Excel Final Project
The data I chose to look at are NHL player statistics for the 2025/2026 season. The data includes all games this season up to December 3rd. In looking at this data, I wanted to look at the top 100 players in the league and see where (if any) Bruins players fall into that top 100 and how they compare to the best player.
Pivot Table
To see clearly how many goals each player had scored and which team they were from, I created a pivot table. Through this, I was able to see that two players from the Bruins were in the data set I had chosen- Morgan Geekie and David Pastrnak. From here, I now needed to find out who the top player out of these 100 had the most goals/points, so that I could compare them to the Bruins players
Filter
To see who was the biggest goal scorer, I used the filter function. I turned off all the other goal values and only selected the top two numbers, which were 22 and 20. To my surprise, one of the Bruins Players, Morgan Geekie, was the one who had scored 20 goals this season. The 22-goal scorer was Nathan MacKinnon. This tells me that he is close to being one of the best in the league in terms of goals scored. With this information, I then wanted to find out how many total points each of these players has earned for their team as another determining factor in who is better.
XLOOKUP
To find out how many points each player earned, I used the xlookup function. I wrote in each of their names, and input the data I needed to search through the find the numbers. Surprisingly, Morgan Geekie had actually earned fewer points than David Pastrnak; additionally, Nathan MacKinnon had significantly more points, even though the number of goals is close to David’s. Now I need to find out why this is
In doing a Google search about what this could mean AI overview helped give me an answer. In hockey, points are a sum of not only the number of goals scored, but also how many assists the player has made a well. To determine if the numbers matched up, I did an XLOOKUP for the number of assists for each player. I then added the assists to the goals scored, and sure enough, they did match.
Results
In looking at the data, I have analyzed that Morgan Geekie and David Patrnak are not very goofd campred to Nathan MacKinnon. Additionally, the fact that only two players out of their 23 on the Bruins landed in the top 100 for the number of points and goals scored, insinuates this team isnt as good as some of the other ones in the NHL.
