New stat portal NHL EDGE gives fans access to player and puck tracking for first time
Trivia question: Which player holds the title of fastest skater in the NHL this season?
For the test of time, hockey fans have only really been able to answer that question with the fastest skater competition at All-Star weekend – or if they were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a piece of data that flashed on the screen during a recent broadcast.
You might guess Connor McDavid or Nathan MacKinnon.
Until today, for the first time, when you’re able to look up and see that Winnipeg Jets forward Rasmus Kupari surprisingly holds that mark through the opening two weeks of the season, hitting a league-best peak speed of 23.95 mph on Oct. 17 against the Los Angeles Kings with 13:44 remaining in the second period.
The NHL launched a new stats portal called NHL EDGE on Monday, which gives fans and media access to some of the most sought-after information from the league’s player and puck tracking data, which includes metrics such as skating speed, distance traveled, shot speed, shot location and goaltending performance metrics.
The NHL first began player and puck tracking in all 32 arenas using 14 IR cameras positioned above the ice surface, along with chips in both the puck and sewn into into individual player jerseys, back in the 2021-22 season. But the data gathered from that system had only been made available to team data departments and broadcast rightsholders until Monday. In fact, the millions of data points created so much information at first that teams didn’t even have the proper storage solutions to intake all of the millions of gigabytes.
The NHL was patient in parsing through the data to now present it to fans in an easily digestible way on NHL EDGE.
“This is very much the starting point,” said Russell Levine, NHL group vice president of stats and information. “We know that fans were hungry for this information and we’re excited to continue to add more information to EDGE as fans consume more and more.”
There are natural limitations to EDGE, of course. One thing missing is historical context. Since player and puck tracking only began in 2021, this is only the third season of data, stretching back to 2021-22. (For the record: Dallas Stars forward Denis Gurianov holds the all-time best speed burst of 24.6 mph from Oct. 16, 2021.) The data is not updated in real time, meaning the leaderboards will refresh overnight after games. And it isn’t possible to go through the play-by-play granularly to find out how fast a skater was moving on one specific play unless it set a new peak.
One of the other limitations is that there is no way to properly size up the entirety of the league in those data points from top to bottom. In other words, it isn’t possible to find out which players have the fewest speed bursts of at least 18 mph and are among the slowest skaters in the league, like you could with more traditional stats. But the EDGE system does have the capability to size up players in different categories by percentile and also ability to side-by-side compare any two players in the league.
The comparison tool is especially powerful when it comes to goaltenders. If you’re a fan of the Boston Bruins, you could dial up Jeremy Swayman’s start to this season compared to last year and see that his save percentage on shots from mid-range is actually up year-over-year. For each individual goalie, you can see a map of the ice detailing where each shot originated from.
The NHL EDGE portal is only beginning to scratch the surface on team play detail. Fans can now access detailed information such as zone time, team speed and total skating distance, as well as shot location data. From that, we’ll be able to glean more information about style of play as more data is recognized in meaningful ways – but EDGE gives fans an initial taste of learning more about their favorite players and teams, and it is delicious.
Said Levine: “This is just the tip of the iceberg.”
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