Yesterday, I described the sources of information I use for the @NLLFactOfTheDay twitter account. In this (much shorter) article, I discuss how I use all that information to create the facts that I publish.

Putting it all together

Now that I have all of this information, I start combing through for the actual facts. When Teddy Jenner interviewed me on the Off the Crossebar radio show, he referred to me as some kind of stats guru, and others have said similar things. While I greatly appreciate these compliments, let me set the record straight – I’m no savant. I don’t just know all of this stuff. I don’t have millions of stats memorized and running through my head for instant retrieval. At the risk of sounding immodest, I do have a pretty good memory for trivia and such, and I do have a Bachelor of Math degree (though in computer science, not statistics) so I understand the stats, but what I am good at is hunting for anomalies.

If I see a column of numbers that looks like “1, 2, 2, 1, 3, 0, 8, 1, 2”, I want to find out about that 8 and see what it means and if it’s interesting or not. I’ll sort one list by different values (eg. list of teams sorted by PP goals per game and then sorted by SH goals per game) and see if a team stays in the same position, or moves from top to bottom or vice versa. Maybe the league-leading team is in last place in some statistic, or the last-place team is leading in something. I look over the season records for repeated names. Maybe a player set two season records in the same season, or one person holds 8 of the top 10 records in some stat.

I look at the dates that significant events happened to see if there are any coincidences there. I look at the best seasons in different stats (eg. most goals in a season in the league – Athan Iannucci, 71) and for individual teams (eg. most penalty minutes in a season for the Roughnecks – Geoff Snider, 74). I look at career stats for the league (eg. most career goals in the league – John Tavares, 778) or a particular team (eg. most career assists on the Knighthawks – Shawn Williams, 491). I look at team stats (eg. most goals scored in home games – Philadelphia, 2151) and franchise records (eg. fewest goals scored by the Roughnecks in a game – 6, twice). I look at game, team, season, and league attendance records, both total and average.

Occasionally I think about a particular obscure statistic and look deeper into that. Recently, it was how often teams played two overtime games in a single weekend. I did some digging and came up with a few facts about that.

Once I’ve got a few facts I want to publish, I use a web app called HootSuite to schedule them. It allows me to write up the tweet, pick which account to use (mine or @NLLFactOfTheDay), and pick a date/time for the tweet to be sent out. I originally started tweeting at 11:00am, but then for some reason I have since forgotten, changed to 3:00pm.

Now that I’ve written it all down, it sounds like a lot of work, but it’s really not – now that I have the infrastructure in place. Whenever I come across an interesting stat, I fire up HootSuite and add it to the list of scheduled tweets – that takes a minute or two, tops. Once or twice a week, I make a point of spending 15-20 minutes adding new ones, so I usually have about a week’s worth done ahead of time. If I went off the grid right now, you’d still be seeing a tweet every day at 3pm for another 8 or 9 days. If something interesting comes up in the meantime, I can reschedule upcoming tweets to add in a more timely one. The hardest parts now are (a) try not to repeat any facts I’ve published before, and (b) to squash all the information down into 140 characters.

So that’s pretty much it – that’s how the magic happens. I say that facetiously, because there’s no magic here. I’m just a stats geek that enjoys sharing the facts that I find with others that might also be interested. For the cynics among you, I’m not doing this for the money – I haven’t made a dime off of this little project. In fact, I’m not sure how I could monetize it even if I wanted to. It’s just fun to come up with these things, fun to get replies from people asking questions about them, and fun to see that others enjoyed them enough to retweet them. If you follow, thanks, and I hope you enjoy reading these facts as much as I enjoy finding them.