Sports Reference Blog

Archive for the 'Hockey-Reference.com' Category

Sports Reference adds a DevOps Engineer

10th November 2020

Nick Pazoles has joined Sports Reference as a DevOps engineer. Nick previously worked for Cleo in the Chicagoland area and is the first White Sox and University of Michigan football fan on staff.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference, CFB at Sports Reference, Expire30d, FBref, Hockey-Reference.com, Pro-Football-Reference.com | Comments Off on Sports Reference adds a DevOps Engineer

Sports Reference Adds Two

3rd November 2020

I'm pleased to announce that Charlotte Eisenberg and Adam Darowski have joined Sports Reference in full-time roles.

Charlotte is joining us as a Data Developer working on baseball, basketball and hockey. She was an intern with Sports Reference previously and also spent a year with the Texas Rangers front office.

Adam is our new Head of User Experience. He has been a long-time consultant for Sports Reference and is responsible for the responsive redesign we undertook in 2016-17 and the design of our new Stathead service. You can follow him on twitter @baseballtwit.

In another move, Jaclyn Mahoney has been promoted from Data Developer and will now manage our Business Intelligence efforts.

About Sports Reference.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference, CFB at Sports Reference, expire21d, General, Hockey-Reference.com, Stathead | Comments Off on Sports Reference Adds Two

Annual Stathead Subscriptions Now Available!

29th October 2020

By popular demand, we're thrilled to announce that annual Stathead subscriptions are now available at Stathead.com. Stathead is the premier set of sports research tools available to the public and is available for Baseball, Basketball, Football & Hockey. Monthly subscriptions, which are $8/month for a single sport and $16/month for all sports also remain available. The new annual subscriptions are priced to give users who choose them two months for free: $80/year for a single sport or $160/year for all sports. If you're a current subscriber and wish to change from monthly to annual, you may do so here. To learn more about Stathead, please visit here.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, Features, Hockey-Reference.com, Pro-Football-Reference.com, Stathead | 2 Comments »

Announcing Hockey Stathead

25th June 2020

A couple months ago, Sports-Reference introduced Stathead and debuted the first set of tools, focused on baseball. Today we're proud to announce that Stathead service is expanding to hockey!

If you are unfamiliar with Stathead, it is the most powerful set of sports research tools on the Internet. With a subscription to Stathead, you can dig through Hockey Reference's massive database of statistics, box scores, and individual goals to answer complex questions in a matter of seconds. Best of all, your first month is free!

The tools that comprise Stathead are already used widely by researchers, broadcasters, journalists, influencers, gamblers, and more. Now, we want to put the power of Stathead in your hands. Here's a rundown of the tools that will be available with a Hockey Stathead subscription: Read the rest of this entry

Posted in Announcement, Hockey-Reference.com, Stathead | 2 Comments »

Play Index Tools are Moving to Stathead.com

13th May 2020

The Play Index first launched on Baseball-Reference.com over thirteen years ago and has been one of the most used research tools for baseball ever since. Many of these tools have been recreated on our Basketball, Football, Hockey and College sites over the last twelve years, and, likewise, they have earned a dedicated user base of their own. Our Baseball Play Index was always a subscription product, but we never applied that model to the other sports' tools. It was always our intention to charge for these products, but for a variety of reasons that never happened.

The Sports Reference sites have continued to grow in traffic and advertising revenue over that time to the extent that the Play Index and our ad-free options are a very, very small portion of our revenue. Most of that is on us, as we have not done a great job of promoting and marketing tools that are highly valued by a dedicated group of users. The Basketball, Football, Hockey, and College Play Indexes represent well under 1% of our revenue. In addition, the Play Index tools are complicated to maintain and manage, and quite frankly are a money-loser for us at this time. It's well past time for us to re-think how these tools are positioned within our constellation of sites.

While Sports Reference is doing well overall, I'm not comfortable with having so much of our revenue dependent on advertising. We are very beholden to search engines continuing to send us traffic, and likewise the ad market can be fickle and difficult for a small to medium size operator to navigate. With the economic downturn currently taking place, our ad revenue is down significantly as well.

In addition, advertising on the sites does not make it easier for you to answer the questions you have. This is our primary mission. We maintain a relatively low level of advertising on the sites (at least compared to your regional newspaper), and we are loathe to add additional advertising units or more intrusive units. Some of you may use an ad blocker, in which case we are making no money from your use of the site at all, and the audience for our ad-free product has proven to be very small as well.

A subscription model aligns our interests much better with our users' interests as well. I realize that users are being asked to sign up for lots of subscriptions these days, but we feel the tools within the Play Index are so specialized and useful that they warrant a paywall.

So we are making some changes. The Play Index for each site will be moving to Stathead.com. Stathead.com will become the center for all of our subscription products. We expect these products to include tools and information beyond just a redesigned set of Play Index tools. This won't happen all at once, but we've started with baseball and are proceeding through the remainder of our sports over the next two months. Also, we have ended our dedicated ad-free product and instead Stathead memberships will have ad-free built-in. There just aren't enough users to justify a separate ad-free product. These changes will began in April for baseball and will be followed by Hockey in May, Basketball and probably Football in June and then College over the summer.

You can try out Stathead Baseball now. If you do a little digging, you will see that we are charging $8/month for a single sport and subscribing to all sports will cost $16/month. We realize moving from free to $8/month is a big ask, but we feel the tools provide a great deal of value and also believe that we can't continue to support the products without a viable revenue stream.

