Oh, boy, dear readers, have we an excellent series for you. I am pleased to bring you content from the best podcast going: Spittin Chiclets.
For those unaware, Spittin Chiclets is a masterpiece of NHL content. The fearless four hosts and producers, RA, Ryan Whitney, Biz, and Grinelli, bring legendary NHL players, coaches, general managers and more to the world, all the while providing unbeatable banter.
This post, and those that follow, are ’lil labors of love, veritable hockey homages. Indeed, what else would drive a beast to profile the entire history of the show’s guests?!?
Your author never made it to the show, but please accept this as much humble offering to the alter of ice. The final post of the series will bring the underlying code to the party. For most readers I suspect the plots and tables will be far more interesting.
Spittin Chiclets Growth: #inOne
BOOM BABY. Here are facts ma’am. Look at the monster growth in the Spittin Chiclets subscribers!
Since Biz joined in April 2018, subscribers are up more than 120,000. The real #rocket phase was from October 2018 - April 2019. I think we can even see the early stages of the Halifax Hike (Crosby + MacKinnon bump from a few weeks ago).
The boys just notched episode 200 so my congratulations and please keep the hits coming.
Guests on the Show…Where, How, Why?
The whole point of this adventure in part 1 is to provide an introduction to the history of Chiclets guests. We will start with the most important stuff…where do these guys come from?
You’ll see below the map that there have been guest from outside North America, but to keep it manageable, we look only at the North American WONDER FELLAs which have made it to the pod. It’s also worth noting that we only included cities with more than one visitor.
Although Boston and Toronto lead the list with 5 guests a piece, we can see the Canadian dominance. Thanks of course to Biz for putting AZ on the map.
Above we promised the how and why, not just the where…through the highways and byways of the internet, we were able to husband data to our cause and look through to the underlying Chiclets guest profile to see just exactly what these folks are made of. Without further ado, we present below 4 key items which describe the history of guests.
Country, draft round, position, and handedness. What else could you want?!? We close the post with observations on each:
- Country: well, we already covered that above
- Draft round: obviously some sample bias here as the players most likely to be interviewed on Spittin Chiclets are those with solid careers, and those with solid careers are more likely (on average people, keep your shit together) to go in early draft rounds. I do love, though, that the undrafted players are high on the list!
- Position: Pretty amazing the distribution here. Actually, the thing that stands out is what an incredible job the guys have done getting players from all over the ice. Just as we learned with Sean Burke, there are real and important differences in perspective, depending on the position.
- Shoots: bring it out for the leftys!
Thanks for tuning in everyone. There is more good stuff to come, including Chiclets’ guests lifetime stats and some statistical work showing just who the most impressive guests are.