NHL-BOT

Hey everyone, I’d like to introduce you to our Hockey stats bot, predominantly focusing on NHL players, but also including statistics of prospects both before entering the NHL and afterwards our bot tracks statistics that we have found to be loaded with information that hockey minded discord members will truly find informative and useful.

To start off this journey we started to develop the bot just for our team, the Buffalo Sabres as that’s what our server was centered around, but it quickly became apparent that with the data available via the NHL’s public API that we could also make this a league wide bot that could pull not only current statistics but also career statistics for not only the playoffs but also natural career statistics for NHL players. This was a major turning point in the development of this bot, as the focus became more about the NHL and less about the Sabres statistics.

To develop our full feature set we decided to informally ask our server members via a survey what kind of information they search for while watching a game on TV and started to expand from there. We also used some of our own intuition that would guide us in some of the more advanced features. Currently so-called advanced statistics are a big thing and the NHL’s API allows for some great statistics about a players impact on a team via established standard metrics. !edge Player will return a list of 30 advanced stats including things like Corsi%, GF%, shot breakdowns, and zone starts.

In addition to the statistics and fun information on the players, we also wanted to make it fun for the server members, so we included a ‘pickem’ mini game feature to allow you to predict game winners and other game stats, including a leaderboard for bragging rights !leaderboard

Originally this was going to be a quick and free only bot but the development time got longer and longer and we felt like a version that was free for a lot of the basic stats that members would love should remain free but some of the more advanced metrics that took a lot longer to code and manage since we’re pulling in data from MoneyPuck and other external APIs would have to come at a nominal cost.

At time of writing there are roughly 30 commands that will return some really great stats, and we would love to see you take a look at what our bot has to offer. Currently all features that are listed as premium will be available until such time we are ready to roll out the subscription piece from Discord. If you run a command that is a premium command, there is a notice on the bottom that they will only be available in the future with a premium purchase. Our !help will show you all of the free and premium versions. We look forward to providing you some great data about the best hockey league in the world.