As has been explored at length over the last few weeks, referees didn't exactly cover themselves in glory when it came to policing the various playoff series. The data suggests they called more penalties than in the regular season, but that certainly isn't enough for a lot of people, especially when so many games finished with so few goals.

So far in these playoffs, 28 of the 47 games — almost 60 percent — featured five goals or fewer, and that includes empty-netters. That's poor enough scoring numbers that it would make the average NHL executive send out another email about maybe making the nets a little bigger. The 7-4 Game 6 between Calgary and Vancouver stands as the big outlier here; only 11 games of those 47 broke seven goals total. Often, those high-scoring games were not even wild affairs, but rather blowouts in which the losing team popped in a few meaningless punches to feel good about having suffered the onslaught.

So it would seem that the margins by which games are being decided are razor thin, and the difference between high- and low-scoring games is likewise not very big. People don't like to see hockey games end 3-2, because it's kind of depressing.

But that's the modern game, take it or leave it.

Which is what makes the cries for more penalties so important to note here. Because what people want when they say they want more penalties is more goals. In theory, teams would adapt to having so many calls go against them in the early goings and allow opponents to move unimpeded through the neutral zone and toward the goalmouth, and that in and of itself would create more goals. In theory.

The alternative to this is that if the “almost everything is a stick infraction” standard of 2005-06 were applied at the start of each season, the teams wouldn't need the learning curve come playoff time, and then we'd get free and easy hockey, plus more power plays. And that means more goals as well.

But those are pipe dreams for this season; as was stated earlier this week, to have refs start enforcing the rules far more strictly at this point in this playoff run would be impossible and unfair to all teams at the same time.

So instead we live in the system we live in.

But nonetheless, the small amount of power plays being awarded means that teams that can score on the power play are almost invincible, regardless of what they do in the much, much larger portions of the game played at 5-on-5.

The proportion of power play goals to those scored at even-strength is more or less unchanged from the regular season to the playoffs (ES goals made up 75 percent of all those scored in the regular season, compared with 76 percent through the end of the first round, while power plays came in at 22 percent and 21 percent, respectively).

But what's interesting is that because the number of goals being scored per game has dropped off — to 2.49 per team per game in the playoffs from 2.66 in the regular season — almost any power play goal is going to be worth more to the team that scores it in terms of affecting win expectancy. Call it a function of tight checking, conservative playoff hockey. But what's interesting is the correlation between being able to not necessarily scoring more goals, but simply draw more power plays per game than your opponents, and winning your series.

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