped it from the CBS website. I was able to go back 9 years and collect the data from the 2015-2016, 2016-2017, 2017-2018, 2018-2019, 2019-2020, 2020-2021, 2021-2022, 2022-2023, and 2023-2024 seasons. From the websites, I simply needed to collect: team name and the review of the team performance.

However, I wanted to compare the different conferences and divisions in my analysis, so I did some of my own data wrangling and added a few extra columns. First, I simply added which season the ranking and review was from (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, or 2023). Then, I created new 2 more new columns indicating whether or not each team is in the eastern or western conference and then which division they are a part of - central, metropolitan, atlantic, or pacific.

Data Dictionary

  • Team Name

  • Review

  • Page ID (URL)

  • Year

  • Conference

  • Division

Analysis

Question 1

What positive and negative words are used the most frequently to describe the eastern vs. western conferences?

In the eastern conference, the words: “won”, “top”, and “strong” were used the most for positive words, whereas the words: “bad”, “injury”, and “lost” were used the most for negative words. For the western conference, the words: “top”, “win”, and “talent” were used most frequently as positive, while the words: “hard”, “injury”, “losing”, and “bad” were used a lot for negative.

Question 2

In what years have CBS analysts been most optimistic about the eastern conference? What about the western?

In years the years 2015, 2017, and 2023, the total positivity score was much higher for the eastern conference than the western. On the other hand, in 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021, the western conference had a higher positivity score. In 2022, the scores were pretty even. From the visual, we see that the level of positivity goes back and forth pretty regularly between seasons; neither the eastern nor western conference consistently has a higher positivity score for more than 3 consecutive seasons.

Question 3

How did the emotional sentiment counts of review words differ for each conference?

Eastern is above Western for every emotional score except for surprise. It is noticeably higher in anticipation and trust. I find it interesting that it is slightly higher for various opposite emotions like both positive and negative, as well as anger and joy.