Elite offences are overwhelming defences in the NHL playoffs

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All season long, we have been talking about how offensive dominance in the National Hockey League is starting to take centre stage. The great offensive teams are winning. The weak offensive teams are not.

There was some curiosity as to whether this offensive explosion would hold up over the course of the playoffs. Well, it has so far. Going into Sunday’s games, postseason scoring is up 18 per cent year over year and is eight per cent higher than the previous high (2009-10) in the NHL’s modern era (2007 to present).

Here is where the changing NHL landscape gets interesting. Historically, when offence is surging, goaltending is struggling. In fact, that’s precisely what we saw during periods of this past regular season, where scheduling compression and flurries of backup goaltenders surely fanned the goal-scoring flames. The month-over-month data (we will focus on even strength, which is agnostic to special teams volatility) shows surging scoring and weakening stop rates moving in opposite directions:

While expected goals (a function of both shot volumes and the lethality of those shots, weighted by angles, shot types, and distances) were marginally up month over month, real goals were up considerably. With a corresponding plummeting of save percentage, you can reasonably infer goaltenders, as a group, were overwhelmed – particularly at the end of the year.

Why is this interesting? In these playoffs we are seeing a reversal of this trend. I suspect some of it has to do with the subset of goaltenders left in the playoffs – teams with bad goaltending struggle to qualify for the playoffs to begin with and overcoming poor goaltending as a qualified team is another animal altogether. So yes, when you have