Author: Joel Kirshner (McCormick ’19)

As the NHL playoffs wear on, only two teams remain in pursuit of the Stanley Cup. The Pittsburgh Penguins have emerged from the Eastern Conference finals after a hard fought game seven against the Ottawa Senators. They have run into the Nashville Predators, whose Vezina finalist goaltender Pekka Rinne has carried the team over the past few weeks, earning an impressive .941 save percentage and a 1.70 goals against average through the first three rounds of the playoffs. The Penguins serve as Rinne’s toughest test yet, as they’ve been boosted into the finals by a star powered offense, featuring the playoffs’ top two points leaders, Evgeni Malkin and Sidney Crosby, as well as top goal scorer Jake Guentzel.

Game one proved odder than any could have predicted, as the Predator’s stellar defensive core held the Penguins to 12 shots on goal, including a 37-minute stretch (yes, that’s over half the game) without a single registered shot. Nonetheless, Pekka Rinne allowed more goals than he did in an entire four game sweep over the Blackhawks in round one, en route to a 5-3 Penguins victory. The Penguins’ stars proved instrumental in capitalizing on their few chances. Crosby added two assists, while Malkin scored a goal—no surprise when one considers their regular season production.

Elite scorers like Crosby have historically been successful in the NHL postseason. Since the NHL switched to a 16 team playoff in 1981, one of the top two leading regular season scorers has made the Stanley Cup Finals 13 times. That player’s team has gone on to win ten of those times (76.9%). Out of the three times that the scoring leader lost in the Finals, two were ousted by other top five scorers. The third and most recent occurrence was in 2011, when Milan Lucic led the cup-winning Boston Bruins with 62 regular season points, good for just 39th in the league.

Lucic’s Bruins are one of only two teams to win the cup since 1981 with a regular season leading scorer who sat beyond 30th in the league. The other instance occurred in the lockout shortened 1994-95 season, in which Steve Richer led the Devils with 39 points, good for just 46th in the league. From the time series plot of Cup-winning leading scorers since 1981 (below), it’s clear that teams lacking an elite scorer, like this year’s Predators, have struggled to win a championship. Using t-statistics to analyze the distribution, a prediction interval can be used to predict the upper bound for how far down a Cup winner’s leading scorer may fall on the league’s leaderboard. A 98% upper bound prediction interval, for example, states that based on all available data, at least 98% percent of future Stanley Cup winning leading scorers will rank better than 35th in the league in regular season points. Though Richer’s Devils and Lucic’s Bruins slightly outpace those expectations (accounting for 5.7% of championships since ‘81), the Predators clearly have their work cut out for them.

Predator fans can take solace in the fact that their offensive shortcomings have been compensated for by exceptional defense and goaltending. In both 1995 and 2011, the Stanley Cup-winning Devils and Bruins were respectively led by incredible goaltending. The Devils’ Martin Brodeur led those playoffs in both goals against average and save percentage, as did the Bruins’ Tim Thomas, who went on to win the Conn Smythe trophy for playoff MVP. Brodeur and Thomas serve testament to the fact that a goaltender can alter the course of a series, earning Lord Stanley’s grail without the safety net of a high powered offense.

Predators fans may also be pleased to know that while on the historical aggregate, elite scorers clearly give their teams a key advantage, that advantage has diminished in importance over time. While the 1980s and early 1990s were characterized by supremacy from teams with elite scorers, including Wayne Gretzky’s Oilers and Mario Lemieux’s Penguins, the leading scorers in recent years have failed to match that dominance. The time series plot, above, shows that since 1993, there has been much higher variance in the league rank of the Cup winners’ leading scorers. In fact, the variance from 1981 to 1992 was a mere 5.71, increasing exponentially to 144 since 1993. This change may be explained by an overall downward trend in scoring, as no player in the last decade has come close to the marks set by the likes of Gretzky and Lemieux.

In the 1981-82 season, teams scored an average of 4.01 goals per game. That number has decreased to an average of 2.73 goals per game over the past five seasons. This difference has bridged the gap between the “elite scorers” who consistently place in the top ten for points and the average NHL player, which explains the increased variance of the run chart above. The scatterplot (left) showing the relationship between league goals per game and rank of the champions’ leading scorers clearly shows that when goals per game is particularly high, say at least 3.7, the leading scorer on the championship winning team is always in the league’s top 10 regular season scorers. More recently, the goals per game has fallen between 2.70 and 2.80, in which range the leading scorer’s rank is much harder to predict. In fact, in the nine seasons with a goals per game falling in that range, the average rank of the winners’ leading scorers is 14.67, with an incredibly high variance of 154.

These trends indicate that the top scorers in today’s NHL are far less successful than they once were in terms of dominating the game and winning at will. This season, Connor McDavid led the NHL with 100 regular season points. The 30th ranking scorer was Auston Matthews, only 31 points behind. At the peak of Wayne Gretzky’s dominance in 1985-86, he scored 215 points, which was 134 more than Ken Linesman at 30th in the league. McDavid and Crosby, while still superior to the competition, are much closer to the average NHL player than the stars of the past.

Thus, while their widely feared offense featuring three of the league’s top 20 scorers offers the Penguins a competitive advantage, the Predators can rest assured that facing such fire power is not the death sentence it once was. The Penguins hold a 1-0 lead heading into tonight’s game two matchup, but Lord Stanley’s Cup remains anyone’s for the taking.

Sources:

All data taken from hockey-reference.com