A potent power play has never been more important

The National Hockey League’s heightened scoring era appears here to stay. With that comes one of several inescapable new realities for front offices and coaching staffs: It is quite difficult to qualify for the postseason without a productive power play.

One of the better parts about the NHL (certainly in relativity to some North American sports leagues) is that there are many ways to build a contender. Having an explosive offence helps; so too does a shutdown defence, or elite goaltending, or special-teams units religiously applying pressure on the opposition. Glance at last season’s playoff field, and you see a diversity of strengths from team to team.

But increasingly there’s a thread that ties many of these teams together, and it concerns the power play. As the NHL has moved into a higher-scoring environment over the past five years, the value of a marginal goal has decreased, but the importance of being able to create volumes of scoring chances (and by association, goals) has increased. In many ways, it’s the offensive end of the spectrum that has become a great differentiator.

This hasn’t always been the case. If we look back at the correlation between power play performance and a team’s corresponding record (we will use total standings points here), we see some weakness around a decade ago.

In recent years, the relationship has strengthened:

A correlation coefficient is a numerical value measuring the strength of a relationship between two variables. In this case, we are asking how much power-play production correlates with a team’s given placement in the standings. A -1.0 value would indicate a perfectly inverted relationship; a +1.0 value would indicate a perfect direct relationship between the two. All we need to take away is one point of conclusion: the relationship between power-play scoring and standings points at the end of the year has strengthened considerably over time. Teams with productive power plays are simply more likely to reach the playoffs than those without one, and that’s true now more than ever in the modern era. 

You can see this borne out just in last year’s data. If we sort all 32 clubs from last season by order of power-play production and their respective standings points, look how difficult it was for the underperformers to qualify:

That’s a table you don’t need a degree in mathematics to understand. Even the outliers have contextual explanations – the Minnesota Wild missed the postseason because the power play couldn’t offset the league’s 29^th-ranked penalty kill. The Winnipeg Jets qualified for the postseason because goaltender Connor Hellebuyck is capable of erasing goals in every game state on a regular basis.

There are plenty of plausible explanations for the burden being placed on power-play units to deliver nowadays. Yes, several teams with offensive superstars (and little roster turnover) are bringing elite power plays to the ice every season — clubs like the Tampa Bay Lightning and Edmonton Oilers have supernova weaponry and use it to their advantage.

There are also structural changes teams have made in recent years that are undoubtedly driving scoring to the upside. Adding a fourth forward to power-play units (in lieu of a second defenceman), a heavy focus on puck control (in lieu of dump and chase and related strategies), and the longer-term focus on developing skilled puck movers on the blueline are components that immediately come to mind. But again, this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to explaining what’s changed.

The critical takeaway though for teams (and their roster building attempts) is to understand this relationship has changed, and efforts to find talent — not reduced purely to on-ice skill; coaching and deployment strategies can have a significant impact on performance, too — are increasingly important.

Data via Natural Stat Trick, NHL.com, Evolving Hockey, Hockey Reference