Alright, here comes the fun and the (mostly) culmination of a hell of a lot of work. As many of you know, one of my goals the past two decades has been cataloging every backup appearance in the NHL. This has been a wild goose chase for the most part, even though the NHL does have this information on media.nhl.com (for which I cannot get access as I do not work for a publication). Games from 1999-2000 to the present are (nearly all) available on the NHL's fan-facing site (if you know how to find the right game sheet data). For games prior to that, the closest we've come is the Penguins' handwritten box summaries that were published as a weird but welcome one-off a few years ago.
Anyhow, thanks to a mysterious benefactor (who I won't name here in case they don't want to be known, but I encourage them to speak up because they're awesome, and you all probably know who it is anyhow), I was able to gain access to the media site's data here. And I've parsed it into my dataset - harder than it sounds - back to 1963:
Click on year, click on a team, see the list - similar format to what I've always published but with fleshed out backups. Similar to this:
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Some notes that are important:
The dataset that I've been using is nearly complete but not entirely complete. For one, a few teams seem to have not published backup goaltender data. For instance, you'll notice that 1987-88 Edmonton Oiler home games appear to be missing data:
For two (and more interesting), back beyond a certain point the league only seems to have published a goaltender's backup information if they were also in the dataset for that year as someone that appeared on the ice. For instance, Michel Larocque and Ken Dryden appear in the dataset above, but not Dave Elenbaas (more on that next). Or Ed Johnston appears for the 1977-78 Blackhawks, but Randy Ireland does not:
This presents a problem and an opportunity - there are clear gaps in the data, but it's also kind of easy now to see where to look. For instance, I was able to track down Randy Ireland in this example because otherwise I had four games without a Chicago backup, and I knew it wasn't Mike Veisor (season ending injury but also his backup data ends on January 14) or Ed Johnston (backup data begins January 26 when acquired). So I knew where to look.
With that as help, I incorporated what I could from the various threads on HFBoards (primarily the "Backup Goaltenders" thread and the "That Goalie Played for That Team?" thread). I have not cross-checked against
@Benchwarmers' site (but need to) and my guess is that it will uncover some more that I've missed.
The data I received actually goes back to 1917-18, but I stopped (here) at 1963 because prior to that, it gets weird - you know why. But moreover, I want to hand-inspect any of the data there before entering them into the dataset.
In nearly all cases (one exception so far) I trusted the NHL's source data over anything I could find first-hand in contemporary media. For instance, I have this article from the New York Daily News of January 29, 1970:
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Oh, that's interesting - Bruce Landon dressed for the Kings on January 29, 1970! But the NHL site says that Desjardins actually backed up Rutledge. Note that the Daily News article speaks prospectively about the events ("taking his place was to be..."). So I'm willing to believe that Desjardins sucked it up and dressed that night after all. Yes, I'm keeping receipts and notes - a lot of them will be here in this thread.
Here's the asterisk from above - start of the Canadiens' 1975-76 season:
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All of the reports from the media here insist that Bunny broke his damn ankle at home before the start of the season (including a media report on October 9) and that Ed Walsh backed up. But the official NHL data says that Larocque backed up Dryden on October 9 (but not October 8, October 11, or any other game until October). That's suspicious to me and likely to you, so I overwrote it and "gave it" to Walsh.
Anyhow, this is a solicitation for anyone who's sufficiently bored to help fill in these gaps - they're relatively easy to spot in how I publish them. If you can find documentation, please post it here. If you have theories that I can run down, please post them here.
This gives something still to do which is nice (although I'd like to finish up the entire catalog back to 1917-18) but this also gives an entry point to finding injuries that have heretofore been unpublished (if a goaltender can't dress, then he was either injured or sent down).
Thanks, enjoy, and happy hunting! Questions, comments, complaints below, please.
If you don't want to read all of that and just want the data, here's the link:
I'll be using the errata thread for random shit that I uncover (like Chico Resch in a towel).
