Who is driving the increase in NHL scoring?

I like to explore interesting hockey questions from time to time, and one popped up last week on social media. That question: How much are depth forwards contributing to the broader increase in scoring across the National Hockey League? 

Or said another way: with increased talent supply across the league, a higher general scoring environment for the league, and the replacement of enforcer-types for more skilled forwards, has it been the depth players who are quietly driving the scoring surge?

To evaluate the change, I wanted to look at the rate-scoring changes for forwards based on their respective utilization over the past 10 seasons. Ten years not only gives us a long enough time horizon to evaluate the changes, but it also covers the dark era of offence in the NHL. Darryl Sutter’s grind-you-down Los Angeles Kings were at the top of the mountain back then, and on most nights scoring three goals meant a regulation victory.

By way of quick example, if you compare offence from the 2012-13 season to the 2021-22 season, it looks like a different sport. Even-strength scoring increased by 16 per cent, and all situations scoring increased by a whopping 23 per cent:

Over this period, we have seen some all-time individual performances, including nine occasions in which a player amassed 50 or more goals in a season. That group includes the usual suspects: Alex Ovechkin, who accomplished it four times, Leon Draisaitl, who did it twice, Auston Matthews, and Chris Kreider. Six of those instances have come just in the past four seasons.

Consequently, you might be led to believe that it’s this archetype of player – the gamebreaker, or elite sniper – who has benefited the most from higher-scoring environments. They have, but so too have most attackers around the league, in what looks like a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats situation.

To illustrate this, I grouped players over the past 10 seasons by their usage rates and categorized every player as a first-line player, a second-line player, a third-line player, or a fourth-line player. I also only focused on even strength for this case, since we know bottom-six forwards play disproportionately high minutes on the penalty kill, and disproportionately low minutes on the power play.

To qualify, a forward must have amassed at least 500 minutes of game play, or 250 minutes during shortened seasons.

Here is what the data looks like:

Every type of forward, irrespective of usage, has seen a marked increase in their ability to score goals – from first-line forwards (+16 per cent) to fourth-line forwards (+14 per cent) alike. And, as you might expect, even if you segmented this by top-six and bottom-six forwards, as the league tends to do, you get the same trend:

The increase in depth scoring also made me curious who was driving the bus, so to speak, through the first month of the 2022-23 season. These forwards may be utilized far less than their top-six peers, but they have found the back of the net with a high degree of frequency relative to how much they play:

Hope you guys were as intrigued by this as much as I was!

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