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With Extra Skater dead, here’s where you can get your advanced stats fix

ExtraSkater.com is dead. Long live ExtraSkater.com. With its founder Darryl Metcalf deservedly scooped up by the Toronto Maple Leafs to work in the team’s nascent department of hockey analytics, the most accessible advanced hockey stats database on the internet is now only accessible if you work for the Leafs. While that’s great news for Toronto, who has now denied their 29 competitors the ability to easily look up Tyler Bozak’s 5-on-5 score-tied Corsi% (free hint: it’s bad), it isn’t great news for the rest of us who are left without an easy-to-use one-stop shop for our hockey-related statistical needs.

While I’m confident someone will step up and assemble a new website to take Extra Skater’s place before long, there are already several sites out there with many of the services Extra Skater formerly provided. This is a guide to where they are, what they do and how you can use them.

Time On Ice

Of all the websites listed in this post, Time On Ice comes closest to replicating some of Extra Skater’s most popular features including game-by-game Corsi and Fenwick reports as well as the ability to chart player and team performance over certain segments of the season. Unfortunately it’s also, far and away, the least user-friendly option. Still, it’s an incredible tool if you can figure out how to use it and, even otherwise, Nice Time On Ice can help you navigate it on a game-by-game basis. Since Time On Ice doesn’t really have a front end, here’s a quick runthrough of how you can get it to do what you want it to do:

Corsi and Fenwick Reports

To retrieve single-game Corsi and Fenwick reports, all of which update in real time while games are being played, specify the season in which the game you’re interested in was played (the database goes back to 2007-08) and that game’s official five-digit NHL game number. Enter them into the following URL like so:

http://timeonice.com/shots[season].php?gamenumber=[five-digit game number]

You can find game numbers by accessing one of the NHL’s RTSS reports for the game in question and noting the final five digits of the URL. For example, here’s the play-by-play file for Tomas Hertl’s four-goal game against the New York Rangers from last season. It ends in 20044, so in order to retrieve Corsi and Fenwick data for it you would use: http://timeonice.com/shots1314.php?gamenumber=20044

Season Totals

You can also get complete Corsi and Fenwick data, at both the player and team level, for an entire season, or for any subset of that season of your choosing. In order to do this you’ll need the season for which you’re interested in retrieving data, the game state you want data for (your options are 5-on-5 situations when the score is tied, 5-on-5 situations when the score is close or all 5-on-5 situations), the three-letter abbreviation of the team you want data for (most of them are what you’d expect but teams like San Jose and New Jersey are signified by S.J and N.J) and the game numbers of the earliest and latest games for which you want data. Here’s how you’d enter that information into your browser:

http://timeonice.com/mplayershots[season][game state].php?team=[team]&first=[five-digit game number]&last=[five-digit game number]&hv=0

So if you wanted to find out how every Shark, and the team as a whole, performed last season in 5-on-5 situations when the score was tied you’d type in:

http://timeonice.com/mplayershots1314tied.php?team=S.J&first=20001&last=21230&hv=0

Entering 20001 and 21230 for the “first” and “last” values will get you full-season data for all teams but you can also retrieve a month’s (or week’s, or any span, really) worth of data by entering the game numbers of the first and last game that team played in that month. You can replace “tied” in that URL with “close” for score-close 5-on-5 situations or leave it blank for all 5-on-5 situations. Change “hv=0” at the end of the URL to “hv=1” for away games only or “hv=-1” for home games only.

Also, if you’re looking to grab a bunch of specific games rather than all the games within a subset of a season (say, for example, you’re looking to retrieve data on all of a team’s games against a certain opponent) you can add “&skip=[five-digit game number]” to the end of the URL to skip as many unwanted games as necessary, with a space separating each subsequent five-digit game number you would like to skip.

Zone Start Report

This is similar to the Corsi and Fenwick reports but instead of shot differential data you can find out how many offensive, defensive and neutral zone faceoffs a given player was on the ice for at 5-on-5 in a certain game. Just like the Corsi and Fenwick reports, you’ll need the season in which the game was played and its five-digit game number:

http://timeonice.com/faceoffs[season].php?gamenumber=[five-digit game number]

Head-to-Head Ice Time Report

One of the most indispensable elements of Extra Skater’s game reports was the head-to-head ice time table which allowed you to use ice time data to figure out who was getting matched up against whom at even-strength. Thankfully, Time On Ice can do the same thing. Once again you’ll need the season and the five-digit game number:

http://timeonice.com/H2H[season].html?gamenumber=[five-digit game number]&submit=go

There’s plenty more you can play around with on timeonice.com and Muneeb Alam’s excellent tutorial can help you through that. Muneeb has also written a D.I.Y. scraper that can get you all of this data and much, much more directly from the NHL. It technically violates their new terms of service but I won’t tell anyone if you don’t. If you’re interested, make sure to grab that as soon as possible before Muneeb gets hired by an NHL team and has to hide all of it. I should probably also note that Time On Ice is run by the mysterious Vic Ferrari so there’s no real guarantee it will be updated in time for next season but, at the very least, you’ll be able to access seven years worth of archives.

