Show HN: Faceoff – A terminal UI for following NHL games

4/19/2026 at 6:15:22 PM

Playball: Watch MLB games from the comfort of your own terminal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37591070 - Sept 2023 (1 comment)

Playball: Watch MLB games from the comfort of your own terminal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21653981 - Nov 2019 (42 comments)

by divbzero

4/19/2026 at 6:48:59 PM

Different sport though, but neat visualizations.

by j45

4/19/2026 at 8:12:25 PM

Nice! I was thinking about doing something like this but for cycling, however one of the biggest PIA about building products for sports is all the gating of data.

Does the NHL really provide an API for all games? That's nice...

by yuppiepuppie

4/19/2026 at 10:18:47 PM

Officially no, but there is undocumented API (if you are commercial, they provide documentation and support) that is public without authentication.

by stackskipton

4/20/2026 at 8:26:46 AM

the more I think about it, the more it's actually so weird that the leagues don't have APIs

by redanddead

4/20/2026 at 1:00:42 PM

The request definitely comes from the leagues' broadcast partners, right? They would want as many eyeballs concentrated in as few places as possible so they can sell ads for more.

by Shalomboy

4/19/2026 at 8:24:22 PM

I had the same thought, went ahead when I found an existing Python module to access the API.

by vcf

4/20/2026 at 12:22:17 AM

It's like the reinvention of Teletext

by mooktakim

4/20/2026 at 7:00:28 AM

Which still exists in many European countries.

by LeoPanthera

4/20/2026 at 1:47:31 AM

This is great. I recently asked AI how many software devs played hockey. It estimated 25k - 50k globally. It also called it a 'prestige sport' which never occurred to me (what with all the guys with missing teeth). But the cost of playing is getting significant. Still the most fun sport to play and watch.

Thanks for this - TUI is awesome.

by mallahan

4/19/2026 at 6:17:07 PM

Nice, I've now created dozens of little personal tools like this now :-)

This is IMHO the killer AI feature for personal use. So many utlities I never would have spent time on are now within reach. Even just non-trivial bashrc aliases and functions

by freedomben

4/19/2026 at 6:21:51 PM

Yeah, I completely agree. It's awesome to be able to build anything you want (as long as it's not too complex). I, too, have at least a dozen, and I usually don't share, but with the playoffs starting, I felt others could enjoy this one.

by vcf

4/19/2026 at 7:37:50 PM

Same — similar pile accumulating, and GitHub has fallen way behind. I keep going back and forth on whether a monorepo is the right answer or if it'd just make the sprawl more legible without actually helping. How are you organizing yours?

by zawakin

4/19/2026 at 11:01:17 PM

One repo per project. It makes it easier when I want to share or make public. I have 100+ repos in my account and I don’t find that cumbersome.

by vcf

4/19/2026 at 8:56:18 PM

[dead]

by nullsanity

4/19/2026 at 6:56:29 PM

> It's awesome to be able to build anything you want (as long as it's not too complex).

That's the thing. It was always awesome, as long as it wasn't too complex. The only thing that changed for me what was "too complex".

by embedding-shape

4/19/2026 at 6:37:42 PM

Super fun! Nice job shipping!

by cr125rider

4/19/2026 at 9:00:22 PM

Link to the API Client is incorrect at the bottom: https://github.com/nhl-stats-api-client instead of https://github.com/liahimratman/nhl-api-client

by captn3m0

4/19/2026 at 10:47:21 PM

Thanks, fixed!

by vcf

4/19/2026 at 11:31:49 PM

Do the endpoints still work?

https://api-web.nhle.com/v1

Keeping upto date endpoints for sport scores is the most difficult challenge.

by ipaddr

4/19/2026 at 11:52:04 PM

I took the lazy way out and use a dependency for that. I’ll look into it and see if I can either push a fix upstream or reimplement myself.

by vcf

4/19/2026 at 9:28:47 PM

nIce! Does it have player in-game stats like TOI and +/-?

This reminds me of that f1 tui… https://github.com/JustAman62/undercut-f1 or https://github.com/IAmTomShaw/f1-race-replay. The one I’m thinking of syncs with kodi for delayed playback “live” stats.

by jlongman

4/19/2026 at 10:44:28 PM

Not player stats, only team stats. I'll have to see if player-level stats are available in the API.

by vcf

4/20/2026 at 5:56:41 AM

NHL? What are we, Canadians?

by worldsavior

4/19/2026 at 6:55:38 PM

> Acknowledgments - This project was inspired by Playball, a similar terminal application for following MLB baseball games.

Should've gone for something generalized that could handle a bunch of different games, instead of just another sport, so someone caring about multiple sports don't need multiple TUIs :)

by embedding-shape

4/19/2026 at 10:46:57 PM

Having long ago built an app that does gamecasts for multiple sports, similar to what you get from ESPN, every sport is completely different. There's almost nothing that matches up, except for the very basic concept of a box score. Even play by play has enough differences to be vastly different

by prh8

4/19/2026 at 11:33:49 PM

I never once built an app for gamecasts, any sport, but even I do realize that sports are different... Not sure what made you(s) believe I'm suggesting the exact same UI for all the sports.

by embedding-shape

4/19/2026 at 8:21:52 PM

not terminal, but fwiw: https://plaintextsports.com

by bpev

4/19/2026 at 7:01:47 PM

Different sports have different ways to present the data. But most importantly, the data availability differs a lot between leagues, so there’s a benefit to having separate tools. I, for one, would not want to maintain an app for all sports.

by vcf

4/19/2026 at 6:52:32 PM

Nice! In practice, how far behind the TV broadcast does it end up being?

by rangersny1

4/19/2026 at 6:58:33 PM

Not too much, but it’s using a Rest API, so it also depends on the refresh rate (default 30 seconds, configurable with cli argument).

by vcf

4/19/2026 at 9:27:15 PM

That’s not bad. One of my favorite times is college football season with a big game on say, ABC. You quickly learn who it watching OTA, who is watching on cable and who has YoutubeTV based on the different reaction times after a big play.

by brewdad

4/19/2026 at 6:53:03 PM

Wicked. Who is your team?

by james-clef

4/19/2026 at 6:57:06 PM

Go Habs Go!

by vcf

4/19/2026 at 10:14:28 PM

Booooo!

(From a Senators fan…)

by bradley_taunt

4/20/2026 at 1:57:55 AM

Not a hockey fan but i absolutely love this

by dionian

4/19/2026 at 7:34:28 PM

What next? Perhaps a small scripting language to run on the side of the terminal?

You know, just to make some simple automations possible, nothing super-special.

by cyberax

4/19/2026 at 7:52:16 PM

settle down

by _doctor_love

4/19/2026 at 7:09:11 PM

Go Habs!

by itsnh98

4/19/2026 at 6:48:42 PM

The missing interface from sports.

by j45

4/20/2026 at 7:07:32 AM

[dead]

by jiexiang

4/20/2026 at 1:23:32 AM

[dead]

by zephyrwhimsy

4/20/2026 at 1:24:13 AM

[dead]

by zephyrwhimsy

4/20/2026 at 6:58:47 AM

[dead]

by vrr044

4/20/2026 at 2:00:22 AM

[dead]

by pukaworks