Bored Friday afternoon at work, painfully counting down the hours and minutes before the weekend, maybe you’ll double-click the internet browser and head to NHL.com.

There, you’ll inevitably dive into the website’s statistical rabbit hole. The only difference between this time and every other time is that the rabbit hole is deeper in both quantity and quality.

Forty-five “enhanced” – the league’s word – stats, including Corsi, Fenwick and PDO, have received the Gary Bettman seal of approval, appearing on NHL.com from Friday at 2 p.m. onwards.

The NHL is playing catch-up by adopting what statheads have popularized over the past decade. They’re validating the concepts and calculations fans have unearthed and taking ownership of the data.

“We’re not giving an opinion, subjectively, if Corsi and Fenwick truly are proxies for puck possession or not,” said Chris Foster, the NHL’s digital business development director. “We just know that we want to give our fans the tools (to decide for themselves).”

It’s a smart business move considering most advanced stats rely on data scraped from the NHL’s official play-by-play inventory. Centralizing all important facts to the league website has worked for MLB and the NBA.

“We just wanted to make sure we’re offering our fans stats that are 100% accurate,” Foster added, “and coming directly from all the data that’s been collected from our real-time feed.”

In this new era of NHL.com, you’ll be able to quickly reference the manner in which the New York Islanders deploy John Tavares through his Offensive Zone Starts Percentage. Or you can marvel at Pavel Datsyuk’s NHL-best Corsi For Percentage. Or you can begin to appreciate the art of gaining the upper hand via Nazem Kadri, who leads the league in a stat called Penalties Drawn.

Others include average shot distance, as well as dividing up primary and secondary assists. Variations of these stats (for instance, goals scored per 60 minutes of ice time), along with contextual boundaries (how is Tavares deployed when the score is tied?), contribute to the group of 45 new stats.

Most of these metrics stick to what happens at even-strength due to the level playing field. Advancements in goaltending statistics appear to be ignored at this point.

Foster said an overhauled look and feel -- something cleaner, modern and more user-friendly -- will also be part of Friday’s unveiling.

Moving forward, it’s unlikely analytics websites, such as the comprehensive WAR-On-Ice.com -- which, according to its founders, has been averaging about 65,000 page views per month since launching last fall -- will be the go-to source for underlying data.

Yet Sam Ventura and Andrew Thomas, the guys behind WAR On Ice, welcome NHL.com’s official acceptance of analytics. As the hunger for non-traditional stats grows, so does the demand for independent sites.

“We think it’s good if more people get into modern hockey statistics and whatever the NHL does to support that is good for us and everyone else,” said Ventura, a 27-year-old PhD candidate in statistics at Carnegie Mellon University.

“I think we see ourselves in the same place in the market going forward,” added Thomas, a 34-year-old associate professor of data science at the University of Florida.

THE NAME GAME

A logical question: With the NHL.com on board, is it time to consider new names for the three advanced stats with the most notoriety?

The answer, it appears, is yes.

While the league has yet to explicitly state whether or not they will be assigning new names, Corsi will be known as “shot attempts” on NHL.com, according to a source.

Naturally, then, Fenwick will be “unblocked shot attempts”. The other stat, PDO, will be relabeled “shooting plus save percentage” or “SPSV%”.

All three have their own intriguing backstory but, as Ventura notes, that could be a “barrier to entry” for fans interested in learning about analytics.

Instead of stopping people in their tracks to learn about how Fenwick became known as Fenwick, for instance, the NHL might want the conversation to revolve around the numbers.

“For my own personal purposes, it doesn’t matter to me. You could call something the Pineapple Percentage and it wouldn’t bother me,” Ventura said. “But, for the greater good of making these (stats) more widely accessible to fans, name changes are probably a good idea.”

In a tribute to the original names, “Corsi”, “Fenwick” and “PDO” will appear on NHL.com somewhere under an also-known-as tag, the source said.

NHL’S PHASEY DAYS

The NHL.com makeover may activate Friday, but the end-game is seasons away.

Three additional phases are required to meet the market’s needs, Foster said.

On April 20, interactive graphs and advanced filtering will be introduced. From a visual and straining standpoint, you’ll be able to better narrow down your statistical curiosity.

A third phase will be “rolled in” next season, Foster said. Along with the insertion of line graphs, unreleased metrics with more complexity will debut, adding yet another layer to NHL.com’s numbers section.

“I know that Jonathan Toews is good at faceoffs,” said Foster, providing an example query, “but how good is he in the last 15 minutes of the game, in the defensive zone when the game is close?”

The eventual establishment of microchip-based player tracking, which was showcased at the NHL’s all-star weekend earlier this month, will have a great effect on the function of these new metrics.

Finally, Phase 4, whose “moving date” is the 2017-18 season, aims to digitalize the league’s entire statistical history dating back to its first season in 1917-18.