Behind The Net

The original online advanced stats hub, Behind The Net is still alive and kicking and it’s a lot more user-friendly than Time On Ice to boot. Most of the site is easy enough to navigate as the Player Breakdown page allows you to toggle among several different stats (as well as teams, game states and games played cutoffs) and helpfully explains whichever stat you’re sorting by in the upper left corner. The “more filters” tab here can yield some interesting results if you play around with it. For example, here’s every player who appeared in at least 30 games last season with a 5-on-5 offensive zone start percentage of 40 or less ranked by Corsi. There’s also a Team Metrics page and a Player Shot Type page that function similarly along with a database of player cards with which you can quickly look up a player’s performance over the course of his career (or at least since 2007).

Behind The Net also provides up-to-date Corsi Hockey League standings, by which I mean team Fenwick Close rankings. Here’s the link for last season with drop-down menus allowing you to toggle between seasons and between game states so you can look at teams’ Fenwick percentages with the score tied, when down by a goal, when up by two and more.

Finally, BTN also has its own version of what was perhaps Extra Skater’s single most popular feature: the Fenwick Timeline. Unfortunately regular season data from 2013-14 hasn’t been added to the database and the charts don’t update in real time like Extra Skater’s did but it’s the best substitute we have for now. You’ll once again need the season and the five-digit game number for the game you’re looking for the timeline of, which you’ll then insert into this URL: http://behindthenet.ca/charts/Shots_[season]_[five-digit game number].php Seasons are denoted by the year in which they began (so 2011 for the 2011-12 season) and you can access playoff data by adding “Playoffs_” prior to the season number. For example here’s the Behind The Net Fenwick Timeline for Game 7 between the Sharks and Kings this year:

Behindthenet1_medium

Hockey Analysis

Losing Extra Skater was frustrating but, ultimately, most of its services can be recreated using other existing websites (at least the NHL data can be at any rate, although Megan was kind enough to save and share the lost CHL data). If stats.hockeyanalysis.com ever went down, however, a good chunk of it would be difficult to replicate without programming expertise. I’m talking specifically about its with-or-without-you data. If you navigate from the index to the “Players” page you have the option of clicking on the name of any player who has appeared in the NHL over the past seven years to obtain information about their 5-on-5 performance (in terms of points, goal differential and shot differential) with and without each of the players they have shared the ice with over any single- or multi-season span of your choosing.

For example, here’s how Joe Thornton performed at 5-on-5 with and without everyone he shared the ice with last season. You can scroll down the page to also find out how he performed when on the ice against certain opponents. The grey navigation box at the top allows you to select a different sample in which to look at the data and allows you to retrieve data adjusted for zone starts or purely in score-close situations.

In addition to with-or-without-you, Hockey Analysis also provides the unique ability to access multi-year samples for a wide variety of stats at both the player and team level with the option to filter those stats based on a number of criteria. For example, here’s how every NHL forward who has appeared in at least 1500 5-on-5 minutes since the start of the 2010-11 season ranks in 5-on-5 points per 60 minutes over that span (Sidney Crosby is apparently pretty good at hockey). This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what you can accomplish with Hockey Analysis and its terrific user interface makes it fairly easy to figure out how to use.

Some Kind Of Ninja

This is a nifty site that actually provides data Extra Skater did not, specifically an easy-to-filter database of shot locations from the last six NHL seasons. From the index page, you can select the season (regular or playoffs) you’re interested in looking at, specify a team, game state, home or away, look only at shots with a specific player on the ice, or choose from many other options to generate a shot visualization diagram. For example, if you chose to look at all even-strength shots, home and away, the Sharks took last season, it would look like this (blue dots are shots that were stopped, red dots are goals):

Somekindofninja1_medium

You can also check the “Scoring Chances” box to retrieve data on how many shots teams are generating from the so-called home plate area of the offensive zone (as well as their shooting percentage on those shots) to make some interesting comparisons across teams. Apart from shot location data, Some Kind Of Ninja also gives you the ability to make your own player usage charts, using data from Behind The Net to plot players on a chart that visualizes how they were used at even-strength in terms of their offensive zone start percentage and quality of competition as well as how they performed in those minutes, signified by the size and color of their bubble. For example, here’s what every player who appeared in at least 30 games with the Sharks last season looks like when plotted on a Some Kind Of Ninja-generated usage chart:

Somekindofninja2_medium

The size of the bubble signifies the absolute value of the player’s Corsi number, with blue bubbles signifying a positive Corsi and red bubbles signifying a negative one. You can also click “All Seasons” in the site’s drop-down menu and specify a certain player to chart how his usage and performance has changed over the course of his career.

Shift Chart

The most enjoyable to use of all the sites on this list, Shift Chart provides real-time animations that simulate games on a shift-by-shift basis, telling you who was on the ice for both teams at any second of any NHL game. You can filter by team or by gameday at the top of the page, choose a game, hit play then watch shifts transpire before your eyes as players shuffle on and off the virtual bench with shot attempt and faceoff notations included. It’s a great tool for charting matchups, something that’s made even easier by the site’s linemate matrix currently in beta.

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This is far from an exhaustive list of all of the hockey stat resources on the internet. Sporting Charts has an excellent data visualization tool for shot locations, Hockey Abstract is another great place to generate player usage charts and Hockey-Reference is the single best database of traditional hockey stats on the internet. If there are any other sites I’ve forgotten that you think should be included, be sure to mention it in the comments. Within NHL teams and fanbases alike, there’s more interest in hockey analytics now than ever before but with Extra Skater going dark, people who are starting to get curious about this stuff may not know where to turn in order to find data. Until Extra Skater’s heir apparent hits the internet, hopefully this guide can be a useful resource.

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