Data Analysis: The Most Foul-Mouthed / Vulgar NHL Fandoms Revealed

Hello David, I hope you had a good weekend. I saw that you have covered a similar story in the past, so I thought you might find our latest data useful.

In connection with the recent start of the 2024-25 NHL season, we have analyzed Reddit threads of all 32 NHL teams’ fans to find out which fans are the most foul-mouthed based on the proportion of swear words used in their communication.

In total, we have analyzed 927,774 comments and we found over 41,000 comments that included profanity.

According to the results of our analysis, the top 10 most foul-mouthed are the fans of the following teams:

1. Vegas Golden Knights – 6.318% of comments contained swear words

2. Dallas Stars – 6.143% of comments contained swear words

3. New York Islanders – 6.139% of comments contained swear words

4. Los Angeles Kings – 5.920% of comments contained swear words

5. Colorado Avalanche – 5.731% of comments contained swear words

6. St. Louis Blues – 5.726% of comments contained swear words

7. Boston Bruins – 5.419% of comments contained swear words

8. Washington Capitals – 5.221% of comments contained swear words

9. Nashville Predators – 5.214% of comments contained swear words

10. Montreal Canadiens – 4.959% of comments contained swear words

On the other hand, the top 5 LEAST foul-mouthed NHL fans turned out to be the fans of:

1. Utah Hockey Club – 2.656% of comments contained swear words

2. San Jose Sharks – 3.006% of comments contained swear words

3. Carolina Hurricanes – 3.140% of comments contained swear words

4. Anaheim Ducks – 3.193% of comments contained swear words

5. Ottawa Senators – 3.467% of comments contained swear words

6. New Jersey Devils – 3.522% of comments contained swear words

To see the full results of the analysis, which include the full breakdown of the data for all 32 NHL fandoms as well as the top 5 most commonly used swear words or the most commonly used swear words per fandom, you can have a look here.

Story credit: CanadaSportsBetting.ca

METHODOLOGY

• Project Description: The goal of this project was to identify which NHL team’s fans use the most swear words. By analyzing the frequency of swear words across subreddit discussions for all 32 NHL teams, we aimed to rank fanbases based on the proportion of profane comments.

Data Collection:

• Comments were scraped from Reddit threads for each team’s subreddit using the Reddit API in Python. The list of subreddits includes dedicated communities for all 32 NHL teams (e.g., r/AnaheimDucks, r/Canucks, etc.).

• The focus remained on recent threads to ensure up-to-date insights in order to represent a broad range of discussions.

• In total, 927,774 comments were collected.

Data Transformation:

• At first, the data was cleaned by filtering out irrelevant comments, spam, and bot-generated content.

• Subsequently, profane comments were identified by checking for the presence of swear words.

• The list of swear words was sourced from a comprehensive compilation available on Wikipedia.

• The frequency of profane comments was normalized, reporting results per 100 comments to allow fair comparison across fanbases of different sizes.

Data Analysis:

• The percentage of comments containing profane language was calculated for each team’s subreddit.