Wired Cola

After a note on a hockey newsgroup, I got to wondering: owing to cases where one team or another is ahead or behind in games played, it's possible for a player who is traded to end up playing more regular-season games than there are in a single team's regular season.

It must have worked both ways: players who have played in every game for their (two or more) teams, but somehow got shorted relative to a regular season, and players who got in an extra game (or more?) relative to the regular season. The former are very hard to discern, because there's no obvious way (aside from original research) to tell if a player was short a game or two owing to missing a game due to a trade, or owing to being scratched for one reason or another. The latter, however, can be found.

Thank you nhl.com!

Last year Brian Campbell and Jeff Halpern both played 83 games. Out of 82, mind.

2006-2007? Sean Avery played 84 games!

05-06? Niklas Hagman, 84 GP

03-04, two players at 83

02-03: Rem Murray plays 85 games

00-01, Bill Guerin, 85 GP

But in 92-93 and 93-94, the NHL played an 84-game schedule.

1992-1993: James Carson, 86 GP

1993-1994: Robert Kudelski, 86 GP

With the 82-game schedule, it would be pretty hard for this to happen again. I'm too lazy to check if there ever will be a 4-game differential between any two teams at any point in this season. I suppose a player could be traded multiple times and gain a couple of games each time, but even thinking about that makes my head hurt. I'd say there's a very good chance the Carson/Kudelski regular-season record will not be broken unless the schedule is extended.

Playoff games, of course, are a whole different matter, and the record for most games in a season (including playoffs) is another question.

Interestingly, NHL.com does have those stats. 20 players share the record for most playoff games in one season: 26 games, presumably out of a maximum of 28 (unless there's been some point at which the NHL played 5 series to the Cup?).

There's another 27 players who have played 25, and 60 with 24 games.

It would take a bit more research to figure out the right answer, but I can sketchily establish a lower bound: Chris Clark played 26 playoff games in 2003-2004 and 82 regular season games, so his 108 may be the record. None of the players who played 25 or 26 games played in the 1992-1994 "long" seasons, but there may be a few outliers who are on both the long-season and the long-playoff lists who may have exceeded 108 games. If you were paying to read this, I might dig out the exact record, but there you go. I'm too lazy to confirm it, but I don't think anyone is likely to have played 112 games that counted in one season.