Load NHL team conference and division memberships by season from the SportsDataverse data repo

One row per NHL team per season, with the conference and division it played in that season, e.g. the Detroit Red Wings moving to nhl:atlantic in the 2014 (2013-14) realignment. Published to the nhl_groups release tag on the sportsdataverse-data releases, one file per season.

Usage

load_nhl_team_group_seasons(
  seasons = most_recent_nhl_season(),
  ...,
  dbConnection = NULL,
  tablename = NULL
)

Arguments

seasons

A vector of 4-digit years (the end year of the NHL season; e.g., 2026 for the 2025-26 season), or TRUE for every published season. Min: 1918. There is no 2005 (the 2004-05 lockout).

...

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.
season	integer	Season (end year).
team_id	character	ESPN team id where ESPN covers the team, otherwise the NHL team id.
team_id_source	character	Id system of team_id: espn or nhl.
team_name	character	Team name as of that season.
subdivision_id	character	SportsDataverse subdivision group id; NA for the NHL.
conference_id	character	SportsDataverse conference group id; NA where the level does not apply.
division_id	character	SportsDataverse division group id; NA where the level does not apply.
source	character	Source the membership came from.
sources_agree	logical	Whether a second source agrees; NA when only one source covers the season.
notes	character	Notes, e.g. the NHL's own team id.

Examples

# \donttest{
  try(load_nhl_team_group_seasons(seasons = 2014))
#> ── NHL team group seasons from the SportsDataverse data repo ───────────────────
#> ℹ Data updated: 2026-10-08 12:58:29 UTC
#> # A tibble: 30 × 11
#>    league season team_id team_id_source team_name   subdivision_id conference_id
#>    <chr>   <int> <chr>   <chr>          <chr>       <chr>          <chr>        
#>  1 nhl      2014 1       espn           Boston Bru… NA             nhl:eastern  
#>  2 nhl      2014 10      espn           Montréal C… NA             nhl:eastern  
#>  3 nhl      2014 11      espn           New Jersey… NA             nhl:eastern  
#>  4 nhl      2014 12      espn           New York I… NA             nhl:eastern  
#>  5 nhl      2014 13      espn           New York R… NA             nhl:eastern  
#>  6 nhl      2014 14      espn           Ottawa Sen… NA             nhl:eastern  
#>  7 nhl      2014 15      espn           Philadelph… NA             nhl:eastern  
#>  8 nhl      2014 16      espn           Pittsburgh… NA             nhl:eastern  
#>  9 nhl      2014 17      espn           Colorado A… NA             nhl:western  
#> 10 nhl      2014 18      espn           San Jose S… NA             nhl:western  
#> # ℹ 20 more rows
#> # ℹ 4 more variables: division_id <chr>, source <chr>, sources_agree <lgl>,
#> #   notes <chr>
# }