It’s NHL playoff time, and wisdom abounds. One such adage I’ve already heard a dozen times is “You’re never in trouble until you lose at home.” Just last year, three teams won their series after dropping the first two on the road: Minnesota over Colorado, Chicago over St. Louis, and Los Angeles over San Jose. However, last season was an exception, and even so, the other three teams who went down 2-0 on the road eventually lost the series.
If we look further back, teams that lost the first two games on the road have won 30 out of 256 series, or 11.7%. Ooof. Even if we restrict ourselves to the Conference Quarterfinals (which have come about in an era with greater parity), it doesn’t look much better, at 11 series victories out of 77 or 14.3%.
Fourteen percent isn’t exactly a longshot, but I think it’s fair to characterize it as ‘trouble’. That’s roughly the chance that you’ll find two people with the same people in a group of 11 people.
The Edmonton Oilers have won the draft lottery, allowing them to pick first overall for the fourth time in six years. Like most hockey fans, I found myself asking: How are they still this bad?
In the aftermath of their “victory”, the Sportsnet panel suggested they trade one of their many young forwards for a solid defenceman. How would that pan out? In 2014-15, Edmonton ranked 20th out of 30 teams in shots against. In 5v5 situations where the game is tied, they ranked 23rd in Corsi percentage.
So although they were below average in giving up shots, they were rock-bottom at giving up goals. Ths was not a good year for Ben Scrivens or Viktor Fasth, who played the majority of Edmonton’s games. Here are the league-wide shooting percentages for and against:
So let’s ask the following simple question: If they had better goaltending, how would Edmonton have fared this past season? I’ll take the simplest possible approach to get a quick, rough estimate. First we model the (fairly-straightforward) relationship between goal differential and (final standings) points.
First, let’s see what would happen if Edmonton had league-average goaltending. The league-average shooting percentage was 8.90% (compared to Edmonton’s 11.23%). So they would improve their goal differential from -1.02 to -0.32, which would translate to a 20-point improvement in the standings (62 to 82).
This would put them ahead of New Jersey and Carolina, and just slightly behind Philadelphia. They would still have a long way to go, but it would make them far more competitive than the past season.
Just for fun, what if Edmonton had goaltending comparable to the Montreal Canadiens (led by likely Vezina and Hart winner Carey Price)? Montreal’s opponents scored on only 7.44% of shots this season. This would improve their goal differential from -1.02 to +0.12, which would translate to a 36-point jump in the standings (62 to 98)!
Now Edmonton is between Calgary and Winnipeg, and would therefore likely have made the playoffs.
Of course, I’m aware that not all shots are created equal, so this is really just a rough approximation. It does however point out that improving their goaltending should be the number one goal for the organization as it’s likely to have a far greater impact than Connor McDavid ever could.
