fastRhockey

Update (2024–25): fastRhockey now ships as a combined Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL) and National Hockey League (NHL) package. The Premier Hockey Federation — which this package originally launched to cover — was acquired and folded into the new PWHL ahead of its inaugural 2024 season, so the women's-hockey functions now target the PWHL. The historical context below is preserved from the original 2021 announcement.

fastRhockey is an R

package that is designed to pull play-by-play (and boxscore) data for both

the National Hockey League (NHL) and the

Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL).

When the package first launched it scraped the Premier Hockey Federation

(formerly the NWHL); in the past there had been a few scrapers for that

league, but they had all been deprecated since the league changed website

formats.

The package was created to allow open access to play-by-play data and to

continue pushing women’s hockey analytics forward — a mission that carries

through from the PHF into the PWHL era.

In Spring of 2021, the [Big Data

Cup](https://www.theicegarden.com/2021/4/15/22374981/a-directory-of-womens-hockey-projects-from-big-data-cup-2021-analytics-otthac-stathletes)

and the [data they made

available](https://github.com/bigdatacup/Big-Data-Cup-2021)

revolutionized what we were able to thanks to the detailed play-by-play

data for the season and the x/y location data. That wave continued with

the inaugural WHKYHAC conference in July

that produced some amazing conversations and projects in the women’s

hockey space.

In the past, the lack of data and poor access to data have been the

biggest barrier to entry in women’s hockey analytics, a barrier that

this package intends to alleviate.

Installation

You can install the CRAN version of

fastRhockey with:

 
install.packages("fastRhockey")
 

You can install the released version of

fastRhockey

from GitHub with:

 
# You can install using the pacman package using the following code:
 
if (!requireNamespace('pacman', quietly = TRUE)){
 
  install.packages('pacman')
 
}
 
pacman::p_load_current_gh("sportsdataverse/fastRhockey", dependencies = TRUE, update = TRUE)
 

If you would prefer the devtools installation:

 
if (!requireNamespace('devtools', quietly = TRUE)){
 
  install.packages('devtools')
 
}
 
devtools::install_github(repo = "sportsdataverse/fastRhockey")
 

Documentation

You can find the

documentation for

fastRhockey on

GitHub pages.

You can view CSVs of historical boxscore and play-by-play on the

fastRhockey

data repo, as

well as the process for scraping that historical data.

Breaking Changes

[**Full News on

Releases**](http://fastrhockey.sportsdataverse.org/news/index.html)

Follow the SportsDataverse on Twitter and star this repo

[![Twitter

Follow](https://img.shields.io/twitter/follow/sportsdataverse?color=blue&label=%40sportsdataverse&logo=twitter&style=for-the-badge)](https://twitter.com/sportsdataverse)

[![GitHub

stars](https://img.shields.io/github/stars/sportsdataverse/fastRhockey.svg?color=eee&logo=github&style=for-the-badge&label=Star%20fastRhockey&maxAge=2592000)](https://github.com/sportsdataverse/fastRhockey/stargazers/)

Our Authors

• Ben Howell

  

• Saiem Gilani

  

Our Contributors (they’re awesome)

• Alyssa Longmuir

  

• Tan Ho

  

Citations

To cite the

fastRhockey R package

in publications, use:

BibTex Citation

 
@misc{howell_gilani_fastRhockey_2021,
 
  author = {Ben Howell and Saiem Gilani},
 
  title = {fastRhockey: The SportsDataverse's R Package for Hockey Data.},
 
  url = {https://fastRhockey.sportsdataverse.org/},
 
  year = {2021}
 
}