fastRhockey

fastRhockey is an R package for accessing hockey data from the NHL (National Hockey League) and PWHL (Professional Women’s Hockey League) via public web APIs. It provides structured data frames of play-by-play, schedule, standings, roster, draft, player stats, and team data. The package also includes integrated expected goals (xG) models trained via XGBoost.

Part of the SportsDataverse family of R/Python packages for sports analytics.

Key Features

• NHL Data – Game feeds, boxscores, play-by-play with shifts, schedules, standings, rosters, draft picks, player/team stats, playoffs, and broadcast information via api-web.nhle.com and api.nhle.com/stats
• NHL Edge Analytics (33 functions) – Skater, goalie, and team advanced metrics from api-web.nhle.com/v1/edge/... covering shot location, shot speed, skating speed, skating distance, zone time, comparisons, landing pages, and top-10 leaderboards. Each wrapper accepts an optional season argument and falls back to the current season via the /now form
• NHL Records API (25 functions) – First-time integration with records.nhl.com/site/api/ for franchise totals, player/skater/goalie career and real-time stats, draft lottery, hall of fame, trophies, awards, attendance, venues, officials, and combine data
• NHL Stats REST (19 dedicated wrappers) – nhl_stats_franchise(), nhl_stats_players(), nhl_stats_glossary(), nhl_stats_country(), nhl_stats_skater_leaders(), nhl_stats_goalie_leaders(), nhl_stats_skater_milestones(), nhl_stats_goalie_milestones(), plus the original nhl_stats_skaters() / nhl_stats_goalies() / nhl_stats_teams() / nhl_stats_draft() / nhl_stats_seasons() / nhl_stats_misc() family
• PWHL Data – Schedules, standings, play-by-play, player box scores, team rosters, stat leaders, player profiles, game logs, career stats, player search, league leaders, transactions, streaks, playoff brackets, game summaries, and scorebar via the HockeyTech API
• xG Models – Expected goals predictions for NHL play-by-play data using XGBoost models (5v5, special teams, penalty shots)
• Helper Aggregators – Convenience functions inspired by nhl-api-py that combine multiple endpoint calls into a single tidy frame: nhl_game_ids_by_season(), nhl_all_players_by_season(), nhl_player_career_stats(), nhl_team_summary_range(), nhl_skater_summary_range(), nhl_goalie_summary_range()
• Full Season Loaders – Nineteen NHL loaders covering play-by-play (full + lite), schedules, season + per-game rosters, player/skater/goalie/team boxscores, game info, scoring & penalty summaries, three stars, scratches, linescores, shifts, officials, shots-by-period, and shootouts (load_nhl_pbp(), load_nhl_pbp_lite(), load_nhl_schedule(), load_nhl_rosters(), load_nhl_game_rosters(), load_nhl_team_box(), load_nhl_player_box(), load_nhl_skater_box(), load_nhl_goalie_box(), load_nhl_game_info(), load_nhl_scoring(), load_nhl_penalties(), load_nhl_three_stars(), load_nhl_scratches(), load_nhl_linescore(), load_nhl_shifts(), load_nhl_officials(), load_nhl_shots_by_period(), load_nhl_shootout()); for PWHL, fifteen loaders covering play-by-play, schedules, season + per-game rosters, player/skater/goalie/team boxscores, game info, scoring & penalty summaries, three stars, officials, shots-by-period, and shootouts (load_pwhl_pbp(), load_pwhl_schedule(), load_pwhl_rosters(), load_pwhl_game_rosters(), load_pwhl_player_box(), load_pwhl_skater_box(), load_pwhl_goalie_box(), load_pwhl_team_box(), load_pwhl_game_info(), load_pwhl_scoring_summary(), load_pwhl_penalty_summary(), load_pwhl_three_stars(), load_pwhl_officials(), load_pwhl_shots_by_period(), load_pwhl_shootout())

Note: PHF (Premier Hockey Federation) functions are deprecated as of v1.0.0. The league ceased operations; use PWHL functions instead.

Installation

You can install the CRAN version of fastRhockey with:

install.packages("fastRhockey")

You can install the development version from GitHub with:

# You can install using the pak package using the following code:
if (!requireNamespace('pak', quietly = TRUE)){
  install.packages('pak')
}
pak::pak("sportsdataverse/fastRhockey")

If you would prefer the remotes installation:

if (!requireNamespace('remotes', quietly = TRUE)){
  install.packages('remotes')
}
remotes::install_github(repo = "sportsdataverse/fastRhockey")

Quick Start

library(fastRhockey)

# NHL
nhl_schedule(season = "20242025")
nhl_standings(season = "20242025")
nhl_game_feed(game_id = 2024020001)

# NHL Edge advanced metrics
nhl_edge_skater_detail(player_id = 8478402)               # Connor McDavid, current season
nhl_edge_goalie_save_percentage_detail(player_id = 8475883)
nhl_edge_team_zone_time_details(team_id = 10)             # Toronto Maple Leafs

# NHL Records API
nhl_records_franchise()
nhl_records_draft_lottery_odds()
nhl_records_skater_real_time_stats_career(limit = 50)

# Helper aggregators
nhl_game_ids_by_season(season = 2025, team_abbr = "TOR")
nhl_player_career_stats(player_id = 8478402)
nhl_team_summary_range(start_season = 2023, end_season = 2024)

# PWHL
pwhl_schedule(season = 2025)
pwhl_standings(season = 2025)
pwhl_pbp(game_id = 27)
pwhl_player_info(player_id = 28)
pwhl_leaders(position = "skaters", season = 2025)
pwhl_game_summary(game_id = 27)

# Full season loaders
load_nhl_pbp(seasons = 2024)
load_nhl_schedule(seasons = 2024)
load_pwhl_pbp(seasons = 2024)
load_pwhl_schedule(seasons = 2024)
load_pwhl_team_box(seasons = 2024)
load_pwhl_skater_box(seasons = 2024)
load_pwhl_scoring_summary(seasons = 2024)
load_pwhl_penalty_summary(seasons = 2024)
load_pwhl_game_info(seasons = 2024)

Documentation

You can find the documentation for fastRhockey on GitHub pages.

You can view CSVs of historical boxscore and play-by-play on the fastRhockey data repo, as well as the process for scraping that historical data.

Changelog

Full News on Releases

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Our Authors

• Ben Howell

• Saiem Gilani

Our Contributors (they’re awesome)

• Alyssa Longmuir
• Tan Ho

Citations

To cite the fastRhockey R package in publications, use:

BibTex Citation

@misc{howell_gilani_fastRhockey,
  author = {Ben Howell and Saiem Gilani},
  title = {fastRhockey: Functions to Access Professional Women's Hockey League and National Hockey League Play by Play Data.},
  url = {https://fastRhockey.sportsdataverse.org/},
  doi = {10.32614/CRAN.package.fastRhockey},
  year = {2025}
}