(continued)...so I had to go all the way back to the contemporary newspaper summaries. It's hard to find complete newspapers for free online, and even then they might not have complete scoring summaries, so I had to use seven papers in combination, through Google News' archive of microfilmed papers: the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen, the Border Cities (Windsor) Star, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Pittsburgh Press, the Calgary Daily Herald, and the Saskatoon Phoenix.
After I had counted all these goals, sometimes I could confirm the totals from other sources. Yahoo Sports sometimes has "situational statistics" that lists a players goals per arena, but there's no way to search for that without knowing the player beforehand, and it only has stats for the past decade or so. And at least For Maurice Richard, Darryl Sittler, Steve Yzerman, and Mario Lemieux, other random websites came up with the same number, or the same number was issued in press releases from the NHL.
Sometimes, I could count the goals for only one player, if they were obviously the high scorer (no one was going to touch Howe, for example), but occasionally I had to count all the goals by both home and away players, until a clear leader emerged. And sometimes the leader wasn't the person I was expecting! I did take into account players who scored a lot of goals playing for one team, and also scored more with another team at their former (or future) team's home arena. I also accounted for the irregular opening/closing dates for certain arenas (Bell Centre, for example). I counted only regular season NHL games, so nothing before 1917, no WHA games, and no playoff games. Of course, I'm not a machine, and I may have made mistakes, but hopefully none so large that the answers would change. I'll try to keep the quiz up to date, especially as I know the goal totals (and some answers) will change as the season progresses.
And lastly, I see that this is my 100th quiz! |
NHL 500 Goal Scorers 
NHL Vezina Trophy 
Premier League Goal Scorers
