Finding the fancystat to guide your gut feelings in the Stanley Cup playoffs
Are the teams that take care of business in the Underpants Zone destined to play for the Cup in June? That was the case last spring — but not two springs ago, my dudes! Playoff hockey, man.
One hockey cliché that has been sent to a well-deserved death since analytics was mainstreamed is that the playoffs are a new game.
They are a different game, but not a brand-new one. Everyone is going all out! Referees are generally calling fewer penalties! And Corey Perry or Nick Cousins is about to do something violent, and you know you are expected to have a good take on it! Other than that, there is nothing original that one can say about hockey being the first, and most truly Playoff Sport.
The point of contributing a pre-playoffs article is about a silly quest — namely, trying to find a telltale stat. The nettle to thread involves figuring out how big a dose of the fancystats you should take to get informed before the Stanley Cup playoffs, which get underway on Saturday.
Hockey media is quite the conundrum. There is endless hypercoverage of the NHL. Stat sites offer Choose Your Own Analytics rabbit holes to crawl down and try to make an argument for this team, or that team.
My goal is the halfway spot. Analytics is a social good since we need to measure something before we know how to improve it. Skin feelings and gut-level feelings are equally vital. Those represent coming to a moment of clarity or truth. The former makes the latter better.
Some of the regular season matters. As a hypothesis, I decided to kick out some fancystat jams.
Natural Stat Trick has a feature that allows you to isolate team stats to a certain span of the season and game situations. For grins, I picked two metrics: Expected Goals For Percentage (xGF%) and High-Danger Goals For Percentage (HDGF%) during 5-on-5 play, isolated to the games immediately after the all-star break to the end of the regular season. Limiting it to 5-on-5 made sense — playoff refereeing, you know. I also looked at the during the ’22 and ’23 seasons for reassurance.
The xGF% stat codifies who is good at the flow of play. A team in the high 50s is dominating the offensive zone. A team under 50 percent likely gets hemmed in its D-zone with a discomfiting frequency.
And HDGF% is all about who is in control of the Underpants Zone. But if you have watched hockey in the last 15 years, you have seen the graphic tracking shots from the area that extends from the goal to the faceoff dots, to the top of the circles. It has the same shape as home plate does in baseball. On the airwaves, they might refer to “Home Plate Shots.” Once a friend who shall remain anonymous relabelled it the Underpants Zone because it resembled a pair of men’s briefs, you’ll never call it anything else, tro mig.
So does it matter? Eh, maybe a little. Over the last two NHL playoff tournaments, the better xGF% team won 16-of-30 playoff series. The better HDGF% team prevailed in 19-of-30 series. That does not mean anything is a sure thing.
This chalk was stronger in the ’23 season. The superior HDGF% team from the closing regular-season leg won 12 of 15 series. The Stanley Cup final pitted the top two HDGF% teams. The Vegas Golden Knights graded out No. 1, and won the championship series against the Florida Panthers, who ranked No. 2. The next two teams in the table, the Colorado Avalanche and Los Angeles Kings, were defeated in the first round.
A season prior, when the league was resettling into the routine from the Before Times after two seasons of COVID-19 protections, the better HDGF% teams were 7-8. The better xGF% teams were 6-9.
Consider this a wild stab at finding the one or two fancystats that explain who wins and who loses. It has no factoring for special-teams play, a team getting hot-goalied, or a teamwide outbreak of squeezethestickitis. Here is how all the matchups line up, with the team that starts on home ice listed first.
As far as Canadian teams go, it looks surprisingly good for Edmonton, Toronto, and Winnipeg. Vancouver? Enh.
Western Conference
Vancouver (P1) vs. Nashville (WC1)
xGF% ranking: Vancouver, fourth (54.46), Nashville, fifth (54.18). HDGF% ranking: Nashville, fourth (61.90), Vancouver, 14th (51.43).
Whelp, that sheds light on why The Athletic’s model gives the Canucks only a 4 percent chance to win the Stanley Cup after a 50-win season and a division title. They have been playing hit-the-logo with the enemy goalies since Super Bowl weekend. No Canucks rank in the top 20 of 5-on-5 scoring since the all-star break., and Elias Pettersson ranks No. 80, one spot below Nashville veteran Ryan O’Reilly.
Edmonton (P2) vs. Los Angeles (P3)
xGF% ranking: Edmonton, second (56.85), Los Angeles, ninth (52.98). HDGF% ranking: Edmonton, second (63.16), Los Angeles, seventh (54.84).
The rankings square with the narratives! The Oilers are an offensive juggernaut and the L.A. Kings are moving up, but not out in four games. Edmonton’s potency is all because of teamwork — oh, who are we kidding, it is mostly due to Connor McDavid, and working-class hero Zach Hyman playing off of him.
Anze Kopitar has Alex Laferriere and Adrian Kempe as his wings. So the L.A. Angels are not the only Triple-A team in the area.
Dallas (C1) vs. Vegas (WC2)
xGF% ranking: Dallas, third (56.42), Vegas, 13th (50.91). HDGF% ranking: Dallas, 12th (52.78), Vegas, 18th (50.00).
The ‘root for the meteor’ matchup for anyone who dislikes the salary cap shenanigans. The Golden Knights regularly cheat the salary cap and package it in a pop-up book called, How I Spent My Annual Vegas Staycation, by Mark Stone. I’ve read it. It is a less-noir derivative of a Russian graphic novel by Nikita Kucherov.
