I’m always impressed with the contest and accessibility of the Baseball with R website (here), which features a great cast of statisticians writing about everything from Hall of Fame entry to umpire bias.

In a similar vein, I highly recommend Sam and AC’s nhlscrapr package in R. I’ve used it extensively to analyze play-by-play data from past seasons (for example, this post on momentum in hockey).

However, I have a soft spot for overtime outcomes in the NHL, and while the nhlscrapr package has game-by-game results, there isn’t a straight-forward mechanism for identifying whether or not a given game went to overtime. Further, data in the nhlscrapr package only goes back about a decade or so.

Thankfully, Hockey Reference has easily accessible (and scrapable) tables for us to use. Given that I am doing some updated analyses over NHL overtime rates, and that I wanted an easier method than copying and…