There have been a few dozen things written about the NHL's new “enhanced” stats site launching, and one feels safe in assuming the thrust of many of them are, “Uhh, what the hell?”

So: Uhh, what the hell?

The NHL entered the advanced stats era fully and officially on Friday, launching its own engine to give fans more immediate access to the data that has been cultivated for years on the websites of nerds who are truly and thoroughly fans of this sport and wanted to understand the game on a deeper level. Views in that community were a bit mixed; on the one hand, there was trepidation that the whole thing might get screwed up, given how much we know about the NHL's ability to do a Peter Sellers-level job of inadvertently throwing itself down a flight of stairs while trying to show off.

But on the other there was a welcoming feeling because this was validation for the years of hard work in a way. By launching this site, the league was essentially saying, “What you have worked on for years has value;” and indeed, the league did an excellent job of reaching out to many people in the analytics community and working with them to see what they'd like to see on the Official Site.

On a third hand, there was also an understanding that this wasn't really something for the existing advanced stats community. As with anything else, the league — and please recall this is the NHL we're talking about, where goals-against average and wins are the two goalie stats listed on a newly updated “Leaderboard” on the front of the stats page — is catering to the casual crowd of fans, not the deep, obsessive fanatics. Even getting them to give up the ghost on pretending these stats don't exist was a huge step forward.

On a fourth, there's the league's insistence that it's doing something unique, which it absolutely is not. What it feels an awful lot like is a Cortez-type moment. The NHL set foot on land that was already discovered long before, and inhabited by industrious people, and said, “Hmm yes, we own all this.” They built this site, yes, but stood on the shoulders of giants to do it; the league accomplished very little on its own, and it's claiming full credit anyway.

Take for example this interview with Chris Foster, NHL director of digital business development, who said, “There's zone starts, I think those are completely brand-new. And the level of depth that we're doing with primary and secondary assists. I don't think anybody's going to have that much detail.”

Zone starts are of course not “completely brand-new” and Hockey Analysis has been breaking down first-assist leaders in the league for years. As for the later claims of providing penalties-drawn data for the first time ever, well, Extra Skater used to do that before the Maple Leafs bought it, and War On Ice still does. And of course Behind the Net, after which the entire 'advanced' stats era is named, was tracking both long before anyone else

This should have been easy: Take War on Ice or Extra Skater, basically copy the idea behind it with enough changes to avoid a lawsuit, slap an NHL logo at the top. You've just built an excellent website that will help put millions more hockey fans in touch with the concepts underlying success in this sport. Is there a learning curve? Sure. But the NHL just expended a whole bunch of resources building something that people have been making in their spare time — and presumably for much cheaper — to roll out a broken product that doesn't do a good job of what it ought to do. Certainly, not as good a job as the league seems to think.

You wouldn't know it from all the back-patting on Friday afternoon, but the problem is that the league — and one assumes SAP, which worked alongside the league to build the site — seems to have put very little thought into many aspects of the launch.

For example, users can't filter for things like “minutes played” or “games played” at this time, so if they went to see who has the best CF% (sorry: SATF%) in the league when the site launched, they were probably going to be shocked to find that the answer — Bruins' prospect Matt Lindblad, who's gotten all of 16 minutes at even strength this season — was a guy they'd never heard of. All the way down at No. 11 is Pavel Datsyuk, who actually leads the league in this category, and who had played five more games than the 10 guys in front of him combined.