The NHL’s scoring surge continues early in the postseason

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For two seasons now, we have seen an acute rise in scoring rates across the National Hockey League. This year’s move to the upside was particularly aggressive, and playoff contenders differentiated themselves from the pretenders through their ability to score at high rates.

Save for perhaps the Dallas Stars and their defensive prowess, this is a postseason defined by great offensive teams facing great offensive teams. We’ve seen scoring grind to a halt in prior postseasons for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s the great goaltenders taking over games. Other times it seems like marked changes in officiating standards curb offence. And, sprinkled in over the past 15 years or so, a handful of elite defensive teams have managed to slow the pace of games and put the league’s most prolific scorers in a torture chamber. (This was just last season.)  

But after the opening week of this year’s postseason, we are seeing more of the same – a lot more of the same. Even-strength scoring is at its most elevated in 15 years, and it’s not from a short-term surge in shooting percentages. Expected goals are also aggressively moving upwards, while the ratio of playoff scoring to regular season is close to par. (Note: power-play rate scoring is in line and, at least for now, not a driver of the scoring increase in the playoffs.)

The other notable takeaway from this? Look at the relationship between playoff scoring and regular-season scoring over the past four years. Stifling defensive play from the Montreal Canadiens last year saw them move into the Stanley Cup Final; the year prior, the Tampa Bay Lightning leaned heavily on their defence and goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy to win their first Stanley Cup. And the year