Having a website dedicated to fantasy hockey that has grown to be quite large over the past year – well, that certainly has it's benefits.

NHL.com has decided – allegedly under the instruction of the NHL's Board of Governors – to remove their shift charts that were very helpful to poolies, and replace them with TOI charts, which lists the shift length and times, but requires tedious analysis to find out who played with whom. I started an email campaign to get them back, but to no avail. After all, bringing back the shift charts would be fan friendly – and the NHL can't have stuff like that…

Thanks to the resourceful people in the DobberHockey Forum , we have found a source for these charts once again. In fact, it's better than last year.

Shift Chart

First, about the chart. In the picture above, the numbers along the top represent the numbers during the game. The example above shows the first seven minutes of Thursday's contest between Boston and Chicago. Along the left are the player names. The green bar represents when they were on the ice. The red line is something that can be dragged left to right to make reading the chart easier. In the picture above, I have the red line just past the three-minute mark.

As you can see, at the three-minute mark of the first period, Kobasew, Sturm and Bergeron were on the ice together. Obviously, they were linemates. See how this chart can be helpful?

It can also aid in finding injuries. What if, at the four-minute mark of the second period, the green bars stopped for Marc Savard? This didn't happen, but if it did you would know immediately that he left the game for some reason (i.e. injury).

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Anyway, that is why the NHL Shift Charts were so important. Here is the link to find them again:

NHL Shift Charts

Instructions for finding the five-digit game number:

1. Right click the "Game Summary" link on NHL.com – Scores.
2. Click "Properties"
3. On the far right hand side of the Address that "Properties" gives you is "GSO" followed by a five-digit game number. That's your guy.

DobberHockey is THE source for all your fantasy hockey information. Period.

You can praise the good people for digging this up, and thank the good people from timeontheice.com, by commenting here.