What We Learned: Who is the NHL’s king of 3-on-3 OT?

(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.)

The Calgary Flames have only been to overtime once since Dec. 17, and they ended up losing that game in a shootout.

Prior to that, though, there was no team in the NHL that should have been more feared in the extra period of 3-on-3, because their success rate was mind-boggling. They've won eight of their 12 overtimes, lost once, and gone 1-2 in the three that lasted into the shootout. Any time you outscore your opponents 8-1 in any situation, even if it's only in a combined total of 32:48, you're in a good place.

And moreover, when that scoring differential wins you eight more points in the standings, it's a major advantage.

Now, you can obviously say that this is little more than a confluence of good circumstances. The Flames lead the league in overtime shooting percentage at 32 percent, and also have the fourth-highest save percentage at .952. That's PDO to the max, and especially where it concerns goaltending; Kari Ramo and Jonas Hiller just aren't that good.

But as to the shooting percentage, well, there's plenty of reason to believe that can be kept up for quite a while to come, and it's all thanks to one man: Johnny Gaudreau.

Again, Calgary has eight overtime wins, and he has a point on seven of them, with three goals and four assists. That's the largest OT point total for any single player in the league, ahead of Brent Seabrook (0-5-5), and five guys who have four points: Patrick Kane, Anze Kopitar, Andrej Sekera, Jordan Staal and Jake Voracek. Of that group, only he and Kopitar have yet to be on the ice for an OT goal against.

That alone is a major difference-maker, but what really separates Gaudreau from literally every other player in the NHL is that this is a game state which seems to be designed to specifically benefit him.

In all, 233 skaters have played more than five minutes of 3-on-3 time this season, and this is where Gaudreau ranks among all of them in terms of individual events — i.e. all shots taken by that player, rather than while that player is on the ice — per 20 minutes (instead of the normal 60, because the current league leader in 3-on-3 ice time only has 31:14, so most guys probably won't sniff 60):

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This is clearly a guy who is considerably better than everyone at just about everything to do with 3-on-3 play. The three guys in front of him in goals, by the way, are shooting 100 percent (Vlad Namestnikov), 75 percent (Jordan Staal), and 43 percent (Jonathan Toews), and you probably make the argument that only Toews — with a similar number of minutes played and only two fewer shots — has a relatively sustainable number in that regard. Namestnikov is 2 for 2 in OT, and Staal is 3 for 4. They've also played far fewer actual minutes than Toews or Gaudreau.

But we also have to keep in mind that Calgary as a whole is a goal factory in overtime, so perhaps Gaudreau is benefiting from a great system and some very skilled teammates, particularly on the back end. It's unlikely that any team has a group of three defenders as well-suited to 3-on-3 as Calgary's Mark Giordano, TJ Brodie, and Dougie Hamilton. Moreover, Sam Bennett, Sean Monahan, Jiri Hudler, Mikael Backlund (and so on) are pretty good guys to rely upon in OT as well.