from the CP at CBC,
It's not as if any great injustice was done, but Montreal Canadiens legend Maurice Rocket Richard getting an assist added to his prodigious NHL scoring totals.
Six years of poring over scoresheets and summaries of games between 1917 and 1987 by an NHL statistics team has found and fixed more than 6,000 bits of information that were overlooked or misregistered in the league's early eras.
Among the finds was an assist on a Toe Blake goal at 10:15 of the second period of a 6-5 Boston Bruins victory over Montreal on Nov. 4, 1945, during a time when the Punch Line of Richard, Blake and Elmer Lach was terrorizing the league....
Finding little gems of information like the Richard assist was one product of a massive undertaking to update and modernize the league database, which is to be re-launched this week.
NHL head statistician Benny Ercolani said fact-checking alone, such as adding one more game played to Ron Stackhouse's total, took two and half years.
"Six thousand little corrections isn't that high when you consider how many games were entered,'' he said. "It sounds like a big number, but it's from 1917-18 to 1986-87.''
Create an Account
In order to leave a comment, please create an account.