Hockey-Reference.com Blog

This weekend I added transactions to the player pages. For example, if you go to the bottom of Paul Coffey’s player page you will see a list of the transactions that Coffey was involved in. These transactions were parsed from the notes that appear at the bottom of the player panels in Total Hockey and The NHL Official Guide and Record Book. These transactions are not in full database form yet, so at this point it would not be easy to add them to the league and team pages. This is something I am going to work on, though, so please be patient. Parsing data is an inexact science, so if you see anything odd in the transactions on the player pages then please send me some feedback.

You may have noticed that most of the SR sites have a shiny new logo in the upper left-hand corner. We had been talking about getting nice logos for years, but the formation of the LLC this past December finally gave us the boost to actually get something done. In fact, when we got together at the Baseball Winter Meetings to sign the documents that offically formed the LLC, we met a graphic designer by the name of John Hartwell. John runs a company named Hartwell Studio Works. He has done a lot of sports-related work, including designing the logo of the Birmingham Barons, a minor league baseball team. We have been extremely impressed with John, not only with the finished product, but also with the professionalism he displayed throughout the process.

Our hope is that these new logos further unify the sites. We want people of to think of our web sites as parts of a whole, not distinct entities, and we believe these logos are an important step in that process. Please feel free to let us know what you think (you’re never shy about that, are you?), and as always we thank you for your support of our sites.

I just wanted to post a quick note to let every know that the page sponsorship system is up and (hopefully) running. Before you sponsor any pages you will have to sign up for a free Sports Reference account. If you already have an account through your sponsorship of pages on our other sites, then you can use that login information here as well. Please let me know if you have any questions or run into any problems. Now hurry up and go sponsor the page of your favorite player or team.

I added winning percentage to the league, team, and coach pages last night, and boy has that generated a lot of e-mail. Several people have told me that I should use the following formula to calculate winning percentage:

(a) points / (2 * games_played)

That works just fine through the 1998-99 season, as the league-wide winning percentage is always .500. But in 1999-00 we encounter the abomination known as overtime losses. Using the formula above, the league-wide winning percentage is no longer .500, but .525. When shootouts are introduced in 2005-06, the league-wide winning percentage jumps to .557. Does that seem right to you? Should the league-wide winning percentage really be .557? To me the answer is no. What I do to calculate winning percentage is the following:

(b) (wins + 0.5 * ties) / games_played

Using this formula, the league-wide winning percentage is always .500.

Let me give you an example. In 2007-08, the Columbus Blue Jackets won 34 games, lost 36 games in regulation, and lost 12 more games in overtime or in a shootout. Using formula (a), we get a winning percentage of .488, very close to .500. However, the reality is that the Jackets won 34 games and lost 48 games, so their winning percentage shouldn’t be close to .500. Using formula (b), we get a winning percentage of .415. Think about it: formula (a) says the Jackets won almost as much as they lost, while formula (b) says they lost a good bit more than they won. I think (b) measures what we really mean when we talk about winning percentage.

I’d like to know what you, the users, think. Please let me know if you agree or disagree with me, and, if you do disagree, explain why my line of thinking is wrong.

UPDATE: Taking a page from Solomon’s book, I decided to add both points percentage (formula (a) above) and winning percentage (formula (b) above) to the pages.

UPDATE II: I’m just going to display points percentage for now and see how things shake out over the next few months. Comments are being closed (just for this post).

This site is organic. No, I don’t mean “Whole Foods” organic. I mean this site, like a living organism, will always be in a state of change. For example, since the site was released on Tuesday the following things have been added:

• Team statistics such as power play percentage and penalty killing percentage have been added to the league summaries and team stats pages. (Hat tip to Tom Awad for the data.)
• Franchise head-to-head results have been added.
• Winning percentage was added to the league summaries, team index, franchise indexes, team stats pages, and coach pages.
• Corrected some errors and omissions.

We also have some other things in the works that you will hopefully see within the next six months, including game summaries and full WHA stats.

Please understand that it is impossible for us to implement every suggestion that is sent, and changes won’t necessarily occur as fast and furious as they have this week. However, all of the changes mentioned above were brought about due to user feedback, so please feel free to drop us a line when you have a correction or suggestion. I have been thrilled with the reaction to this site on various blogs and message boards, so I definitely have the motivation to keep this site in a constant state of change. That is, 100% organic.

Hi, my name is Justin Kubatko, Vice President of Sports Reference LLC and the person in charge of creating Hockey-Reference.com. You may already be familiar with the three other sites in the SR family: Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, and Pro-Football-Reference.com. I think it’s fair to say that those sites are the top sites on the Internet for historical baseball, basketball, and football statistics, respectively. We had always wanted to do a hockey site, but things kept getting in the way: we didn’t have enough time, we couldn’t find a good data set, etc. Finally, toward the end of 2007 we negotiated a licensing deal with Dan Diamond and Associates, publishers of Total Hockey and the annual NHL Official Guide and Record Book. Now that we had the data, we had to go about creating the site. This is where it gets boring, so let me just say that lots and lots of Perl scripts were written (and re-written) and lots and lots of errors were corrected. The end result is what you see here today. So what exactly do we have?

• Pages for every player in NHL history, plus pages for some notable non-NHL’ers as well.
• Pages for every team in NHL history, including player stats and game results, plus franchise histories, franchise leaders, and more.
• Pages for every season in NHL history, including league leader boards, player statistics, and more.
• Pages for every coach in NHL history.
• Extensive season, career, active, and yearly leaders boards for both the regular season and playoffs.
• Lists of all major trophy winners, including the Hart Memorial Trophy, the Vezina Trophy, and many others. We also have a list of the members of the Hockey Hall of Fame, the end-of-season NHL All-Star teams, and more.
• A playoffs section with yearly playoff results, leaders, and player statistics.
• The result of every NHL All-Star Game ever played, plus game rosters.
• The results of every NHL amateur and entry draft, plus draft histories for each franchise.
• A research tool called the Player Season Finder that will allow you to create custom season and career leader boards. For example, here’s a list of the most wins by a rookie goaltender in the modern era.
• Fun stuff, like lists of birthdays and birth places.

To paraphrase an old quote, talking about this site is like dancing about architecture, so I would recommend that you quit reading about this site and start getting lost in it. After you have had some time to look around, we would love to hear your comments, either in the comments section below or through our feedback form. We feel that we have set the bar pretty high with our other sports sites, and we want to bring Hockey-Reference.com up to that level as well. With your comments and suggestions, I feel confident that we will. Enjoy the site!