Special teams say a lot about this year’s Cup contenders
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When you are evaluating each team’s viability as a Stanley Cup contender, you must overweight two components: the sustained ability of a team to win at even strength (where the lion’s share of game minutes are played), and the efficacy of the goaltending.
If a team cannot reasonably check both boxes, they are ripe for an early exit in the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Beyond that, we know the importance of special teams – a team can smooth over average even-strength play or mediocre goaltending if they possess a dominant power play or penalty kill. On the surface, it may seem that these two special-teams units should be equally weighted, but in the NHL’s heightened scoring environment, the mathematics have certainly changed.
A nearly two-decade NHL trend I continue to find fascinating is the increasing importance of a high-calibre power play, and the reduced importance of an elite penalty kill. In the defensive era of hockey 10 or 15 years back, most Stanley Cup champions possessed a penalty kill that ranged from good to great.
But over the past decade (a decade that’s seen both a surge of offensive skill enter the league, coupled with changes in tactics and deployment strategies intended to juice scoring), that relationship has flipped. Most eventual champions now carry a higher-end power play, while the ability to kill penalties is of lesser value.
Consider the ranking of each Stanley Cup champion since the 2007-08 season, and notice the trend materially shifted starting with the 2017-18 season. That season, I emphasize, is the first year we saw a sharp rise in scoring leaguewide – a shift that has sustained itself through 2025:
With the exception of the Vegas Golden Knights in the 2023-24 season, every recent champion has maintained a power play varying from good to electric; their penalty-kill units, meanwhile, were right around league average over teams’ respective regular seasons. It certainly is a far cry from the days of the Los Angeles Kings and Pittsburgh Penguins routinely winning tight-checking games en route to their titles.
Setting aside the heightened importance of a quality power play, it’s also clear a champion cannot maintain an untenable special-teams unit on either side of the aisle. In the few instances in which a team did have an underperforming unit, they frequently offset it through strength elsewhere – the 2012-13 Chicago Blackhawks couldn’t find a goal on the power play but were dominant when killing penalties, whereas the 2016-17 Pittsburgh Penguins couldn’t kill penalties but had the fourth-best power play in the league.
To that end, it made me curious if any of this season’s credible contenders should be concerned. The short answer to that question is yes.
Of the teams we are sure are going to be playing beyond game 82, the Carolina Hurricanes and Los Angeles Kings should be wildly concerned about their success rates on the man advantage. It’s not lost on me that both contenders are scoring at a rate comparable to the lottery-bound San Jose Sharks, managing just six goals per 60 minutes played. For context, the league-leading Winnipeg Jets are averaging nearly 12 goals per 60 minutes played on the power play. Double!
And though the penalty kill may be waning in relative importance, the penalty kills in Vegas and Minnesota leave a lot to be desired. Vegas has been able to offset the pain here through the league’s second-best power play, but Minnesota has struggled there too, and it’s a key reason the Wild are still fighting to secure a wild-card slot in late March.
Lastly, I would be remiss to not acknowledge the New York Islanders. They simply possess one of the worst special teams combinations in recent memory. In their case, it’s going to be the reason if they miss the playoffs outright – their even-strength play is on par with the Edmonton Oilers (+16) and Colorado Avalanche (+12), and it still won’t be enough to cross the playoff cut-line.
Just look at their shot profiles on the year courtesy HockeyViz:
A power play that only can generate pressure from the perimeter, coupled with a penalty kill that concedes shots left and right from the net-mouth area and between the circles when down a man? That’s a recipe for catastrophic failure, and surely is already atop head coach Patrick Roy’s focus list this off-season.
Data via Natural Stat Trick, NHL.com, Evolving Hockey, Hockey Reference