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

www.vincentgregoire.com

119 points by vcf 18 hours 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).

yuppiepuppie 15 hours 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...

  • vcf 15 hours ago

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

  • stackskipton 13 hours ago

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

    • redanddead 3 hours ago

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

mooktakim 11 hours ago

It's like the reinvention of Teletext

  • LeoPanthera 5 hours ago

    Which still exists in many European countries.

mallahan 10 hours 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.

freedomben 17 hours 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

  • vcf 17 hours 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.

    • cr125rider 17 hours ago

      Super fun! Nice job shipping!

    • embedding-shape 17 hours 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".

    • zawakin 16 hours 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?

      • vcf 13 hours 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.

ipaddr 12 hours ago

Do the endpoints still work?

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

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

  • vcf 12 hours 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.

rangersny1 17 hours ago

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

  • vcf 17 hours 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).

    • brewdad 14 hours 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.

james-clef 17 hours ago

Wicked. Who is your team?

  • vcf 17 hours ago

    Go Habs Go!

dionian 10 hours ago

Not a hockey fan but i absolutely love this

cyberax 16 hours ago

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

You know, just to make some simple automations possible, nothing super-special.

j45 17 hours ago

The missing interface from sports.

embedding-shape 17 hours 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 :)

  • vcf 17 hours 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.

  • prh8 13 hours 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

    • embedding-shape 12 hours 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.