Free NHL stats??

January 17, 2008 10:49 AM

I want NHL (2007/08) stats. I want as much data as I can get my hands on, in a nice, easily parsed format. But I don't really want to pay for it. Can you help me find this data on the cheap?

The downloadable stats here look like they'd be perfect. I'm not so keen on paying $89/year for them, however.

I don't suppose anyone knows where I could find this data for free?

My goal is to get these stats in a MySQL database, and I want to get them in there with as little effort as possible. As the season progress, I'll be updating the database, most likely on a daily basis. Obviously, NHL stats are available from every major sports news source, but they're usually buried in individual site pages.

If it comes down to it, I'll probably just either pony up the $$ to get them in .csv, or write something up that will scrape the boxscores/logs available on tsn.ca for every game. I am a software developer, so that's within my talents, but it just seems like... work. I'm also lazy, and I figure someone, somewhere has already done this work, and has made it publicly available... but where? Google is failing me. Unless someone else has a better idea...

On a related note, in case I'm going to have to do it myself - anyone have any strategies for easy page scraping? Any specific Perl or Python libraries I should look into?

posted by cgg to sports, hobbies, & recreation (6 comments total)

How much better could your site be that the NHL Super Stat Machine?

http://www.nhl.com/superstats/

It's unbelievably detailed and has 10 years of interactive stats for every player and team.
posted by zephyr_words at 11:18 AM on January 17, 2008

Oh, I meant to put this in too. If you are set in doing this I think this site would basically do what you're looking for: http://www.sportsinteractive.com/Stats.asp?SportID=1

It's free and everything is at least in a CSV so you'd be able to parse it.
posted by zephyr_words at 11:20 AM on January 17, 2008

Don't worry, i'm not trying to make a stat site better than any of the others out there. This is more for my own personal project and curiosity.

And yes, the sportsinteractive link is the one I posted in the original question. The stats they give away for free are rather limited, and only list player names, number of games played, goals and assists.
posted by cgg at 11:29 AM on January 17, 2008

Ahh, I didn't even look - sorry about that. Good luck getting the information. Maybe send an email to the guy or team that runs hockeydb.com ? He must have an interesting way of getting data, I can't imagine doing that whole site by hand.
posted by zephyr_words at 12:26 PM on January 17, 2008

I know this isn't NHL specific, but the MLB Baseball equivalent is VERY extensive at http://baseball1.com/. The data is current through the 2007 season, and is available in both CSV & Access formats.

There is an NFL online site at Football but I don't think the data is download able.
posted by GurnB at 12:27 PM on January 17, 2008 [1 favorite]

I've done this sort of thing with baseball stats. I took my stats from mlb.com into a .csv file and then loaded that file into a MySQL database. Making a perl script to grab what you need and format it as you like isn't too hard -- I was able to do it with no prior perl experience. As a software developer, this should be a piece of cake for you.

Basically, you want to load every URL of the type

http://www.nhl.com/nhlstats/app?service=page&page=Stats&fetchKey=20082ALLSASAll&viewName=summary&sort=points&pg=1

looping through the part in bold. Right now, there's 26 total pages to this on nhl.com. So if you can set something up with perl to load these pages and parse them, you should be good to go.
posted by kjackelen05 at 9:37 PM on January 17, 2008