Load NHL groups (conferences and divisions) from the SportsDataverse data repo

One row per NHL group lineage (the league, its conferences and its divisions), keyed by the SportsDataverse group id (e.g. nhl:metropolitan). Published to the nhl_groups release tag on the sportsdataverse-data releases by sdv-reference-data. Seasons are keyed by their end year (2025 = the 2024-25 season).

Usage

load_nhl_groups(..., dbConnection = NULL, tablename = NULL)

Arguments

...

Additional arguments passed to an underlying function that writes the data into a database.

dbConnection

A DBIConnection object, as returned by DBI::dbConnect()

tablename

The name of the data table within the database

Value

A data frame (fastRhockey_data) with the following columns:

col_name	types	description
league	character	League key.
group_id	character	SportsDataverse group id, {league}:{slug}; one id per lineage across renames.
level	character	Group level: league, conference or division.
first_season	integer	First season (end year) with at least one member.
last_season	integer	Last season (end year) with at least one member.
notes	character	Lineage decisions and source caveats.

Examples

# \donttest{
  try(load_nhl_groups())
#> ── NHL groups from the SportsDataverse data repo ────────── fastRhockey 1.0.0 ──
#> ℹ Data updated: 2026-10-08 12:57:45 UTC
#> # A tibble: 21 × 6
#>    league group_id            level      first_season last_season notes         
#>    <chr>  <chr>               <chr>             <int>       <int> <chr>         
#>  1 nhl    nhl:adams-northeast division           1975        2013 lineage: Adam…
#>  2 nhl    nhl:american        division           1927        1938 1926-27 to 19…
#>  3 nhl    nhl:atlantic        division           2014        2026 lineage: the …
#>  4 nhl    nhl:canadian        division           1927        1938 the league's …
#>  5 nhl    nhl:central         division           2014        2026 new in 2013-1…
#>  6 nhl    nhl:central-2021    division           2021        2021 2020-21 only …
#>  7 nhl    nhl:east-1968       division           1968        1974 the 1967 expa…
#>  8 nhl    nhl:east-2021       division           2021        2021 2020-21 only:…
#>  9 nhl    nhl:eastern         conference         1975        2026 lineage: the …
#> 10 nhl    nhl:metropolitan    division           2014        2026 new in 2013-1…
#> # ℹ 11 more rows
# }