We’re less than a week into the NHL season, and we’ve already seen a small uptick in scoring. Through Thursday’s games, the average NHL team has scored 2.7 goals per 60 minutes of play, per Natural Stat Trick, which is the highest rate of 5v5 scoring dating back to at least 2008. In addition, NHL goalies are having a very rough go. : They have collectively saved 91.3 percent of shots faced at 5v5, which would be the lowest year on average.
It’s an interesting trend that has sustained over several seasons: NHL save percentage peaked in the 2015-16 season, when goalies made 92.5 percent of saves. Since then, that number has steadily declined, and is down a full ten points in the early going of the 2022-23 season, after finishing at 91.6 percent last season. To put that in perspective, the worst team in the ’15-16 season (Calgary, at 91.1 percent) would have been 24th in the ’21-22 campaign, nearly out of the bottom ten of the league completely.
There are a few plausible options for the fall in save percentage, and I would love to be able to spend time researching each of them.
First, and most obvious, the pandemic led to expanded rosters over the ’20-21 and ’21-22 seasons that allowed a lot more players who wouldn’t sniff the NHL to play. There were 115 goalies that started a game last season, compared to just 85 in ’15-16. It goes without saying that a team’s ninth or 10th-string defenseman is much more NHL-ready than its fourth or fifth-string goaltender.
Second, skaters are catching up to goaltenders. While it was common for goalies to have their own individual camps and coaches a decade ago, it is now expected that many of the sport’s elite forwards will work together over the summer and work on their skills. Coaches like Darryl Belfry hold summer camps for elite players, who make it their full-time jobs to make life miserable for opposing defenders and goalies.
Third, goalies are getting worse in general. We are at the end of a golden age of goaltending, with aspiring goalies unable to take over for the void left by goalies such as Carey Price and Tuukka Rask. Worse, NHL teams restrict their goalie search to those who are 6-foot-2 or taller (just three of the 20 drafted goalies this past June were below that height), limiting opportunities for would-be talented keepers.
Fourth, and what I will be discussing today: Teams are far more efficient with their rosters than they used to be.
Fighting has not completely left the NHL. Tanner Jeannot led the NHL with 14 fights last season, per the invaluable HockeyFights.net. That’s more than the leader from the ’15-16 season, Cody McLeod, who led the league with 12 fights.
What sets Jeannot apart from McLeod, however, is that Jeannot is a much better hockey player. Jeannot finished seventh in Calder Trophy voting last season, was a mainstay on the Predators’ third line and averaged over 16 minutes a game. He also scored 41 points in 81 games. McLeod, by comparison, averaged just over 10 minutes a game, and had just 13 points. In fact, over his three previous seasons culminating in ’15-16, he scored just 38 points in total despite playing almost every game.
Some of the other players that were among the top 10 forwards in fighting majors also had very productive seasons. Nic Deslauriers, second in fighting majors, may have been Anaheim’s best regular penalty-killing forward last season. Marcus Foligno, who had 10 fights and was tied for fifth, was a mainstay on possibly the league’s strongest checking line.
Compare that to previous years, and you see a much different caliber of player on this list, which brings me to the point: NHL third and fourth lines have become much improved over the last decade, and roster spots formerly reserved for players like Cody McLeod or Zack Stortini or Jared Boll or George Parros or any number of classic enforcer types, are now being used on stronger depth players.
On the lineups put forth by teams in their opening games, there are, by my count, only two players that fit this definition of player: the Avalanche have managed to find a roster spot for Kurtis MacDermid, who is listed as a defenseman but average just 7:24 of ice-time last season. The Blue Jackets did the same for Mathieu Olivier, who averages a fight every eight games in his professional career and had just 11 points in 46 games in the AHL last season.
Other than that, when NHL fourth lines hit the ice, we are much more likely to see something resembling hockey than we used to. The average call-up player scored 1.20 points per 60 last season, 22 percent above the valley for these types of players (0.96 P/60) in ’14-15. (By comparison, first-line players are up 21 percent over the same span, 2.21 last season, up from 1.83 in ’14-15). More telling, when call-up players were on the ice last season, they averaged 1.96 goals for per 60 minutes and 2.43 goals against. Those rates are both well up from the 1.64 GF/60 and 2.06 GA/60 from the low-scoring ’15-16 season.
What that means is that there is no respite for defenses.
When the Predators were defending a two-goal lead in the third period against the Kings on Tuesday night, while they did successfully keep the Kings stars from tying the game, they allowed a goal against the Kings’ fourth line (on a Brendan Lemieux rush up ice) and third line (with Quentin Byfield and Gabe Vilardi playing together at 4v4). It is much tougher to defend those types of depth pieces than it was in 2016 when the equivalent fourth liner might have been Jordan Nolan or Kyle Clifford.
Teams still value size up front, but they are also demanding that these players must be able to keep up with a rush, rather than simply throw a few hits and score the occasional goal.
Data sourced via Natural Stat Trick
(Photo of Tanner Jeannot: John Russell / NHLI via Getty Images)
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