About

sportperspective is a small independent site about the NHL and NFL. Mostly it’s articles: I pick a question, dig through the numbers, and write up what I find. The live standings, scores, league leaders and weekly power rankings are the data I work from, and they’re all here too.

I started it because I wanted power rankings that weren’t just someone’s gut. These come from a formula, and the whole formula is below, so if you think your team is too low you can check the math yourself. (It’s probably right. Sorry.)

Every team gets a rating out of 100 made from two things:

• R, results: how much a team has actually won. For the NHL that’s standings points out of the max possible. For the NFL it’s win percentage, with a tie as half a win.
• P, scoring margin: a “Pythagorean” estimate of how often a team should be winning, based on what it scores and gives up. Blowing teams out counts for more than squeaking by, and in my experience it tells you more about the next few weeks than the record does.

Results are 55% of it and margin is 45%:

Why weekly

If it updated after every game it’d just bounce around, so it’s a weekly snapshot. The up/down arrows show where a team was the week before.

• NFL, “Through Week N”. A week only counts once every game in it is final. Mid-week you’re looking at the list through the week before.
• NHL, “Week of” a Monday. Cut-off is the end of Sunday, Eastern time. Anything from Monday on goes into next week’s.

The one-liner under each team is generated from its numbers (record, differential, streak, movement). If I’ve actually written something about a team it’s labelled “Editor’s note”.

What it ignores

• Strength of schedule. A win is a win, doesn’t matter who it was against. This is the big one I’d like to add.
• Injuries, trades, lineups. It only sees results, not who played, so it has no idea your starting goalie or QB is out.
• Home/away, rest, travel. Not in there.
• Small samples. Early in the season a couple of games can swing a team a long way. Don’t take October (NHL) or September (NFL) too seriously.
• OT and shootouts. In the NHL they only count through standings points. It doesn’t try to sort skill from luck.

If last week’s results won’t load for some reason you still get this week’s list, just without the arrows, and there’s a note saying so.

Standings, scores and leaders all come from ESPN’s public data feed. Your browser grabs them directly when you open a page, there’s no server of mine in the middle.

To keep things quick your browser hangs on to each response for a bit. Old finished games don’t change, so those are kept longer.

Scores, records, names and stats are just facts. Logos and headshots load from ESPN’s image server and are only there so you can tell who’s who. They belong to the leagues, teams and ESPN. If one won’t load you’ll see the team’s abbreviation on its colour instead.

Heads up: the feed is public but it isn’t an official, documented API, so ESPN could change it whenever. If it’s down you’ll get an error and a Retry button. The site won’t ever make up numbers to fill the gap.