Design bench · pick the base figure

Two candidate players, same ice

The figure is a marker — it says “a real shot came from here, and this is what happened.” It is never a claim about how anyone actually stood or moved. So the only thing to judge is whether it reads: at a glance, at small sizes, and in a crowd. Both candidates render the same two real outcomes — saved (shooting) and scored (arms up).

AMascot

Big head, soft shapes, a face. Built to be legible small — the silhouette is a head on a bean, which survives shrinking. Warm, obviously a character, obviously not a claim.

BRetro tabletop

The rod-hockey tin man: flat colour, heavy outline, stiff fused pose, standing on its peg. Reads as a game piece — a built-in admission that it’s a token, not a person.

The crowd test — 35 real shots Devon Levi faced

AMascot
BRetro tabletop
What to look for. Can you tell a save from a goal without reading the legend? Does the figure still say “hockey player” at the smallest size in the ramp? In the crowd, do overlapping figures turn into mush, or do they stack into something you can still count? That last one is where the shot map lives or dies — most of the shots in a real game are far out and small.

Honest about this page: the crowd test uses real shot coordinates from MIN @ BUF, 2023-11-10 — distance from the net and lateral position are the actual recorded values, and near shots are drawn larger because they were closer. The hero row and the size ramp are arranged for comparison, not positioned by data. Nothing here estimates, interpolates, or invents a player’s posture: the two poses encode the two real outcomes and nothing more.