Several playoff contenders — the Chicago Blackhawks, the St. Louis Blues, the Montreal Canadiens, the Anaheim Ducks, the Vancouver Canucks, the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Rangers — sent seven or more players to the Sochi Olympics.

With sentiment growing against sending N.H.L. players to the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, those teams’ post-Sochi performance will be under the microscope as the N.H.L. season resumes Tuesday.

Opponents to the N.H.L.’s Olympic participation have long argued that clubs that send many players to the Winter Games tend to perform poorly after the break. The critics have had no real statistical evidence to back up the claim, though, and have largely based their opposition on individual teams that stumbled in the stretch run.

Still, a little-noticed 2012 study may provide such evidence: It found that for every player an N.H.L. club sent to the Olympics, the club’s goal differential dropped by 0.088 of a goal per game compared with its performance before the Games. That is to say, clubs that sent many players to the Olympics in 1998, 2002, 2006 and 2010 suffered a bigger performance drop-off, on the whole, than clubs that sent few players.