Dallas may have done some similar roster massaging with wing Evgenii Dadonov. And both teams have the unearned advantage accruin’ from the NHL not factoring tax jurisdictions into the cap.
So, both these Sunbelt franchises have been a net positive for hockey, while also being shady. To heck with them, except for Joe Pavelski. Remember when he scored four goals in a 5-4 defeat in a playoff game last season? That was the first time the Stars had scored four goals in a loss during the playoffs since 2020. And who scored two goals the last time that happened, including the third-period equalizer? Joe Pavelski, again.
Winnipeg (C2) vs. Colorado (C3)
xGF% ranking: Colorado, 11th (51.78), Winnipeg, 16th (50.15). HDGF% ranking: Winnipeg, eighth (54.43), Colorado, 20th (49.35).
Well, at least there is one fleet of Jets whose doors do not get blown off regularly. Winnipeg and Connor Hellebuyck allowed the fewest goals against during the regular season.
Poking through late-season defense-pairing stats involves some scrolling to find Colorado’s first pair of Cale Makar and Devon Toews. That is not too good for the Avalanche, like their goaltending.
Eastern Conference
Florida (A1) vs. Tampa Bay (WC1)
xGF% ranking: Florida, 10th (52.47), Tampa Bay, 22nd (48.48). HDGF% ranking: Florida, ninth (53.85), Tampa Bay, 13th (52.05).
Ron DeSantis had more of a bandwagon than either team in his state.
Florida has been good three seasons in a row while averring that it is better to be despised than ignored like the franchise has been for over 80 percent of its existence. Matthew Tkachuk, Nick Cousins, Sam Bennett, and others all mix skill with doing the dark arts. But they will be even more contemptible if all that sandpaper does not lead to a Stanley Cup.
It is the Lightning, and one knows to write them off at their peril of ending up on Freezing Cold Takes. Goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy had that zinger the other day about how cable TV is too expensive for him, and just for that it would be cool to see him find his Peak Form.
Boston (A2) vs. Toronto (A3)
xGF% ranking: Toronto, seventh (53.45), Boston, 17th (49.99). HDGF% ranking: Toronto, fifth (59.34), Boston, 16th (50.65).
The Leafs are 11 spots higher in the high-danger conversion table than the Bruins? You cannot make a Simpsons-referencing shitpost from that.
History and the season-series sweep scream BOSTON. And remember, it is far from sure there is a carry-over from the closing stage of the regular season to the postseason. Remember, Brad Marchand is one of the great on-ice heels in the history of the sport. The Leafs, in that post-all star break stretch, had primary and complementary scoring spilling out of their gloves, even with Mitch Marner missing about 10 games.
New York Rangers (M1) vs. Washington (WC2)
xGF% ranking: Washington, 19th (49.35), Rangers, 25th (47.17). HDGF% ranking: Washington, 15th (51.16), Rangers, 24th (44.64).
Possibly fraudulent Rangers versus aging and washed Capitals in a matchup of big East Coast markets. Bless you, parity.
Serious hockey knowers have gone to lengths to clear up how the Rangers won the Presidents’ Trophy while being the grocery stick in the 5-on-5 goal differential table. In that phase of the game, they scored 166 goals and allowed 165 to finish at plus-1, sandwiched between the non-playoff Pittsburgh Penguins and now non-existent Arizona Coyotes.
I do not want to know what I do not know about how they pulled that off.
Carolina (M2) vs. N.Y. Islanders (M3)
xGF% ranking: Carolina, first (58.60), Islanders, 15th (50.22). HDGF% ranking: Carolina, first (63.64), Islanders, third (62.50).
That second metric confirms any eye-tests that the Patrick Roy-coached Islanders could maroon the Hurricanes, and launch another flotilla of UrinatingTree Hurricanes Man memes.
However, narrative. Carolina has the best top-4 defenders in the biz. That crew includes Jalen Chatfield, who has a chance for a rare trophy trifecta. The MemCaldStan; yeah, that term was coined on the spot. Chatfield, who never got drafted in any league, hoisted the Memorial Cup with the Windsor Spitfires in the Canadian Hockey League in 2017. In 2022, he won the Calder Cup with the AHL Chicago Wolves. Now he is a fairly key cog on the odds-on favorite to win the Stanley Cup. That is heady.
Roy already has the MemCaldStan, although he completed the CHL leg as a coach. That was in 2006. Who won the Stanley Cup that season? Those Cup-capturing Hurricanes: captained by Rod Brind’Amour, the current head coach.
Holy omens! Now let’s see if the stats bear it out.
In closing
Watching a well-fought hockey game can be like waiting for the fog to clear. You hang on for that split second, just before someone scores the overtime goal in the playoffs, where everything seems so clear.
You know it when you feel it. A goal scorer has that extra beat to pick their spot. Or a 2-on-1 rush forms against a defender who has munched more minutes than he can chew in a warm arena on softening spring ice. The goalie has left a just-a-bit-too-juicy rebound and is scrambling to recover for the second shot. You watched barely any games through the six months of reg-season slogging, but you have watched the sport for 40 years. And, ballgame. Then it is on the next game, perhaps a new series, and you are flying through the clouds again.
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.