Playoff success 101

Part I: Scorin' or borin'?

Welcome to part one of a short series more accurately titled “LW3H Investigates One Of Juice's Playoff Hypotheses, Makes It Unnecessarily Complex And Fails To Draw Any Firm Conclusions”.

Hypothesis Número A can be summarised as: Better defensive teams have more playoff success than higher scoring teams
The Werk Wot I Did

• Order all NHL teams by both goals scored and goals against in each of the last 10 regular seasons (back to 1997/98 – 2004/05 was excluded as it wasn't very interesting to look at)
• Look at how these numbers translated to playoff failure or success
• Construct some colourful (yes, there are two letter u's in that word) tables and charts to try and illustrate whether there are any strong trends
• I've kept this stuff pretty light on number-crunching, (a) to keep it mostly simple and observational, and (b) because I would probably shame my profession with the level of proper statistical methods that I have forgotten how to use
  

Obvious drawbacks

• 10 years isn't a huge sample size, so tough to take really definitive answers from it, but enough to give an illustration – league-wide trends in scoring have varied a lot over 20-30 years anyway
• Regular season performance doesn't automatically translate to post-season play – there are occasions where some poorer defensive teams have stepped it up significantly in the playoffs, for example
• Broadly, the best teams are stronger at both ends of the ice than average teams, so it's hard to say one aspect of the game is clearly more valuable than the other
  

Key



Ranking charts
The charts below show the overall league ranking by Goals For and Goals Against and the stage of the playoffs each team made. At the bottom of each is the average rank of the teams reaching each playoff round in each year, with the overall 10-year average in the far right column. (Note that the average for each round includes all teams that made that round, not just those that got knocked out.)




These figures suggest there is a slight tendency for better defensive teams to get further in the playoffs:

• The 10-year average GF ranking for Cup Finalists is 9.0 compared to 6.9 for the GA ranking – average GF ranking is also worse for the other playoff rounds, but by a smaller margin
• 45 teams ranked 15th or worse in GF made the playoffs in the 10-year stretch (including four Finalists), compared to 38 ranked 15th or worse in GA (two Finalists – Carolina both times)
• Only one top-ranked team in GF (the Devils in 2000/01 obviously...) made the Final, compared to three top-ranked defensive teams – numbers are closer if you extend it to the top two or four ranked in each category, however
  

Trend graphs
The next picture shows a diagrammatical representation of the Goals For data, the red line being the league average over the period, the individual bars the average GF figure for the teams reaching each stage of the playoffs:



Observations:

• The general post-lockout scoring spike
• Playoff teams score well above the league average, as you would expect
• The GF average of the Conference Finalists (blue bars) is only significantly above that for all playoff teams (orange bars) in four or five of the 10 seasons
• 2000/01 and 2007/08 are examples of years where high-scoring teams fared particularly well in the playoffs, the snoozefest that was the 2002/03 playoffs being the clearest example of where they did not
  

The second picture is the same but for Goals Against:



Observations:

• Again, the obvious point that playoff teams have much better defenses than the league average
• The GA average of the Conference Finalists is better (below) that for all playoff teams a bit more frequently than the GF average was, but not a really strong trend there
• In pre-lockout years, there seems to be a slightly clearer bias towards stronger defensive teams going further in the playoffs than there is for stronger offensive teams in the same period (the yellow and blue bars are further below the red line in the GA graph than the same bars are bove the line in the GF graph) – again, not a definitive picture though
  

So, all in all, a lot of work to illustrate not all that much? Probably so – but some interesting information in there, I think. Maybe you can point out some things that I haven't noticed.

Stay tuned for the rest of the series:

• Part II – some West vs East type shenanigans
• Part III – Glen Sather: Still alive or “Weekend At Bernie's” style cover-up?