NHL API: Get Schedule

 

Introduction

The NHL has a publicly accessible Application Programming Interface (or API) that allows users to obtain a lot of useful data (including detailed play-by-play data). There are a couple of obstacles though: 1) the NHL API does not come with a user manual; and 2) the NHL API is most easily accessed using a programming language such as R or Python. To help you overcome those obstacles I’m writing articles that provide the code (in the R programming language) for functions that pull data from the NHL API.

In this article I provide a function that pulls schedule data.

The Data

Before I provide the code, here’s a sample of the data.

game_id: 2022030245

season: 20222023

game_type: P

date: 2023-05-12

home_team_id: 54

home_team: Vegas Golden Knights

away_team_id: 22

away_team: Edmonton Oilers

The Code

Here’s the code for the function that pulls the above data.

# This function pulls the NHL schedule for a specified time period
# The date format is "YYYY-MM-DD" (include the quotation marks)
# The default setting is to pull data for ONLY the regular season
# To pull data for ALL GAMES enter "FALSE" for reg_szn (include the quotation marks)

get_schedule <- function(start_date, end_date, reg_szn = "TRUE") {
        
        # Generate the appropriate URL based on reg_szn TRUE/FALSE
        
        sched_url <- ifelse(reg_szn == "FALSE", paste0("https://statsapi.web.nhl.com/api/v1/schedule?startDate=", start_date, "&endDate=",  end_date), paste0("https://statsapi.web.nhl.com/api/v1/schedule?startDate=", start_date, "&endDate=",  end_date, "&gameType=R")) 
        
        # Pull and clean schedule data for the specified time period
        
        sched_site <- read_json(sched_url)
        
        sched_dates <- sched_site$dates %>%
                tibble() %>%
                unnest_wider(1) %>%
                unnest_longer(games) %>%
                unnest_wider(games) %>%
                unnest_wider(teams) %>%
                unnest_wider(away) %>%
                select(-link) %>%
                unnest_wider(team) %>%
                rename(away_team_id = id) %>%
                rename(away_team = name) %>%
                select(-link, -leagueRecord, -score) %>%
                unnest_wider(home) %>%
                unnest_wider(team) %>%
                rename(home_team_id = id) %>%
                rename(home_team = name) %>% 
                select(game_id = gamePk,
                       season,
                       game_type = gameType,
                       date,
                       home_team_id,
                       home_team,
                       away_team_id,
                       away_team)
        
        sched_dates$date <- as.Date(sched_dates$date) 
        
        return(sched_dates)
}

Get It On GitHub

I’ve created a public repository on GitHub where I’ll be sharing my functions for accessing the NHL’s API. You can go to the repository by clicking here.

The End Of The Article

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Cheers,

Mark (18 Skaters)