Fetching NHL Play by Play game data

October 25, 2016 One minute read

github • hockey • javascript • json • nhl • node.js • npm

Fetching NHL Play by Play game data

I created a Node.js application called nhlplaybyplay-node that provides the means for accessing, fetching the NHL Schedule and Play by Play game data files which are in JSON format.

Hope your familiar with this…
The following URL retrieves the complete 2016-2017 NHL season schedule
http://live.nhl.com/GameData/SeasonSchedule-20162017.json

While this one retrieves the entire Play by Play game data for game 2016020031 (BUF vs. EDM on October 16 @ 19:00 EDT)
http://live.nhl.com/GameData/20162017/2016020031/PlayByPlay.json

Note: Schedule and Play by Play data only available from the 2011-2012 NHL Season and onward…

Installation

Once you have cloned the repo from GitHub:
git clone https://github.com/sfrechette/nhlplaybyplay-node

You can install the dependencies with the following npm command:
npm install

Create a data directory:
mkdir data

Before using you will need to create a specific directory for each of the seasons you will be fetching data for.
i.e. To fetch data from the 2012-2013 NHL season you need to create the following folder 20122013 under the data directory.

Usage

node fetch.js season [game]

To fetch all games for a specific season:
node fetch.js 20152016

To fetch specific game from a specific season
node fetch.js 20162017 2016020001

Will be adding parsing functionallity in the near future… Enjoy!