About

After every NHL game, three players are named that game’s “stars”: they’re the breakout players who really made the game special. They can be from either the winning or losing team; the final results play a factor, for sure, but they’re picked by the local media outlets that are covering the game.

At the end of the game, the stars from the home team will sometimes come back onto the ice for a “victory lap” and toss signed pucks to fans. Other teams have different traditions.

Simply put, it collects the data and organizes it! I like data visualizations, and I often get into friendly arguments with friends about who deserved stars for a given game. I thought this might be a fun way to see what the stars actually look like when laid out!

They’re an invention for this site, meant to try and help with the leaderboard aspects. Being the “first star” of the game is worth 3 points, the “second star” gets two points, and the “third star” gets one point.

The NHL has a wonderful open API that provides a ton of information about all of the games and players. Every hour, an automated script checks for finished games and collects their stars. So, a game’s stars usually show up here within an hour of the final horn!

The NHL started consistently putting the Three Stars on their website in the 2010 - 2011 season, so I made the decision to stop there. The earlier seasons do have some games that have Three Stars on them, but because it was spotty, it didn’t seem fair to have some teams and not others.

Sometimes, NHL teams are renamed, either because they move to a different city or for other reasons. When teams are renamed, they’ll oftentimes retain the history of their prior name.

For the time period that this site covers, there are two: the Arizona Coyotes (formerly the Phoenix Coyotes), and the Winnipeg Jets (formerly in Atlanta as the Atlanta Thrashers).

By default, no. When you visit, you’ll see that annoying “can we use cookies?” popup. If you’ll allow it, I’d like to use Google Analytics while you’re visiting so that I can see how people are using the site. But it’s off by default. If you do opt-in, your data stays securely with me.

Nope. This is entirely a fan project made for the fun of it. All names and logos belong to the NHL and its teams, and are being used here under the fair use doctrine for reporting and description purposes.

Two tabs. Players ranks everyone who earned a star for the team, with a bar showing their 1st, 2nd and 3rd Stars; click a player to see the games. Games is a timeline of every game, newest first, with home games on the right, away games on the left, and each game’s three stars.

They narrow things down: home or away, regular season or playoffs, wins or losses, a single opponent, which stars count, and which positions. The little gray numbers beside each option tell you what you’d see if you picked it. Your filters stay in the address bar, so you can share exactly what you’re looking at, and they come along when you switch seasons.

Those players were on the other team that night. In the Games timeline, they also wear their team’s logo on their picture.

Milestones! A gold, silver or bronze badge means a player just earned their 1st, 5th, 10th or 25th (and so on) 1st, 2nd or 3rd Star; a white one with a ★ counts stars of any kind. “Overall” means across their whole career; “With CAR” means with that team. See the Milestones tab for more.

Yep! The Export button makes a spreadsheet (CSV) of every star, or only the ones your filters keep.

That’s the Stanley Cup! It means that team won the National Hockey League playoffs that year!

A card up top with their totals, then three tabs: Games lists every game they were a star in, Week & Month lists the NHL’s Three Stars of the Week and Month they’ve earned, and Pairings shows who they share the spotlight with.

The players who were most often named a star in the same games. Each one gets a little grid: this player’s star down the side, theirs across the top, and how many games landed in each square. The diagonal is crossed out, since two players can’t both be the 1st Star of the same game.

The NHL’s own picks for the best players of each week and each month. They aren’t single games, so the filters don’t apply to them.

Because they were playing before the 2010 - 2011 season, when the NHL started publishing the Three Stars. Their stars from before then aren’t on file, so their totals here are only part of the story.

A player’s 1st, 5th and 10th star, then every 25th after that: for stars overall, and for 1st, 2nd and 3rd Stars on their own. Each counts across a player’s whole career and with each team they’ve played for, so a trade means a fresh set of firsts!

The number is the count they just reached. A white badge with a ★ is stars of any kind; gold, silver and bronze are 1st, 2nd and 3rd Stars.

Yes! Follow @threestars.hockey on Bluesky, or subscribe to the RSS feed. You can also browse past weeks on the Milestones page.

Every player in the league, ranked by stars (or by points). It has the same filters as team pages, plus which positions to count, so you can find, say, the league’s top defensemen in road games.

Tied! Players with the same totals share a rank, the same way the NHL writes it, and the next rank skips ahead: T-16, T-16, then 18.

The player’s position: center, left wing, right wing, defenseman or goaltender, as of their most recent star.

A few fun charts about the whole league’s stars: which positions earn which stars, how often the winning team gets them, how many points it takes, and who gets a little home cooking.

The home team’s local media pick the stars, so it’s fun to ask: does the home team get more of them? The chart shows each team’s share of the stars on the road and at home, next to how much more often they win at home. Spoiler: the stars jump a lot more than the wins do.

Because there aren’t many games yet! Pick “All tracked seasons” for the long view.