from Jason Mackey of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review,

Creating one of the most widely used hockey analytics websites in North America was never the intent, Sam Ventura and Andrew Thomas insisted.

Yet when the friends, who met through Carnegie Mellon's statistics program, saw one of the industry's preeminent advanced stats sites — ExtraSkater.com — shut down, they sprung into action to fill what they perceived to be a gigantic void.

“We knew we had something to share,” said Thomas, 34, of Gainesville, Fla. “But we didn't know what form that was going to take.”

The form became war-on-ice.com, which launched in August 2014 and is dedicated to the mathematical and analytical side of hockey. In less than a year, the website has gone from local startup to one that has had 4 million page views since November.

War-on-ice features anything from shot-based statistics to graphical comparisons to a salary-cap database that seeks to replicate CapGeek.org, the standard-bearer for such things that shut down in January, about two months before its creator, Matthew Wuest, died of colon cancer.

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