NHL32 / INDEPENDENT RESEARCH PROJECT
Nobody asked me to build this. There was no brief, no blueprint, and no predetermined outcome. Just a spreadsheet full of hockey cards, some questions about their value, and an opportunity to see what I could figure out along the way.
32 TEAMS / ONE COLLECTION / AN OPEN-ENDED QUESTION
The original idea was pretty straightforward. Collect one Young Guns rookie card from each of the NHL's 32 teams. Nothing particularly complicated. Just a collecting challenge I thought would be fun.
Young Guns have a long history in hockey collecting. They're harder to pull from a pack than ordinary cards, and there's something exciting about getting one. But I also liked the idea of finding those overlooked prospects. The players whose cards might only cost a few dollars, but who could turn into something special.
And something interesting happened along the way.
I'm a huge Columbus Blue Jackets fan. I love hockey. But collecting a card gave me a reason to pay attention to the player. Suddenly, games outside Columbus mattered a little more. I was following rookies, watching their performances, and paying attention to teams I might not have otherwise cared about.
The collection wasn't just growing. It was changing how I experienced hockey.
As the collection grew, I started getting curious about what the cards were actually worth.
I was buying cards from different places, pulling cards from packs, and trying to keep track of everything I had. Nothing particularly complicated. I'm a collector, not an investor. But I was interested in understanding the value of what I was collecting.
It's easy to find asking prices. It's much harder to understand what cards actually sell for. There's a pretty big difference between what someone wants for a card and what another collector is willing to pay.
I was tracking everything in Excel, but understanding value meant manually searching completed sales, comparing prices, and trying to make sense of information that was constantly changing. I was learning about comps, completed sales, and an entirely different side of the hobby. And honestly, keeping everything organized in Excel was becoming a project of its own.
The spreadsheet was fine for keeping track of my cards. But the more I learned about the market, the more I realized how much information was out there and how difficult it was to organize.
There had to be a better way.
Hockey cards are more than memorabilia. Their values change with player performance, demand, market trends, and sometimes just the excitement surrounding a particular player.
That got me thinking. What if I looked at my collection the way someone might look at an investment portfolio?
Instead of just asking whether I owned a card, I could start asking different questions. What's it worth today? How has its value changed? What are people actually paying? And what could completed sales tell me over time?
I'm a collector, not Rockefeller. But I liked the idea of borrowing a little investment logic to better understand my hockey cards.
And rather than looking for someone else's solution, I figured I'd embrace a little DIY punk rock philosophy.
Why not build it myself? So I did.
I've always been curious about technology. I like finding the right tools, figuring out how they work, and not being particularly afraid of breaking something along the way.
The original plan was simple. Get everything out of Excel and into a database.
At first, it was about organizing the collection and asking basic questions. Show me every Columbus Blue Jackets card. Every Young Guns Canvas variant. Every card from a particular team. Nothing groundbreaking, but suddenly I could explore the collection in ways that weren't nearly as easy with a spreadsheet.
And once I had a database and an application to work with, I started thinking about what else was possible.
Could I automatically collect completed sales? Could I update information without entering everything manually? Could I connect different sources of data and start looking for patterns?
That led me to APIs and automation. Each new capability introduced another question, another problem to solve, and another opportunity to learn.
I didn't have to know how to build everything before I started. I just had to be willing to figure out the next piece.
Bring the information together. See what we've got.
Does the information make sense? Is it even right?
Fix what isn't working. Make what is working better.
Try it again. See what happens. Keep learning.
I'm a creative strategist by trade, not a software developer. But I've always believed that figuring things out starts with being willing to try.
And sometimes that means realizing you've made a stupid mistake. Other times, it means running into something that's completely outside your wheelhouse.
Getting completed sales into NHL32 was a perfect example.
I could connect to an API and pull sales information. But sometimes the results were incomplete. Sometimes a sale I knew happened wouldn't show up. And sometimes the system would find the right player but the wrong card.
So I'd dig in, figure out what went wrong, make adjustments, and try again.
That's become a big part of NHL32. Every problem is another opportunity to learn something, question an assumption, or find a better way to make the system work.
And I've learned that getting something to work is one thing. Getting it to work well is something else entirely.
There's something pretty satisfying about opening an application you built yourself and seeing your entire collection organized in one place.
I can look up individual cards, explore different players and variations, and see completed sales without spending hours digging through listings.
And I can look at the collection a little differently now. Not just as a bunch of hockey cards, but as a portfolio with values that change over time.
I'm not managing millions of dollars here. I'm collecting hockey cards. But it's interesting to see how much more you can learn about something when you start looking at it from a different perspective.
And the best part? There's still plenty more to figure out.
See the entire collection in one place.
Explore individual player positions and market activity.
Explore transactions, pricing behavior, and broader market patterns.
Identify patterns worth investigating as the dataset grows.
The funny thing about NHL32 is that every time I think I've figured out what I want it to do, I come up with something else.
What started as a way to organize a hockey card collection has turned into a growing collection of information about players, transactions, and the market around them.
And the strategy side of my brain loves having all those data points to play with.
Does a player's performance actually affect what collectors are willing to pay? What happens to rookie card values as players establish themselves? Are there patterns in completed sales that aren't obvious when you're looking at individual transactions?
Are the Columbus Blue Jackets cursed?
Okay, maybe the data can't answer everything.
But that's what makes NHL32 interesting to me. Having the information means I can start asking questions, exploring possibilities, and seeing where the answers take me.
Maybe I'll discover something interesting. Maybe I won't.
Either way, there's always another question worth exploring.
I didn't start collecting hockey cards because I wanted to build a database. I started collecting because I love hockey. Everything else came from being curious about what I could do with it.
I've never needed to know exactly how something would turn out before getting started. Sometimes things work. Sometimes they don't. Either way, I usually learn something worth knowing.
Ideas are great. But there's something incredibly satisfying about taking an idea, figuring out how to make it work, and ending up with something you can actually use.