While browsing through various different websites keeping NHL player stats, I realized that the league does a terrible job of keeping updated player positions. I’m not exactly sure how or where they get their data from, but it is quite inaccurate. All sites do distinguish between forwards and defenseman, which is enough for most analysis, but I still think more specific player positions hold value, especially when looking at team depth and related areas. In an attempt to solve this problem, I decided to use k-means clustering on location information within play-by-play data (thanks to Emmanuel Perry and Corsica Hockey for making this cleaned data available to the public). Clustering has been used pretty frequently in hockey analysis, most recently (I believe) to identify different styles of goal scorers by Alex Novet. It has also been used by Ryan Stimson to identify team and player styles with data collected from his passing project and similarly on DTM About Heart’s old blog