Get Your NHL Super Schedule 2008-9 Right Here!

by Dirk Hoag on Jul 17, 2008 3:15 PM EDT in Statistical Analysis

UPDATE: For the latest on the 2008-9 NHL Super Schedule, head over to my article at Kukla's Korner!

The NHL announced the 2008-9 Regular Season schedule today, so of course, it's time right here to publish my very own NHL Super Schedule 2008-9 as well.

For those unfamiliar with what I did last year, the NHL Super Schedule is a spreadsheet that I put together and make publicly available via Google Documents*. It includes an entry for each game in each team's 82-game regular season schedule, with additional information such as how far that team has had to travel since its last game, how many days have passed since that previous game, and various statistics relative to the opponent that evening, such as 2007-8 Winning Percentage, Goals Per Game, Goals Against Per Game, etc. For example, you can total the distance that each team will travel during the upcoming season, or find who plays the most back-to-back games. Check out which team faces the toughest opposing offenses, or which power plays will take on the nastiest penalty killers.

The purpose of posting this spreadsheet at Google is to allow anyone to download it and analyze to their heart's content. Dig around to see which road trips are going to tax your favorite team, and when they'll have a long stretch of home games that they'll need to take advantage of to earn points in the standings.

I'll chime in later tonight or tomorrow sometime with some analysis, but for now, we've got great weather here in Middle Tennessee and I promised the Little Forecheckers that I'd take them to the pool....

*One note about Google Spreadsheets; while I like the fact that I can easily make something publicly available, I don't buy the notion that Google Docs is going to replace software that actually runs locally on your PC, like Microsoft Office or Open Office. After building this with Excel, I had to copy & paste this thing into Google Spreadsheets one column at a time (sometimes even more cautiously than that), because their servers couldn't handle an update with a decent chunk of data coming from the clipboard. Definitely not ready for prime time...

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Comments

Can't you just upload the excel file straight into Google Docs now? Much easier than copy/paste. I think that' probably a limitation of the browser more than Google's app directly...though that becomes a limitation of the app by extension of course

by Paul Nicholson on Jul 17, 2008 3:58 PM EDT reply actions

I'll have to try that next time; it won't accept .xslm files (Excel 2007 macro-enabled), but what I could probably do is get things looking as I like, copy that into a new Excel sheet that's saved in Excel 97 format, and try uploading that.

The browser-based limitations are definitely an obstacle that Google Docs doesn't have much control over, but they still stink. I tried, for example, to use one of the Plug-ins that adds a pivot table to a Google spreadsheet, and it bogged things down so badly as to be completely unusable.

by The Forechecker on Jul 18, 2008 7:42 PM EDT reply actions