A Retrospective on CWHL & PHF Stat-Keeping: How the PWHL Must Be Better

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The point of a hockey game is to score more goals than your opponent. To score more goals, coaches and GMs need to build a team full of the best players available to them. To know who the best players are, these coaches and GMs need to start by looking at who scores the most goals and produces the most offensive stats.

To do this, a league needs to have widely available, accurate, and public statistics. Similarly, many fans need accurate statistics in order to properly generate buzz around players and the league. Some players, like Connecticut Whale icon Shannon Turner, donate to charities based on their stats. Players from other leagues need these public statistics to gauge the viability of traveling cross-country or internationally to try out  for a team.

Without accurate and widely available statistics, very few of these things are possible. With that in mind, let’s review the mistakes of the PHF and CWHL so the PWHL can learn from them to avoid taking steps backwards.

Both the CWHL and PHF had over a half of a decade and previous leagues’ mistakes to learn how to develop an accurate and viable system to record and distribute statistics. The CWHL did a fairly good job thanks to Richard Scott and his crew. Having been burned by a lack of centralized record-keeping the NWHL (1999–2007), they ensured the CWHL was different. They consistently gathered game sheets from CWHL games that recorded goals, assists, shots, penalties, and a few other stats, checked their accuracy, and compiled them into a centralized internal database.

While these stats were consistent and still are available publicly, they were also not entirely detailed beyond these few standard stats. Additionally, they were not widely distributed, as many players and fans are under the impression that the stats from this era are completely gone, when they are in fact meticulously preserved in many places. Primarily, Scott puts out a book yearly compiling accurate stats back to the 90s and is still around on Twitter if any older or retired players want their stats from that era.

The NWHL/PHF made strides in regards to the number of raw statistics they were tracking and in having well-put together and public facing stats pages for each game and the league as a whole. They also collaborated with Stathletes in later years in an effort to connect coaches, players, and fans more with the analytical side of the game that was carving out niches in NHL front offices. However, there were many errors and avoidable mistakes in their processes.

Here are just a few from the beginning of the 2021 season.

These are just a small sample of errors in a league where a single save or goal can be the difference between earning a contract that lets a player quit their second job or not.

As many know, Mike Murphy, our managing editor here at The Ice Garden, spent years acting as a voluntary external reviewer for PHF goals and other stats. However, when he or others reached out to the PHF to have them implement these corrections, replies were often “agonizingly slow” or absent altogether. Additionally, “sometimes corrections [were] made but [Mike] didn’t get [an] email” back. Eventually, the league office had to be bypassed completely to get stats corrected because of these communication issues, and we instead worked with individual team’s stats recorders to get things corrected. 

I am deeply grateful for all of the league’s on-site stats recorders from year one on, because they were the true backbone of the operation despite being unpaid for the entirety of the PHF’s existence. I want to make it clear that I do not blame them for any of the errors made in recording live game stats, as it is a difficult task with only two or three recorders present per game, they were monetarily uncompensated, and they had little-to-no training ot support from the league for it. The most extensive training I heard of recorders receiving was a single-page overview, and there was high turnover in these positions.

When I had the privilege of attending the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in 2022, I asked Johanna Boynton if improving the league’s data product was a priority for PHF leadership. In her answer, it was evident to me that the league had no immediate plans to improve something as basic as statistics recording, let alone venture into record-keeping like that provided by the new NHL Edge site.

To quote her directly, the league at the time was “still exploring ways to accelerate it,” even after two years under their ownership. You can check out my question and her response here yourself:

Some may notice that I have yet to mention the PWHPA. The PWHPA was extremely far behind both leagues and was even behind some U16 leagues in recording statistics. Last year was the first year that they provided a page of public statistics on their site and did not venture beyond points and penalty minutes. Before that, to even glean what happened in a game numberswise, one had to look through all the team’s social media accounts, and even then there was no mention of anything other than scores in some instances.

Simply put, if the PWHL continues with a record-keeping system as simple as this, they will already be, at most, the third best league in the statistics realm, beaten by both the SDHL and Naisten Liiga. As the projected pinnacle of a women’s hockey league, the PWHL must be leagues better. There needs to be lessons learned from the organizations that came before it.

To help with this, my next piece will outline what exactly the PWHL should record and publicize and how they should do it. Subscribe to The Ice Garden to keep an eye out for it.