Experience SAP and the Stanley Cup hockey playoff

[Jason_Cao]

I wasn't really in the mood to talk/blog about hockey or my favourite NHL (National Hockey League) team, the Vancouver Canucks, these past couple of weeks. That's because after winning the first 3 games in the playoff series, they went on to lose the next 3. Luckily this was a best out of seven-game series. Last night, the Vancouver Canucks won their last and final game of the series, beating the defending Stanley Cup champs, the Chicago Black Hawks, in a nerve-racking, over-time game to win the series! The playoffs are not over yet. Go Canucks Go! #bandwagonjustgotheavier

Maybe you're not interested in being a Vancouver Canucks fan (like maybe you support the Black Hawks)? Or maybe you're just getting to know about the game of hockey? Either way, I have a feeling you're interested in SAP and how to tame that data-beast. I think you'll agree with me that sports can generate some of the most data and statistics available. Whether this information is valuable or not will depend on your interests or profession.

It's my pleasure to introduce you to another way to experience SAP. And guess what - there's hockey involved! Whether you're a hockey fan or not, the folks from "Experience SAP" bring you the Hockey Experience to let you slice and dice, sort and compare, visualize and reflect on how to get useful information out of seemingly random data.

The Experience SAP team took massive amounts of data (supplied by the National Hockey League Players Association), of players, teams, and games over the years, and put this into SAP BusinessObjects Explorer and SAP BusinessObjects Dashboard. The result is a fun and easy way to look at all the statistics.

I create a head-to-head comparison of some Vancouver Canucks player in the Player Comparison model below:

Once you've gotten new-found knowledge from analyzing players and teams, you can then play a game and determine who you think will gain the most points in tonight's game!

Want dig a little deeper? Click on "Launch Explorer" and do the slice and dice, and all the drill down you need with the entire data set. If you have trouble accessing this set of data, please be patient. I had to try a couple of times myself. (I have a feeling there are a lot of folks hittng this site to update their own hockey Playoff Pool.)

Interested in what the Experience SAP team is up to? Check out the Experience SAP wiki on SCN.

Have fun!