During the deployment of these changes, the existing Play Indexes will remain free.

--sean forman

Posted in Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference, CFB at Sports Reference, Hockey-Reference.com, Play Index, Pro-Football-Reference.com, Uncategorized | 20 Comments »

Row Isolation Added to Sports-Reference Sites

16th October 2019

Sports-Reference has added a feature to tables that will make it a lot easier to compare teams and players in an easily scannable fashion. Now, when you select a row on a table, a popup will appear with a button: "Show Only Selected Rows". Highlight the rows you want to isolate, and once you're ready, click the button. The site will then fade out the unselected rows so the only rows displayed are the ones you highlighted. If you want to return to viewing the full table, just click on the "Show All Rows" button.

This feature applies to any tables that don't have row summing capabilities. This will work on both desktop and mobile. You can see a video of the feature in action at Baseball-Reference's Twitter account. You can contact us through our feedback form if you have any questions or suggestions.

Posted in Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference, CFB at Sports Reference, FBref, Features, General, Hockey-Reference.com, Pro-Football-Reference.com, Tips and Tricks | 2 Comments »

Preseason Over/Unders and Stanley Cup Odds Added to Hockey Reference

18th July 2019

Hockey Reference has added preseason Stanley Cup odds back to 1985 and over/unders on point totals back to 2011. Looking at the 2018-19 preseason, the eventual champion St. Louis Blues had +3000 odds to win the Stanley Cup, 10th-best in the league. The New York Islanders were tied for 2nd-longest odds to win the Stanley Cup at +20000, and would go on to make the second round of the Eastern Conference playoffs. The Islanders finished the regular season with 103 points, safely exceeding their preseason over/under set at 82.5.

We again thank SportsOddsHistory.com for providing us with the historical data for this addition, as well as similar preseason odds additions on Basketball Reference, Pro Football Reference, and our college sites. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

Posted in Announcement, Data, Features, Hockey-Reference.com | 3 Comments »

Team Analytics Added to Hockey-Reference Season Pages

26th February 2019

Hockey-Reference has added a Team Analytics table to the 2016-17, 2017-18 and 2018-19 season pages. This table shows Corsi on the team level in 5-on-5 situations, as well as possession quality and scoring chance data. We are also including this information on team pages so you can quickly see how the team compared to the league average in those measurements. We thank War on Ice for defining expected goals, scoring chances and high danger scoring chances, and you can read more about those definitions in our Hockey-Reference Advanced Statistic Glossary.

Looking at the 2018-19 table, we can see that the Washington Capitals are currently leading in Actual Goal Differential minus Expected Goal Differential, at +36. A positive differential would indicate a team is converting or stopping a larger amount of good chances compared to league average. Meanwhile, the Minnesota Wild find themselves at -27, currently the lowest differential. A negative differential would indicate a team is getting more good chances, but not converting or is allowing more than league norms. When looking at high-danger scoring chances, the Philadelphia Flyers and Florida Panthers have done the best at converting those into goals, while the Arizona Coyotes are the only team who has converted less than 10% of high-danger scoring chances into goals so far.

Posted in Advanced Stats, Announcement, Features, Hockey-Reference.com | Comments Off on Team Analytics Added to Hockey-Reference Season Pages

Hockey-Reference Team Game Finder Adds “Made Playoffs” Filter

23rd January 2019

One of the tools in Hockey-Reference's Play Index is the Team Game Finder, and a new feature we've added to that form is a filter for teams who made or missed the playoffs in a given season. With this addition, you can now more easily find that the 1992-93 Philadelphia Flyers are the highest Modern Era goal-scoring team to miss out on the playoffs, or that the 1985-86 Winnipeg Jets made the playoffs with a -77 goal differential, worst in NHL history among playoff teams.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

Posted in Announcement, History, Hockey-Reference.com, Play Index, Playoffs | 3 Comments »

Introducing the Hockey-Reference Goal Finder

30th October 2018

Hockey-Reference's Play Index already has a variety of tools at your disposal, such as our Game Finders, our Advanced Stats Finders and our Player Comparison Finder. We have now added a Player Goal Finder to our Play Index section.

The Goal Finder can search through goals scored with a wide selection of filters for analysis. Some examples of how the goals can be searched include home or away, even strength, power play or short-handed, and unassisted or assisted. You can also specify searches limited to a franchise, to an individual scorer, and to an individual goalie.

For example, let's say you want all Alex Ovechkin regular season goals scored on Cam Ward. The ensuing result will show each of those goals, when in the game it was scored, what the game situation was and the players who assisted if applicable.

The Goal Finder also works for searching for total goals in a certain situation. For example, if you were interested in Roberto Luongo and who scored the most playoff goals on him during his career, the Goal Finder will find that for you. (Spoiler alert: Blackhawks occupy the top two spots.)

You can also search specifically for go-ahead or game-tying goals. No surprise to hockey fans that Claude Lemieux, an ordinary regular-season performer, is tied for the most go-ahead playoff goals in the 3rd Period or OT.

You can also search for goals by time. Mark Messier's 13 goals in the opening minute of play are the most. Wayne Gretzky's 70 goals in the final minute of the 3rd period are the most. But only two of The Great One's goals in the final minute of the 3rd put his team in the lead. Mark Recchi has the most of those, with 5.

And just for fun, the most frivolous search possible: Wayne Gretzky has the record with 10 goals scored on his birthday.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

Posted in Announcement, Features, Hockey-Reference.com, Play Index | 3 Comments »