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

Posted by vcf 1 day ago

Faceoff is a TUI app written in Python to follow live NHL games and browse standings and stats. I got the inspiration from Playball, a similar TUI app for MLB games that was featured on HN.

The app was mostly vibe-coded with Claude Code, but not one-shot. I added features and fixed bugs by using it, as I spent way too much time in the terminal over the last few months.

Try it out with `uvx faceoff` (requires uv).

Comments

Comment by divbzero 1 day ago

Playball – Watch MLB games from a terminal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451577 - Oct 2025 (146 comments)

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)

Comment by j45 1 day ago

Different sport though, but neat visualizations.

Comment by duncangh 9 hours ago

I love this - watching the hurricanes game right now! Autorefresh would be nice and then it looks like a small bug in the faceoff percentage as they both say 100% which shouldn't be possible at any point in the game. Also would be sick to be able to enter the team and roster detail page from within the game detail page. But I love this so much and appreciate you for building it :D

edit the face off percentage is still a little off it's updated to show this 87% - 67%. Also followed you on twitter and github.

Comment by yuppiepuppie 1 day ago

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...

Comment by stackskipton 1 day ago

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

Comment by redanddead 1 day ago

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

Comment by Shalomboy 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by vcf 1 day ago

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

Comment by mooktakim 1 day ago

It's like the reinvention of Teletext

Comment by forestingfisher 17 hours ago

I think a teletext-like central information service for terminals would see use, because sometimes you just want to check the weather and news without being spammed with a billion ads and JavaScript

Comment by LeoPanthera 1 day ago

Which still exists in many European countries.

Comment by freedomben 1 day ago

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

Comment by vcf 1 day ago

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.

Comment by zawakin 1 day ago

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?

Comment by vcf 1 day ago

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.

Comment by nullsanity 1 day ago

[dead]

Comment by embedding-shape 1 day ago

> 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".

Comment by cr125rider 1 day ago

Super fun! Nice job shipping!

Comment by mallahan 1 day ago

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.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by captn3m0 1 day ago

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

Comment by vcf 1 day ago

Thanks, fixed!

Comment by ipaddr 1 day ago

Do the endpoints still work?

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

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

Comment by vcf 1 day ago

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.

Comment by jlongman 1 day ago

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.

Comment by vcf 1 day ago

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

Comment by embedding-shape 1 day ago

> 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 :)

Comment by prh8 1 day ago

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

Comment by embedding-shape 1 day ago

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.

Comment by bpev 1 day ago

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

Comment by vcf 1 day ago

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.

Comment by rangersny1 1 day ago

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

Comment by vcf 1 day ago

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).

Comment by brewdad 1 day ago

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.

Comment by worldsavior 1 day ago

NHL? What are we, Canadians?

Comment by james-clef 1 day ago

Wicked. Who is your team?

Comment by vcf 1 day ago

Go Habs Go!

Comment by bradley_taunt 1 day ago

Booooo!

(From a Senators fan…)

Comment by dionian 1 day ago

Not a hockey fan but i absolutely love this

Comment by cyberax 1 day ago

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