Scoring surge
Increase in goals per game welcome change for NHL
GOALS per game are up to nearly six, with 13 of the league’s 31 teams averaging three or more a night. And though those totals are somewhat inflated by the NHL’s dodgy practice of including shootout winners in the goals-for column, Sixth Avenue has been doing that since the 2005-06 introduction of the skills competition. Hence, comparisons hold.
This will be the NHL’s highest scoring season since 2005-06, when 16 clubs averaged at least three goals per while combining for 6.17 a game in the first year under the Shanahan Summit reset coming out of Owners’ Lockout II — The Canceled Season.
In the interim, goals-per dipped to 5.42 only two years ago when just two teams could get to three a night. In 2014-15, 2013-14 and 2011-12, only three teams hit that magic number, which in truth is the bare minimum necessary to stoke even a modicum of excitement. Last year, seven teams scored at least three per.
Coaching is too good — or perhaps too obsessive, take your pick — and goaltending is too good for the league to ever go back to the offensive explosion of the late ’70s to early ’90s when games generally featured 7-8 goals a night. Everyone understands that. But this does appear to be trending in the right direction.
The steady influx into the league of remarkably talented and equally con- fident teenagers who don’t necessarily conform to previously established norms represents a major factor in the offensive uptick. The 2016 World Cup may not have a prominent place in history, but Team North America’s influence most surely endures.
It isn’t only scoring that’s up, but both scoring chances and golden scoring chances, at least from an anecdotal basis. Of course, keep in mind that I am surrounded by defenseoptional operations in Manhattan and Brooklyn, so my sense might be warped, but probably not entirely. There are more chances, and more good chances, around the league. And I’d give a good amount of credit for that to the NHL’s crackdown on slashing that officials have maintained from the start through the finish. The inability of beaten defenders to hack away at attackers’ hands or chop at them once a halfstep behind has opened up the ice from the wide hash-marks in. Enforcement of the rule has created more one-on-one situations with which goalies have to contend.
This has been a welcome exception from the league, which has generally abandoned previous, assorted crackdowns by mid-season. Now the trick will be for the refs to enforce the rule just as consistently in and though the playoffs as they have during the season.
Enforcement of the rules. What a concept.
Of the 121 team seasons over the past four years, the Devils’ offensive output of 2015-16 (2.22 goal per game), 2016-17 (2.20) and 2014-15 (2.15) ranked 115th, 116th and 118th overall.
This year, entering Saturday’s match against the woebegone Islanders, New Jersey ranks 15th at 2.95 per. And Taylor Hall (86 points) had recorded 72 percent more points than team runner-up Nico Hischier’s 50.
That, by the way, represents the greatest such difference in the NHL, exceeding Connor McDavid’s 51percent edge in Edmonton over Leon
Draisaitl (103 points to 68). You can take that to the heart.
So how many teams that might not otherwise fire its coach would do so if the Blackhawks dismiss Joel Quenneville?
Is there any more of a metronome than Derek Stepan, who, good, bad or indifferent — never indifferent — is on his way to a fifth straight season of posting between 53 and 57 points? Entering Saturday with 53 (with a career-low 13 goals but a matching career-high 40 assists) with four games to go, the former Ranger — pretty much everyone in the league is a former Ranger by now — could establish a personal best.
Yes, the Blueshirts missed him. Yes, everyone knew that they would. No, I never understood why the market was next to non-existent for him.