There are a few regular season stats that usually translate into NHL playoffs wins, and they’re not necessarily the ones everyone may expect

A while back, I decided to run some numbers to see which regular season team stats actually translate into NHL playoffs wins in a series of a few blog entries on my personal blog (1, 2, 3). A few patterns became clear, as illustrated by the chart below that originally came from my old blog post (it covers 2008-2014).

One takeaway, goal scoring and power play really didn’t translate into the postseason success at all. That’s certainly not surprising regarding raw goals scored (which I actually didn’t even bother to run by this stage of testing), and maybe a little surprising regarding power play efficiency.

More stat oriented guys will certainly approve of Corsi numbers and total goal differential. There are good reasons for that, and they do show decent correlation. Furthermore, there’s not all that much difference between Corsi and Fenwick.

The thing that surprised me the most was how good a predictor that penalty kill turned out to be. I suppose that speaks to both defensive organization and goaltending as bedrocks of postseason success.

None of the individual stats, however, had a particularly high correlation. While none of the stats get you all way there, I did take about 5 years of data and run a multi-variable regression with total goal differential, Corsi Close percentage, save percentage relative to league average, and penalty kill relative to league average as the variables. That spit out a single stat by which you can rank teams. In the end, that combined statistic did prove to have some merit.

Using this statistic (which I decided to call “Playoff Hockey Success Indicators,” mainly so it could be called “PHSI” aka “Fizzy”), I ran it back over the last several years. The result I got was that the eventual cup winner almost always was a top 3 team by this statistic. The only team that broke that trend was the 2011 Bruins, who won the Cup with the 5th best ranking. Every Stanley Cup finalist going back to 2011 was a top-5 team by my PHSI.

Last year, for instance, the Chicago Blackhawks were the clear number one. Virtually tied for second were the Pittsburgh Penguins and Tampa Bay Lightning. Obviously the Penguins crashed and burned, but that wasn’t surprising given that they went into the playoffs as the coldest team in the entire NHL, and their defense was unrecognizable due to injury. Allowing for those intangibles, it was right on predicting the Blackhawks and Lightning as Stanley Cup finalists.

Running the test this year, this is what comes up:

If the test is to be trusted this year, the East comes down to Pittsburgh and Washington, while the West comes down to Anaheim and LA.

The Ducks are actually an interesting case. By this stat last year, they were one of the worst teams in the playoffs (along with Calgary). This year, they’re number one. This shows some of the shortcomings of the stat, or trying to boil anything down to a single number.

So is this just another stupid “power ranking” statistic? Maybe, but I hope not! We will follow up with some series previews and predictions on Wednesday, which will refer to these rankings. In the future there are probably a few ways to improve this indicator, but for now I’ll keep it simple. Until then, I’ll be keeping an eye out for those four teams in this year’s NHL playoffs.