Welcome to Hockey-Reference.com
Posted by Justin Kubatko on April 15, 2008
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!
April 15th, 2008 at 6:47 am
This is a great look -- much cleaner and easier to navigate than hockeydb.
Some questions though --
Are you looking at acquiring WHA data at some point?
Are you planning on doing a minor league page like baseball and basketball-reference have (or international tournaments like the Olympics, World Cup, Canada Cup, etc?)
So far so good...I enjoy these sites a lot and am happy hockey has been added.
April 15th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Absolutely love the site, Justin. It\'s fantastic to finally have hockey stats in CSV form.
One thing I\'d like to see is some kind of normalization by era, much like the normalized stats at bb-ref. Of course, I hesitate to even ask for that because you\'ve provided so much already.
Thanks again.
April 15th, 2008 at 10:37 am
Congrats, JK.
April 15th, 2008 at 11:53 am
I\'ve been waiting for this site for a while, and it\'s just what I was hoping. Great job ^_^
April 15th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Well done! Been looking forward to this for a while.
Next up: nascar-reference.com? :)
April 15th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Thank you kindly, gents.
April 15th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Brilliant. Simply brilliant.
Thank you beyond words.
April 15th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Looks great. The thing I would really like to see is in depth game logs for individual players and team game logs (shots for, shots against, # of penalties, penalty mins, power goals, power play opportunities, etc.).
April 15th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
This is awesome - great work. One of the elements of the baseball site I love is the info on hall of famers, and the odds of current players getting into the hall of fame. Any plans to add that at some point?
Again, congrats on the launch and keep up the excellent work!
April 16th, 2008 at 10:52 am
I appreciate the feedback. Three quick answers to questions that have been posed:
(1) Yes.
(2) Possibly.
(3) Yes.
Please understand that this site will always be a work in progress, so you may not see some of these things for a while. However, we will do our best to add things in a timely manner.
April 16th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Outstanding. I\'m thrilled H-R is finally up and running to join the reference site family. Well-done.
April 16th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Adding international data: Canada Cups/Olympics/World Championships would be a good addition, so I second that suggestion.
Eventually, detailed game logs would be great, but I can see that as being a big undertaking.
What about adding a GWG column to the individual game results, right next to the streak column or notes column?
Similarly, could home record and road record columns be added, with updates after each game result? That way someone could look to see how a team is doing at home/road at any point in a season.
April 16th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Love it.
My new reference for hockey. I\'m afraid you\'ve outdone HockeyDB now.
I guess I\'m asking the same question as above...any chance of including individual gamesheets??
Would be unbelievable to see (goals, penalties, attendance, refs, PP%, and individual G/A/+-/PIM).
A lot of work but it would guarantee you be the top name in Hockey research.
April 16th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Amazing work. Thank you.
April 16th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Amazing work, you guys are geniuses!
Thank You!
April 17th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Echoing all the praise - tremendous work, and thank you. 2 requests:
Enhancement request: I would love to see even-strength goals added to individual statistics (and included as a search criteria).
minor Player Search request (btw, this feature is an absolute powerhouse): If I\'m making a request for say, \"Best +/- (>=50) in a season\" - it would be nice to have the default sort criteria be +/- and not have to manually set that.
April 18th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
One thing that doesn\'t work is searching negative plus/minus statistics in Power Play. It leads to an error (probably because of the minus being listed). The site is awesome though -- keep up the great work overall, Justin!
April 20th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Dickie, I fixed the problem with the PSL Finder in Power Play. As you guessed, it was an issue with entering a negative value in the criteria box.
April 22nd, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Awesome site!!
Small question: Can you somehow sort the city of birth places?
April 23rd, 2008 at 9:02 am
When you view the players born in a particular state or province (e.g., Massachusetts), you can click on the headers to sort the table, so just click on "Birth City" to sort that column.
May 13th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Terrific! I've been waiting for this site ever since I came across baseball-reference.com years ago.