The change was subtle. Just a random, numbered bylaw in a verbose Terms of Service agreement posted on the National Hockey League’s official website, which was updated this week. The League calls it “boilerplate” and nothing that targets anyone one, or any other website, in particular – at least at the moment.

But the ramifications have the burgeoning hockey advanced stats community on edge.

NHL.com is a clearinghouse of news, images, video and above all else, numbers. Their stats pages are essential for chronicling nearly every measurable number collected during a season, with archives that go back decades. Their box scores for nightly games include official game summaries that break down individual stats, ice time and faceoff figures. There are also play-by-play sheets that detail every on-ice incident, from shots to stoppages in play.

That information is shared through many sports media sites by providers like Stats LLC, which maintains stats pages for Yahoo Sports and NBC Sports, for example. But it’s also harvested by other websites through software that pulls the information from NHL.com. That’s the case for sites like Behind The Net, Extra Skater and others that are at the forefront of the advanced stats revolution in hockey.

Which brings us back to the subtle change in the NHL’s Terms of Service this week, which reads:

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For comparison’s sake, you can see that the previous official ToS of the NHL didn’t have any of this language about prohibiting "unauthorized harvesting of content."

It’s the timing of it that set off alarms. It’s the Summer of Fancy Stats, after all, as bloggers like Tyler Dellow and executives like Kyle Dubas have been gobbled up by NHL teams for their advanced stats prowess. And hockey fans have handed many clicks to sites like Extra Skater, a clearinghouse of NHL numbers as well as the requisite Corsi and Fenwick metrics.

(Darryl Metcalf, creator of Extra Skater, declined to comment for this story.)

In some ways, this is boilerplate stuff. ESPN, for example, has had this on its site for quite some time:

Additionally, you agree not to access, monitor or copy, or permit another person or entity to access, monitor or copy, any element of the Disney Services using a robot, spider, scraper or other automated means or manual process without our express written permission.

"You could read that as, ‘You agree not to access...any element of the Disney Services using a...manual process without our express written permission,’” said Gabe Desjardins, creator of Behind The Net.

“So basically, their terms of use restrict you from even going to the website. This is boilerplate language they can turn to in order to stop something egregious, like somebody mirroring their site.”

Or someone using a website like NHL.com’s data for commercial purposes, which was a concern cited by the League’s legal department when we contacted them for this story.

Which brings us back to a basic question: Who owns the numbers?

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