Stanley Cup contenders have already separated from the field

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The National Hockey League, particularly in relation to the other major North American sports leagues, requires a lengthy regular season.

A low-scoring league susceptible to high single-game volatility that features a points system that recognizes overtime losses means we need a lot of games to separate the wheat from the chaff.

But if you have looked at the standings recently, this season is a bit different. Absent the muddied middle of the Pacific Division, the league has shown itself to be quite top heavy at the halfway mark. Playoff probability models show 14 teams with 85 per cent or better odds of qualifying for the playoffs – an extraordinarily high number of qualifying teams considering the number of games remaining.

You can infer from that fact alone there’s significant divergence in the talent of teams this year, or a reduced level of parity. You can also see that story reinforced in the data. If we look at every team’s per-game goal differential, we see a marked volatility increase. Lower standard deviations here would indicate teams are closely clustered in talent, whereas a bigger number indicates broad separation between the haves and have-nots:

I would be wary of expecting standings compression over the second half of the season merely because teams have 35 or 40 games remaining. If you look at the last 82-game season (2018-19) and split it in half, you notice little change. This year is unique, and the contenders have separated from the pretenders early. If you think talent divergence is something that develops over multiple years, the fact that 2020-21 was a similarly top-heavy season lends itself to that argument.

This trend made me curious about how we can evaluate the prospective