The Website - A Page A Day, Part V - Rink Repairs

Prologue
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV

Well, the pace didn't last long, but we're back with Part V - Rink Repair Statistics

Probably, this is the least hockey related page of the website, but hey, we can do it, and it's actually pretty easy, so why not?

The STOP events as listed in the Play-By-Play HTML summaries since the 2002/03 season on the NHL.com website contain the reason(s) for the stop. While most of them are game-based, such as ICING or OFFSIDE, one of the more rare ones caught our eye: RINK REPAIR. We decided to collect these stops and rank NHL home teams as well as NHL arenas by the amount of rink repairs that happened. We filter out the occasional venues, such as outdoor stadiums for NHL special events or the foreign arenas for the European showdown games.

Since we already parse practically all events from the Play-By-Play summaries (or PL), and classify them by types, we already have a collection of STOP events. And we also detect and catalog the reasons for the stoppages, so it is an easy Mongo query to extract all rink repairs incurred. We then aggregate them by locations and teams, and create SQL tables for easy quick display of the data.

And so we were able to assemble a nice set of tables displaying the level of maintenance in the rinks around the league. Here's a look at the 2016/17 season:

Arena	Repairs
BARCLAYS CENTER	8
XCEL ENERGY CENTER	3
CANADIAN TIRE CENTRE	2
VERIZON CENTER	2
PEPSI CENTER	2
FIRST NIAGARA CENTER	2
NATIONWIDE ARENA	2
CENTRE BELL	2
WELLS FARGO CENTER	1
SCOTTRADE CENTER	1
ROGERS ARENA	1
REXALL PLACE	1
PRUDENTIAL CENTER	1
CONSOL ENERGY CENTER	1
BB&T CENTER	1
JOE LOUIS ARENA	1
HONDA CENTER	1

So the claims that the Islanders' current home has the worst ice has been substantial. For the last three years, actually, Barclays Center ranks among highest. Naturally, the old arenas like Canadian Tire Centre or Rexall Palace also seemed to get a lot of rink repairs during the games. You can switch the year of the display or the mode between 'By Team' and 'By Arena'. As with all the displayed tables on our site, there are links below it to see it in a pristine form, the direct link to the page for the selected season, and buttons to share it on Twitter and Facebook. Once again, it doesn't seem like a highly meaningful piece of work, but we consider it fun, and it took about quarter an hour to implement altogether. TODO:

• Aggregate show by a period rather than a single season
• Include arena ages (requires manual input of construction years)