Sports Reference Blog

In a huge addition, we at Hockey-Reference are glad to announce that we now have all NHL regular season box scores available back to the beginning of the NHL, the 1917-18 season. With this, we can now fill out the gamelogs section of many great players' careers. For example, you could now find Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito's excellent 1970-71 seasons when Orr finished with a career high 139 points and Esposito set the then-record of 76 goals in one season. Bernie Parent's 1973-74 season of 12 shutouts can now be examined easily. Gordie Howe's extensive NHL career, beginning with his rookie season in 1946-47, has game logs now.

All of these game logs are also searchable on Stathead now, which is also a great new asset to have. Looking for most goals by a player in a game will now lead you to Joe Malone's record day in 1920, when he scored seven for Quebec in what ended up being a 10-6 victory over the Toronto St. Patricks. While the top of the list of most saves in a shutout doesn't change, Jacques Plante's 52-save shutout in 1955 now properly appears in the top 5 thanks to this addition. We should put a reminder that there are some categories, such as saves and shots against, that were not recorded in the earlier days of the league.

So now there's a lot more history to dig through, and we hope you enjoy our presentation of the "new" box scores! Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 20th, 2021 at 11:40 am and is filed under Announcement, Data, Features, General, History, Hockey-Reference.com, Leaders, Stathead. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.