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2019/20 for Exeter Chiefs in the Gallagher Premiership (so far) - featuring some TREEMAPS!!!

With the Gallagher Premiership returning from its extended break due to the Coronavirus this weekend I've dusted off some player stats for the first 13 rounds of the 2019/20 season.

As part of moving from 'analyst of data' to 'Data Scientist' I used a new tool (or rather perfect slightly something I've been playing with for a while), I've been toying with the R package "treemapify" to make some visualisations for a few months now and thought this might be a good use for them. 

Treemaps are very simple - the bigger the area the bigger the proportion of a total made up by that element. 

I think Rob Baxter's preference would be defence first so the first graphic shows the number of tackles made in the Premiership so far by each Chiefs player who has featured (nb this excludes missed tackles). 
Unsurprisingly the largest areas are those forwards who play the most and its reflective of how little the likes of Henry Slade and Jack Nowell have featured this season. 
Sam Simmonds has made the most tackles with 163 (with just 8 missed - he also has the highest tackle success rate of any player who has played for more than 30 mins), with Jonny Hill (125), Jacques Vermeulen (123), Jannes Kirsten (120) and Dave Ewers (119) also having made over 100 tackles. 
Notably both the fly halves (Gareth Steenson and Joe Simmonds) feature quite strongly for the backs, while the departed trio of Sam Hill, Nic White and Matt Kvesic have made significant contributions.
Putting the boot on the other statistical foot let's look at some attacking measures firstly carries made by each player. 
The incredible Sam Simmonds is once again leading the way and having carried 135 times, he's some way ahead of the others with Dave Ewers (104) and Tom O'Flaherty (102) the only other Chiefs playes to have carried 100 times so far in the Gallagher Premiership. Once again the departed trio of Sam Hill, Nic White and Matt Kvesic contributions to the first half of the season should not be downplayed. 
And finally this chart shows the metres gained in those carries. Suddenly the wingers & full backs start to feature with Tom O'Flaherty's 589 metres leading the way. Amazingly for a number 8 that man Sam Simmonds is in third place for metres gained.  
Technical bit:
This was compiled in R and the graphics are produced using Treemapify. In terms of the how to replicate this Treemapify documentation is excellent and really useful and possibly clear than my own code. However I've produced an extract of the code used for the tackles below

#aes for area, the fill colour (in this case based on the players most common position played in) and what I'm using as the labels
tacks_treemap <- ggplot(chiefs, aes(area=tacklesmade,fill=mode_pos,label=PLAYER))+
  #treemap object
  geom_treemap()+
  #add and format the label text (player names)
  geom_treemap_text(fontface = "italic", colour = "white", place = "centre",
                    grow = TRUE)+
  #nb this is my own theme object that I've created
  bs_tree_theme+
  #labels for the chart
  labs(title="Exeter Chiefs tackles made by player",subtitle='Gallagher Premiership 2019/20',
       fill = "Position")

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