Friday, July 21, 2006

 

A Bit About This Blog

A lot of terrific information is available from NHL.com. Most of it is pretty raw.

And a lot of people around internet land have scraped the info from there, dug through it to find what they were looking for, and crushed some hockey myths and made the rest of us a bit smarter about the NHL game along the way.

The idea here is that the process should be as painless as possible. It would take hours to sift through the information manually, and writing macro code in Excel can speed up that process a tonne. And hopefully a lot of the guys with ZERO programming skills, but good eyes, rational minds and a passion for the game ... hopefully some of those guys will see just how easy this is once you get past the first couple of hours on the learning curve. That's a big part of what I hope to accomplish with this specialized little blog. Folks like Lowetide, Dennis, Andy Grabia, and dozens others like them. Once they realize that it takes less time to prove (or disprove) their point in a compelling way ... less time than takes to actually argue about it ... then we're going to be moving forward with speed I think.

Personally I'm not a programmer, and have limited skills. Programmers are a strangely helpful bunch though, and in my experience they'll solve your problems for you if you just ask at an online forum.

Hopefully other people will want to contribute here, leaving bits of code to cut and paste to save everyone else from doing actual work :) . If you have something to post, please just send me an email or leave a note in the comments section and I'll send you the 'invite' link.

Let's keep it simple. And just Excel VBA code for here.

If I don't drag smart, non-computer types into the weird world of Roger Neilson ... then I've failed with this little venture.

Comments:
Well the interface is critical to snare non-programmer folk. Excel is a good start. If you can get them to speak SQL commands, then things get really interesting, I'd say, because then the tables can better designed and the heavy lifting of the programmer folk can be leveraged by both programmer and non-programmer alike.
 
Can someone tell me what SHOT(!) or SHOT(*) or HIT (!) or HIT(*) means in nhl stat play-by-plays?

Thanks!
 
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