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.
The most foul-mouthed fandoms are ranked in the interactive table below:
As can be seen above, the fans of Vegas Golden Knights turned out to be the most foul-mouthed with 6.32% of their comments including profanities.
Dallas Stars (6.143% of comments include profanities) and New York Islanders (6.139% of comments include profanities) are in second and third place, respectively.
On the other hand, the least foul-mouthed NHL fandoms turned out to be Utah Hockey Club fans with only 2.66% of their comments including profanities, followed by San Jose Sharks with only 3.01% of their comments including swear words.
In the table below you can find the top 5 most used swear words uncovered by the analysis:
Lastly, in the table below you can see the most commonly used profanities per fandom:
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.
