April 19, 2026
Power play in plain text
Show HN: Faceoff – A terminal UI for following NHL games
Hockey in a black window: fans rave, tinker, and ask if it beats TV lag
TLDR: A new terminal app, Faceoff, lets fans follow NHL games live with play-by-play, stats, and standings right in a text window. Commenters are hyped about DIY tools and AI-assisted tinkering, debating whether it keeps up with TV and comparing it to MLB’s Playball—proof that fan-made tools are winning attention.
The nerdiest hockey bar just opened in your terminal, and the comments are buzzing. Faceoff, a text-based app that runs in a plain black window, lets fans track NHL games live with scores, play-by-play, standings, and player stats—all without a browser. Early reactions were surprisingly spicy: one fan crowned it the missing sports experience, another demanded a latency faceoff with TV, and a third declared this the killer AI use-case for whipping up little personal tools.
The cross-sport hype is real. A top comment immediately linked to Playball, the MLB version, turning the thread into a mini “who did it better” moment. Meanwhile, a practical crowd wanted the real tea: if the app auto-refreshes scores, how far behind is it from what you see on TV? The vibe split between “this is pure retro bliss” and “show me the milliseconds.”
There was also hockey-fan energy seeping through the code talk. One commenter asked the dev’s team allegiance (bold move), while others cheered the clean, one-command setup—just type “pip install faceoff” and you’re in. With a clear “we’re not the NHL” disclaimer and data coming from public stats, Faceoff feels like a fan-made scoreboard for your keyboard. The scoreboard wars have gone text-mode, and people are loving it.
Key Points
- •Faceoff is a terminal UI app to follow NHL games in real time.
- •Features include live schedules, auto-refreshing scores, play-by-play, box scores, and scoring summaries.
- •Provides pre-game previews, multi-view league standings, player leaders, team rosters, and player profiles.
- •Responsive layout adapts to terminal width and displays game times in local timezone.
- •Built with Python’s Textual and nhl-stats-api-client; installs via uvx or pip; uses publicly available NHL API data and is not affiliated with the NHL.