Most Goals Scored in Every NHL Arena

While browsing through the Baseball Reference website, I noticed it was possible to make a list of players with the most home runs at each ballpark. I wondered, could such a list be made for the most goals scored at each National Hockey League arena? It turns out that making a list is possible, with some difficulty. There is no resource for hockey as thorough as Baseball Reference and Retrosheet are for baseball.

I have made this list by using a few different resources. Baseball Reference’s sister site Hockey Reference has game information going back to the 1987-88 season. Its “play finder” can be used to produce a list of games in which a player scored at least one goal, at home, while playing for certain teams. The goals can then be added up, in cases where the player has multiple-goal games.

For seasons before 1987/88, the most useful tool is the Hockey Summary Project. HSP has game logs for the 1917-18 to 1925-26 seasons, and 1952-53 to the present, as well as for 1938-39, 1942-43, and the Philadelphia Quakers’ 1930-31 season. It’s time-consuming, but easy enough to go through all the game logs and counting the goals.

For the seasons missing from the HSP, the only resource is the game logs in newspaper reports. Through Google News‘ archive, I found game results using the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen, the Border Cities Star/Windsor Daily Star, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Pittsburgh Press, the Calgary Daily Herald/Calgary Herald, and the Saskatoon Phoenix/Saskatoon Star-Phoenix.

This list also counts goals scored by players who were playing a road game for a different team. As one notable example, Wayne Gretzky’s total in Edmonton includes the goals he scored while playing for Los Angeles. Sometimes, goals have been subtracted when a player scored at a home game away from their usual home rink. This includes, for example, the “neutral site” games of the early 1990s, and the NHL Premiere games in Europe.

I have included only regular season NHL games, from 1917-18 to the present, played a team’s regular home rink. I haven’t included all the “neutral” sites in this list, as they generally don’t have a top scorer, only a long list of players who scored one or two goals. In future posts I will include all the other arenas used for regular-season games. I will also go into greater detail with top-10 lists for each arena.

The list is up-to-date as of the games of April 7, 2012, the end of the 2011-12 regular season.