Can NHL games be found by their ordinal appearance?

[PrimumHockeyist]

How Many Goals Have Been Scored In NHL History | StatMuse

How many goals have been scored in NHL history?

www.statmuse.com

As of today, June 17, 2024 statmuse.com says there have been 125,232 NHL games since, I presume, 1917.

Does anybody know if NHL games can be identified by their oridinal appearance: like, which was the 698th NHL game of all time, or the 17,353rd or 102,341st games?

I know that the NHL logs games this way per recent season. I also know that they have all of their games now, but I don't know if those games can be queried this way, on the NHL's database or another. Like, maybe there's some way of knowing when a major epsiode took place this way, like Orr's 'Flying Goal'. It would be much easier than a year-by-year-by-year manual analysis.


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[Doctor No]

At least on modernish nhl games, they publish official start and end times.

Prior to that, it’s probably handwritten on the game summary kept by the official scorer, although I don’t see it published by the league.

Related question - if you were to order games, would you count a game one it starts it once it ends?

 

[PrimumHockeyist]

At least on modernish nhl games, they publish official start and end times.

They also note by seasonal game number, the 386th game of the season and so on. I had learned that the NHL celebrated the league's 50,00th all-time game which they seemed to have scheduled as it involved Montreal and Toronto. in 2010. So, the NHL knows, but can the rest of us acess the same info.

Prior to that, it’s probably handwritten on the game summary kept by the official scorer, although I don’t see it published by the league.

Related question - if you were to order games, would you count a game one it starts it once it ends?

I'm a hard lean for counting when a game begins. It's tidier. I think that the NHL actually schedule start times a bit differently to make sure no games start at the exact time, or maybe that's some other league or my imagination.

 

[Doctor No]

True - at least nowadays, the league sorts the games (roughly) in order of projected start time, noting that they do it at the start of the season, so time changes (like a game moving to primetime, or a game delayed via weather, or just random variance between when the games were expected to start and when they do start) need to be considered. But generally game 020001 will occur before game 020002.

Now if you go back far enough, say here:

NHL Scores | Feb 21, 1981 | NHL.com

The official source for scores, previews, recaps, boxscores, video highlights, and more from every National League Hockey game.

www.nhl.com

The games are sorted (hover over Gamecenter and see the part after the query indicator) roughly based on some order of teams involved - for instance, for a long time, Boston games were first for some reason. There's a consistency but it doesnt' seem to be related to game start time.