An NHL game win probability app

June 23, 2014

A few months back I created an in-game win probability statistic for NHL regular season and playoff games. The metric takes play-by-play information about the current score, powerplay situation, and home ice advantage and outputs the probability that the home or away team will win the game.

In the last couple months I’ve worked to build a web app that allows the user to choose any NHL game since the 2007/2008 season and calculate the statistic. You can see the current version of the app here. The app outputs a graph which shows how the probabilities varied throughout the game. There are also tabs which provide summary statistics about how much the probabilities swung throughout the game and how much each goal or penalty affected the win probabilities.

The app is also built so that it will work for a game the second that the score goes final on the NHL’s website. For this reason, I hope that the app can be a useful tool for fans and bloggers to recap what just happened in the game that they just watched. There is also a download button, which allows the user to export the graph to an image file for use in a blog post or elsewhere.

The app is still a work in progress, so if you find any weird bugs or have feedback I’d love you to drop me an email at pettigrew@fas.harvard.edu. Enjoy!