from David Ebner of the Globe and Mail,

One of Ralph Slate’s great scores arrived unexpectedly through an eBay dealer he often bought from.

The man behind HockeyDB, the statistics site originally known as the Internet Hockey Database, had paid $50, not knowing exactly what forgotten corner of hockey history he would find in a stack of envelopes. When the package finally arrived, he discovered a decade’s worth of game sheets half a century old from the Eastern Hockey League, whose tumultuous brand of hockey in part inspired the 1977 movie Slap Shot.

The granular detail, of referees under assault by coaches and players, was a bonanza.

“Just amazing. Most people don’t appreciate this the way that I do,” said Slate, who by day works as the principal data architect at New England’s electric power system operator. By night, he’s the brains behind one of hockey’s most popular online destinations for statistics and facts about the game’s most prominent and most obscure participants – past and present.

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