At our panel in the Joint Statistical Meetings this past August, it became clear that we were far less effective at getting our methods, ideas and results out to a wider audience than we would like to be. The fact that @StatsByLopez was live-tweeting the panel and driving most of the interest, especially at 8:30 AM, made it clear that we had to do better for the public to read about and consider adopting what we had done, and that a new website would be the way to do it, particularly with our development of a Wins Above Replacement methodology to come.

We decided that this would be best served by using what we use in our daily work routines — flavors of the R language with its web interface Shiny and its own back-end computational engines — to put together a site quickly on top of our previous data collection efforts with nhlscrapr and the visual tool Hextally.

The timing of this — just before ExtraSkater went down — could not have been funnier in hindsight. After a good week of paranoia about the NHL’s Terms Of Service and the reveal that Darryl Metcalf was announced as a new hire by the Maple Leafs, meaning that his site was not shut down by the NHL, but apparently embraced by it in some way, we were more sure we would go for it. We were far from the only people working on the idea, of course — we started talking with others who were thinking the same things, chiefly @SteveBurtch and Jen LC (@RegressedPDO), and got involved with further discussions with a number of #fancystats enthusiasts — Corey Pronman, Matt Pfeffer, Nick Emptage, Kent Wilson, Gabe Desjardins, Josh Weissbock, Peter Hassett, Greg Sinclair, and Travis Yost, all of whom contributed ideas and constructive comments to our first drafts. At the same time, Matt also developed his own product at progressivehockey.com, which we consider to be not a competitor but a partner in the effort, just as Gabe’s own behindthenet.ca and Greg’s Super Shot Search are dedicated to looking at data in new and interesting ways.

Since then we’ve had no shortage of folks on Twitter giving us feedback — non-exhaustively, @MoneyPuck_, @senstats/@MannyElk, @garrethohl, @garik16, @BSH_EricT, @mc79hockey and @pfholden make up just a few.

Additionally, Rob Vollman (@RobVollmanNHL), Sean McIndoe (@DownGoesBrown) and Scott Cullen (@tsnscottcullen) contributed a number of ideas at the Alberta Analytics Conference that we’re doing our best to build into the site. All have given the work some great press, for which we are grateful, as did Fluto Shinzawa (@GlobeFluto) after our JSM panel.

Finally, special thanks to those who participated in the JSM hockey analytics panel:  Michael Schuckers (@SchuckersM), one of our original sources of inspiration to get into the statistical analysis of hockey; Brian Macdonald (@GreaterThanPM), who doubles as a co-author and has since moved on to greener pastures with the Florida Panthers; Mike Lopez (@StatsByLopez), who we should also thank for all of the publicity for this site and nhlscrapr on his blog, http://statsbylopez.com/; and Kevin Mongeon of The Sports Analytics Institute.

And to those of you who keep using the site from here on out, we can add you to the thanks once we see what you’ve produced!