FantasyHockey

Chris Adoretti
December 10, 2010

Attach:adoretti_c_nhlproject_writeup.pdf

Overview

This project is an automated Fantasy Hockey Draft picker. It implements draft picks based on the minmax algorithm and a customizable player rating heuristic. This heuristic relies on stats parsed from the nhl.com website.

Screenshot

Concepts Demonstrated

Minmax algorithm is used to sort players
Heuristic based calculation is used to rate players as the user sees fit.

Innovation

My project is innovative in that it helps put some automated math behind a normally human instinct based process of following sports and guessing for draft picks, based on feelings about who would do best. This project relies on stats from nhl.com, and those stats can be used to pick players best suited for who the user believes would win in a fantasy league based on previous performance numbers.

Technology Used Block Diagram

Evaluation of Results

This project accomplished a solid system for generating draft picks based on virtually any statistical ranking on an individual player basis. It works well, and is customizable to any players likings. I evaluate the results on the ability to tailor the results to what the user wants, and this excels at that.

Additional Remarks

This project was intriguing to me. I came up with a lot of lofty ideas that would be cool to implement in the future, but I simply didn't have time for. I'd like to make the ranking system selectable on a your team their team basis, also offering the traditional pick ranking to be used for the opposing teams and your own heuristic for yours, or the other way around. Also, I'd like to implement something similar to Bruce and Chris's project where they select players manually for their team, but instead it would allow you to pull the picks from an actual fantasy league website, or at least allow you to input the picks of others, so that it could tell you exactly what to pick given your heuristic AND the real time available players.