If you're a faithful fan of hockey trivia, on any given day you might want to know ...
- How many goals Cam Atkinson of the Springfield Falcons scored as a collegian.
- The hometown of Boston Bruins star Zdeno Chara.
- Who led the 1967-68 Stanley Cup champion Montreal Canadiens in scoring.
- The entire roster of the 1970-71 AHL champion Springfield Kings.
- The age of retired superstar Gordie Howe.
Well, you can find all that – and a whole lot more – on a website that has become the rage of the hockey world.
"We would be lost without it. It's our go-to resource. I'm on it almost every day of the week," said Bruce Landon, president/general manager of the Falcons.
The go-to site for Landon and everybody else in the hockey business is simply called "Hockey db" – and it is an absolute treasure for anyone interested in present-day hockey and/or the history of the game.
What makes this site even more special for local hockey aficionados is that its headquarters are right here in Springfield. It was designed and built by Ralph Slate, a 42-year-old Cathedral High School graduate, who still maintains the site at his Springfield home. That’s his hobby. Full-time, he works as principal data architect for ISO New England, a Holyoke-based electric power grid.
His site’s traffic numbers are astounding – 600,000 visitors in any month during the hockey season.
“That’s about 10 million pageviews (‘hits’) per month,” Slate said. “On each weekday, I get about 40,000 different visitors.”
Canada is his biggest consumer, with 50 percent of the visitors. The U.S. ranks second at 33 percent.
“I get more traffic than normal – around 750,000 visitors – at the NHL trading deadline, and the day of the NHL draft,” Slate said. “Oddly, I also get a noticeable spike in traffic when a lesser-known player is traded to the Montreal Canadiens.”
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Slate’s hockey site is that its information is updated nightly.
“Every significant hockey league publishes its statistics electronically, and most of the results are available in real time,” Slate said. “I wrote software to process the updated information, and apply updates to my site each night. My software runs between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m., and processes whatever the leagues publish.”
This miracle of the electronic age thus makes it possible for a Bruins fan, for instance, to check Slate’s site the morning after a game and know that all the player stats will be right up to date.
How did Slate get involved in such a complicated process? Well, start with the fact that he’s a lifelong hockey fan who loved the Springfield Indians and Kings, and now has season tickets to the Springfield Falcons.
Baseball statistics – or the lack of them – were partially responsible for his desire to organize hockey stats.
“My grandfather, Harry Slate, was a great athlete at Tech High and he played a couple of years of minor league baseball,” Slate said. “I could never find any record book that had anything about his pro career, so that had something to do with my motivation.”
More motivation came when he was a mathematics major at Renssalaer
Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. He went to RPI after graduating from Cathedral in 1987.
“RPI won the NCAA championship in 1985, and there was big hockey interest at the school,” Slate said.
“We were sitting around the dorm one night, and I started asking whatever happened to some of the guys who had played for RPI over the years. We came to realize there was no good way, no publication, to find where they were, be it in pro hockey (here) or in Europe.”
A few years later, when he was working as a computer programmer for a Springfield store, Slate started compiling information about hockey teams and players into a database.
“I intended to publish the information in a book, but I quickly realized it would have been too large to be economical,” he said.
Around that time, the Internet was starting to take off. Slate decided this was the right place for his info, because the Internet had no page or size constraints.
“Also, I knew the linking nature of the web would allow people to pivot between a view which listed all players on a certain team, and one which listed all the teams and years for each player,” he said.
On Nov. 30, 1996, Slate launched his site, calling it “Internet Hockey Database.” He later changed it to “Hockeydb.com.”
The site is maintained through advertising sales. Slate does some of that locally, and gets additional help from advertising networks.
So what happens to the site when disaster strikes, such as the Oct. 29 snowstorm which caused a widespread power outage?
“My site is hosted by a Pittsburgh company called Pair Networks. They are a reliable company that I can trust to manage things like power failures and server problems,” Slate said.
Because the site is on a remote server, Slate can administer it from anywhere. If power goes out at his home, he can do updates from his Blackberry, if necessary.
“The trick is writing the correct software to allow this,” he said.
His site duties are easier these days, he says, because the updates are made automatically. However, he never stops working to improve the site.
“I’m always researching new players and adding leagues. I have data from Russia, Germany, Sweden. I have every significant minor professional league all the way back to the ‘20s, and seven of Canada’s 10 junior A leagues,” he said.
He also has complete stats on every player who ever appeared in an NHL game.
Now he’s working to increase his college hockey database. He has Division I well covered, and is determined to develop full info for Divisions II and III.
“It’s unfinished business,” he said. “I’m finding it hard to get college data prior to 1970.”
Slate said his site is the product of “15 years of research, and 20 hours of work a week.”
Not all of his hockey addiction directed to the Internet. He’s also a passionate collector of game programs.
Said Springfield hockey buff Whit Bacon, “I thought I had a lot of stuff until I saw Ralph’s collection. He must have 2,000 programs.”
Slate said he has driven to hockey shows in Canada to find certain game programs, but most of his memorabilia now comes from eBay.
“I just enjoy the history of the game,” he said.
And thanks to him, hockey fans around the world can enjoy it too, while at the same time keeping up with their favorite teams and players, day by day, game by game.