There’s a lot of hockey players out there. As of writing this blog post, I have a count of 832 players across the 32 teams of the National Hockey League. That’s a lot of names and faces to remember, and as someone who’s trying her hand at actually writing blog posts about hockey, I was pretty intimidated by the idea of potentially having to include a bunch of data every time I mention a player.
One of my other hobbies is Magic: the Gathering, and there’s a pretty neat web extension out there called “MTGify.org” which lets you hover over any card name on a webpage and instantly see the card art, mana cost, and rules text in a little popup. It’s a tiny quality-of-life feature that makes reading MTG articles so much better – no more opening fifteen Scryfall tabs just to follow along with a deck tech.
So I built the same thing, but for hockey. Hover over these names to check it out:
Pyotr Kochetkov, Alex Ovechkin, Patrick Kane
Every player name on this site is now interactive. Hover over it (or tap on mobile, or tab to it with your keyboard) and you’ll get a tooltip showing their headshot, team logo, jersey number, position, and both season and career stats, all pulled live from the NHL’s API. It even knows the difference between skaters and goalies and shows the right stat columns for each.
The whole thing runs as a WordPress plugin. When it’s activated for the first time, it syncs every active roster across all 32 teams and builds an index of player names. When you load a post, it scans the content and quietly underlines every name it recognizes. The stats themselves are fetched on-demand and cached so the NHL’s servers aren’t getting hammered every time someone reads a blog post.
I plan on making this WordPress plugin open-source after I’ve had some time to tinker with it, make sure it’s not an excessive drain on the NHL’s web resources, and is a responsible consumer of data. But for the time being, you can enjoy this functionality exclusively on Gayniacs.org!