Frequently Asked Questions

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 night, an automated script runs and collects the information from the last day’s games across the league. So, you’ll see tonight’s games tomorrow!

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).

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

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.