The goal of the Hockey Summary Project is to compile hockey summaries in a database format and to provide this research to all who want it in a platform independant package. The researcher will be able to sort and manipulate the data from their own hard drive without the need to be connected to the internet.
Similar in spirit to baseball's Retrosheet project, HSP was organized in January 2001 and we now have over 16,500 NHL game summaries in our archives.
Concurrent with the gathering of paper are our efforts to get the data from the paper and into a consistant electronic format, then into a database.
The HSP has a mailing list available through Yahoo! Groups. We are always looking for data entry volunteers and people with computer programming and database knowledge to help us.
List members can drop by the files section to obtain the game results of almost every NHL game ever played and a few other goodies.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hockey_summary_project/The goal of this project is to be much more than a collection of static unofficial games summaries. However, we would like to share with you a few interesting summaries as we come across them from the archives.
Thanks to the generous donations of Ernie Fitzsimmons, Rick Ambrozic, Karl-Eric Reif and Wilbrod Despres we now have summaries available for almost all NHL seasons from 1960 to 1998. We anticipate adding summaries from the 1987-88 and 1988-89 seasons very shortly. We have managed to gather electronic copies of game summaries from 1998 to the present through various internet sources.
If you need a specific game summary for research purposes drop us an e-mail and we will do our best to send out an electronic copy to you.
All NHL results from 1917 to the present day can be found at Randy Rokosz's Shrp Sports Site.
Randy has offered us some space on his site to keep our larger files and we encourage you to check out the HSP page on Randy's site.
Jeff Wood and Randy worked long and hard, double and triple checking the game scores for accuracy. There were simply too many sources both in print and on the internet that were repeating the same errors over and over. This collection of NHL game scores is the most accurate you'll find anywhere.
Great work guys, and thanks!
HOCKEY SUMMARY PROJECT FAQ LAST UPDATED ON JANUARY 21, 2004 1.0 OUR PURPOSE The purpose of the Hockey Summary Project (hereinafter referred to as "HSP") is to put hockey game summaries into a database format for the free use of anyone who wants to access the information. 1.1 Who Are We? 1.1.1 Volunteers There is never any pressure to have anyone work to a deadline. I don't know about you but I have enough of those to deal with in my "regular job". We'll try to make this as fun as possible but let's face it, this is pretty dry, mundane work. If it was easy, someone would have already done this right? 2.0 THE PROCESS Each person will be assigned to enter data from the home games of one team for a specific regular season. This will mean that people can get involved with a minimal commitment of anywhere from 35 to 42 games, depending upon which season you choose. We will try our best to accomodate specific choices as far as picking your favorite team but at certain points we may just have to assign a team to you in order to complete the data entry for a particular season. 2.1 Initial Data Entry - What You'll Need to Participate 2.1.1 The CD A data entry volunteer will receive a CD with game summaries taken from back issues of "The Hockey News". The CD will usually contain a single season worth of summaries that have been scanned from photocopies and saved in .jpg format. You will have to e-mail your snail mail address to stumcmurray (at) yahoo.ca in order to get the CD mailed out to you. 2.1.2 The Entry Program A program specifically written for the HSP by Peter Anson allows for consistency when entering the game summary data. The program is called "GameEntrynew.zip" (1807kb) and is located in the files section of our Yahoo! Groups page at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hockey_summary_project/files/ You will need to install the program on your local hard drive in order to start the data entry process. 2.1.3 The ****-game.dat Files You will also have to download a file of game results specific to the season you are working on. This MUST BE DONE BEFORE you begin entering the game data as it keeps the proper numbering sequence of the games in place. Forgive me for shouting but this part is really important. You data will really screw us over if you don't heed the above instructions. These files are usually called "1964-game.dat" with the numeric "1964" referring to the 1964-65 season. These files can also be found at the above link. The file is to be placed in the same folder as the "EntryProgram.exe" file that you will have extracted from the "GameEntrynew.zip" file. 2.1.4 The other .dat Files The data that is entered into the program will generate eight additional *.dat files for a total of nine *.dat files. The nine files for the 1964 season, for example, are: 1964-assist.dat 1964-estats.dat 1964-game.dat 1964-goal.dat 1964-goalie.dat 1964-goalieperiod.dat 1964-official.dat 1964-penalty.dat 1964-period.dat 2.2 Initial Data Entry - What do I do when I'm done? 2.2.1 Where does the data go? Your nine data files are to be e-mailed to Peter Anson. 2.2.2 What do I do after that? Well, you can choose another team and season to work with or simply accept our thanks for a job well done. You are free to monitor our continuing progress, participate in our discussions or just lurk around the mailing list. Whatever works for you is fine with us! 2.3 Data Proofing Peter will run these .dat files through a parser to produce human readable files that resemble the usual game summary that you would find in a newspaper. He will then e-mail the readable files to our proof readers, currently myself and Paul Patskou. Paul and I will compare our data for accuracy against the official game summary sheets at the NHL offices in Toronto. We will record all necessary changes and/or additions to our data in the *.dat file(s) and then e-mail the final, "proofed" data back to Peter. The data is now ready to be used in the database.
No, "boxscore" is a baseball term not a hockey term. Also, hockey players wear sweaters, not jerseys; they put their sweaters on in a dressing room, not a locker room; and please don't tell me that goalies pitch shutouts cause they don't. Okay? Thanks.
Just a few of my pet peeves!
Stu McMurray Hockey Summary Project