Skip to main content

Bravo, NHL

Sure, most folks these days are waxing poetic about the NHL's great fortune in hosting a Detroit vs. Pittsburgh Stanley Cup Final, and yes, I'm looking forward to a dynamic series as much as the next fan. Something over at NHL.com caught my eye today, however, and it makes me want to give the crew over there a standing ovation.

Until now, if you were to comb through their online stats, say be sorting all players in 2007-8 based on goals scored, as you surfed from one page to the next (since each page presents 30 players) the columns would shift around, a deliberate attempt to prevent people from automatically scraping that data off the website. The work could still be done, but it had to be done so by hand (or especially clever scripting), and it was a brutally unnecessary pain in the butt. Going through all the skaters, for example, involved 29 pages that would have to be copied, pasted, and edited in Excel to come up with one coherent list.

Today, while grabbing some info for a look at how faceoffs will play a role in the Stanley Cup Finals (curse you, Alan Ryder, for beating me to the punch!), I needed to gather some information, and noticed some marginal improvements to the NHL stats pages. First off, they've provided easy links at the top of the page to switch between a look at various key stats, like Goals, or Plus/Minus. Previously, you had to navigate back to the main page and try a new query from there. The biggest change, however, is that as you scroll through the listings page by page, the columns no longer shift around! The old "Copy & Paste" is all I needed to seamlessly load up my data cart and happily truck down Analytical Avenue.

Over the last couple months I've had to rebuild a lot of my data after I'd hosed my previous PC, and this subtle change will make that task much easier. Thanks, NHL geeks; it's greatly appreciated.

Popular posts from this blog

My goals for 2011: Make sports blogging pay off

In my never-ending quest to figure out a model for making what is currently my hobby & passion into something bringing in at least a side income, I've decided to set a couple goals for myself to complete during the rest of 2011. Simply put, I plan to publish two products over the next few months, which I hope will provide real value to hockey fans, and that they'll be willing to pay for. Will it succeed? Will it fail? The only way to know is to put my nose to the grindstone and get these two things done (I'll keep the details under my hat for now). The important thing to note is that these efforts are in addition to anything I'm doing over at OTF . Taking away what we're doing over there and asking people to pay for it is a surefire lose-lose all the way around, because if there's anything we've learned over the last few years, it's that people love to read about sports, but only for free. I'm also optimistic about Hockey Gea...

My Letter To Gary

Dear Mr. Bettman, When the announcement was made a few weeks ago that Jim Balsillie had entered into an agreement to purchase the Nashville Predators, speculation immediately began that a relocation to South Ontario would come in short order, and many hockey fans in the Nashville area jumped to the conclusion that we'd see a "Major League" scenario, whereby the new owner would deliberately undermine local support of the team so as to trigger the escape clause in the team's arena lease. As for myself, I decided to give Mr. Balsillie the benefit of the doubt - surely as a lifelong hockey fan and player, he wouldn't do such a thing after acquiring one of the best young teams in the game, with the Stanley Cup potentially within reach. I've waited and watched over recent weeks, and was initially encouraged by Balsillie's promise to field a competitive team, giving GM David Poile an ample budget to put together the best team possible. His legal representative ...

Cheer up, it's the holidays...

Why is it that various media outlets continue trying to put their own spin on the "what's wrong with the NHL" story? Our latest example comes from The Hockey News , in a piece by Jay Greenburg entitled, "Excitement Level On The Decline." Take the opening sentence: Attendance is down and yet still up from before the lockout, leaving it arguable whether buildings in New Jersey and Florida are half-full or half empty. It's no surprise that attendance is down from last season, particularly if you compare the first half of 2005-06 to the first half of this year. Coming out of the lockout, there were legions of fans starved to see the on-ice product, particularly in light of the massive rule changes. This year is more indicative of business as usual, so the fact that the league is above pre-lockout levels is a positive. Toss in the projection that overall revenues are increasing despite a 1% decrease in attendance, and I'd say that paying fans have come back ...