Sports Reference Blog
Every Hat Trick in NHL History Added to Hockey Reference
Posted by Mike Lynch on September 5, 2017
We're happy to announce that you can now find every Hat Trick in NHL history on Hockey Reference. We have integrated these additions across many sections of the site.
For instance, in our Leaders section, we have added various Hat Trick leaderboards such as all-time career leaders, all-time postseason leaders, yearly Top 10s and single-season leaders.
Additionally, on season pages we have added a tab under the "skaters" section that includes all of the Hat Tricks in that season. For instance, this link will show you all 133 Hat Tricks in 1980-81. Similarly, our postseason pages also now have every Hat Trick in those playoffs listed under the "skaters" tab.
You can also find Hat Trick information specific to your favorite team. We have a page for every franchise in NHL history. From there, you can select any team. For instance, here's the Philadelphia Flyers franchise history. Under the "more" tab all the way on the right side of the "Flyers Franchise Index" is a dropdown. Click on Hat Tricks to see every Hat Trick in Flyers history.
We also have "Leaders" pages for each franchise. So you can see, for instance, that Tim Kerr is the Flyers all-time leader with 17 Hat Tricks and that his 5 Hat Tricks in 1984-85 are also a franchise record.
If you visit Kerr's player page, you'll notice that one of his stats tables as you scroll down the page is a list of all 20 of his career Hat Tricks. His 3 postseason Hat Tricks are indicated with an asterisk.
Team year pages, like the 1984-85 Flyers, also have tables listing all Hat Tricks. For instance, here's the 14 Hat Tricks by the 1984-85 Flyers, including two in the Stanley Cup Playoffs denoted with an asterisk.
In addition to having this information for all active franchises, we even have all the Hat Tricks for defunct franchises you might think we're making up, such as the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Montreal Maroons.
We would like to thank several fellow members of the Society for International Hockey Research for their help in completing this endeavor: Tim Beever, Kevin Vautour and Eric Hornick. Without their valuable contributions, we might still be pulling out our collective hair trying to find elusive Boston Bruins Hat Tricks. We'd also like to thank our intern Isaac Spear for collating this massive amount of information into something we could insert into our database.
In addition, we'd like to thank Scott Surgent for his contribution of all-time WHA hat tricks. Scott is author of the World Hockey Association Factbook.
We hope you enjoy this new addition. Please let us know if you see any issues or have any questions.
Just a quick word on the process we used.
1. compiled data from media guides. Most franchises had their all-time hat tricks listed in their media guides.
2. Notably missing were the Bruins and Flames. We got the Flames from various people who had historical media guides. We also got the Bruins back to the 80s thanks to Doug Reynolds and others.
3. We were able to track down a Cleveland Barons media guide to help with their hat tricks.
4. This left defunct franchises from the 20s to 40s and old Bruins games. To get these we searched for all 3+ goal games for the teams and then set our interns on Newspapers.com and searched for a game account for every game that could have had a hat trick. This list was whittled down a bit as a handful of teams listed opponent hat tricks in their media guides, but it still involved hand checking nearly 2,000 games.
You do amazing work. Hopefully, the NHL will make good on their promise to post game summaries for every game in history soon so that your research won't have to be so intense in the future.
[…] Every Hat Trick in NHL History Added to Hockey Reference […]
Just following up - while the NHL may not have made a public announcement, it looks like game summaries are now available for most of its history. I found game summaries going back as far as the 20s that definitely weren't there a month or two ago.
Will you be adding boxscores for every season now that the NHL has published them?