# Canonical player files on Hockey Insights

Hockey Insights player pages use the official seven-digit NHL player ID as the permanent identity key. Names remain display labels, never database join keys. This avoids splitting one career because of accents, shortened first names, spelling changes, or a trade to another organization. The player directory at `/players/` searches by name, team, and position, but every result resolves to `/players/{NHL-ID}/`.

A canonical player file keeps evidence clocks separate. Current roster status comes from a dated official NHL roster snapshot and can change during the offseason. Official regular-season and playoff histories are separate ledgers rather than one pooled career object. The current game-log workspace provides every available official 2025-26 appearance with regular/playoff, rolling-window, opponent, venue, sort, trend, and native goalie controls.

The Insights workspace keeps research contracts explicit. Strict Pressure describes what happened next after recorded takeaways, giveaways, hits, and blocks; it is not possession or causality. Opponent Atlas contains descriptive career results against franchise alias sets with a five-game minimum. Development Trails show strict raw scoring-rate paths and do not adjust for age, role, teammates, injury, schedule, or uncertainty.

Completed-season Delivered Player Value may appear after the repaired 940-player reconciliation. Official season totals, official play-by-play roles, participation, and filtered event evidence remain separate. Current, Next Season, and Three-Year V4 outputs are shadow research and are not shown as results.

Missing evidence stays unavailable rather than being converted to zero. Player pages do not expose research-only betting signals. Links lead to the comparison room, relevant team hub, Team Pipeline drawer, and Season Database so readers can inspect the source context behind a headline.

The directory currently contains 6,717 NHL-ID files spanning the dated roster universe, resolved organization prospects, and every official NHL ID in the 35-season stats archive. The 5,527 historical-stat IDs all resolve. A player without a trustworthy landing cache receives a compact official-season-history-only file; biography, headshot, draft, playoff, award and current-status fields are not inferred. Players without a trustworthy NHL ID remain in their source tool rather than receiving a false canonical page.