What We Learned: Why is NHL scoring on the decline?
One of the things that gets talked about a lot in the NHL is the ability of the league's coaches to suck the fun out of everything.
No matter what comes along to make the game high-scoring — more power plays, 3-on-3 overtime, etc. — eventually someone figures out a way to make it more conservative, safer, and ultimately lower-scoring. So when scoring started to spike several years ago, and more guys started putting up 50 goals and/or 120-plus points on a regular basis, it felt like maybe something had fundamentally changed league-wide. It felt like maybe the ads were true way back in 2022, and this was indeed the NHL's Next Golden Era.
We know now that this was hubris. For about a decade in the second, far less talked-about Dead Puck Era (2006-2017), the league averaged somewhere around 2.6-2.7 goals a game and occasionally, through statistical quirks, cleared 2.8. Apart from the first post-lockout season when they gave you a penalty for looking at a guy the wrong way, the league-average goals per game hadn't cleared 2.9 since the mid-1990s, around the time the New Jersey Devils really sunk their nefarious, defense-first claws into everything and spawned a legion of copycat trappers.
But then in 2017-18, damn: 2.93 goals per game, almost out of nowhere, a year-over-year increase of more than 7 percent. And that number mostly stayed on an upward trend until 2022-23, when everything peaked at 3.14, the highest-scoring season in 27 years.
That season, Connor McDavid and David Pastrnak both cleared 60 goals, McDavid scored a miraculous 150 points, and 11 players — including defenseman Erik Karlsson — had triple-digit point totals. Then in 2023-24 Auston Matthews almost scored 70 goals, and both McDavid and Nikita Kucherov had 100 assists. Nathan MacKinnon had 89 helpers, and Quinn Hughes registered 75 from the blue line. As a fan, it felt incredible to watch players chase and often attain that level of 1980s-inflected scoring greatness on a near-nightly basis.
In all, 14 of the 35 salary cap-era 50-goal seasons happened in just the last four seasons. The same is true of 34 of the 73 individual 100-point seasons.
It felt like we were in the midst of an absurdly high-scoring era. But good times never last. This past season, no one even hit 85 assists, only six players hit 100 points, and just one guy (Leon Draisaitl) scored more than 45 goals.
There's an easy line to draw here. Scoring started surging in 2017-18. Another thing that happened in 2017-18 is that the NHL added an expansion team that thinned out every roster in the league to one extent or another. Scoring jumped again — to north of 3 goals per game — in 2021-22, when the league added another expansion team. This is not a coincidence. Nor is the fact that scoring would spike in those years but slowly settled down, at least slightly, over the course of a few years after those expansion seasons.
But here's the thing: Even all those gaudy goal totals are an illusion, a sort of sleight of hand for the league and its superstar players. Becauee another situation that really spiked in recent years? Empty-net goals surged to ludicrous levels. ENGs accounted for about 6.5 percent of all goals (511 of 7,898). In 2016-17, the year before the Vegas expansion, that rate was around 4.3 percent (289 of 6706). We're talking about an increase of almost 50 percent in the new expansion era. To be fair, this sharp upward trend actually started in 2014-15, but is now at by far the highest levels ever seen and seems to only be accelerating. In fact, 33 of the top individual 50 cap-era seasons with the most empty-net points have happened since '21-22.
We saw a bit of debate regarding how empty-net points padded scoring totals for MacKinnon last season. And indeed, he was one of seven players in 2024-25 to have at least 10 empty-net points — Mikko Rantanen led the league with 16, and three of the four highest-ENP seasons ever happened last season. The following is a list of every player with 10 empty-net points in a season over the 50 years from the start of the expansion era (1967) and when Vegas entered the league (2017): Jaromir Jagr (2000-01, when he had 10). End of list. In fact, 10 of the 17 biggest single-season ENP performances ever are in the past two seasons.
On top of that, a shocking underreported aspect of the decline in scoring is that while 5-on-5 goals per hour hasn't really changed and is still fairly high, and power-play scoring is at its highest in the cap era (1.56 goals per 60), the number of power-play minutes is in free fall. Last year, NHL teams had almost 57,800 minutes of man-advantage TOI. That's the lowest of any non-COVID/lockout season in the cap era… by a long shot. No other 82-game season has ever had teams on fewer than 60,600 minutes since 2007-08. Last season saw a decline of more than 6,000 power-play minutes from 2023-24.
Refs only gave out an average of 2.71 power plays per game, the lowest number since they started keeping track of that stat… in 1963-64. The next-fewest is 2.89. It's a huge gap.
Personally, I don't buy that there's never been a time for more gentlemanly, foul-free play since JFK was alive, but here we are. Again, this is a trend. All of the bottom-11 seasons for power plays per game have been in the last 11 years, and 7 of the last 8 were in the post-Vegas-expansion era. This is very obviously how the league wants games to be played, and maybe that makes sense from the perspective of refs not wanting to "decide games" because guys are converting on power plays at similar rates to those seen in the '70s and '80s. Last year's league-wide power play percentage (21.6) was the eighth-highest since they started keeping that stat 61 years ago.
So the question is this: How sustainable is the high scoring of the past several years?
I really don't think the empty netters are going anywhere. Teams are more aggressive about pulling the goalie and players are faster and more skilled than ever. It may be a "fake" way to juice scoring in some respects, but it's not something coaches can disrupt unless they really want to commit once again to only pulling goalies with under a minute to go. And I doubt that's a road coaches want to go down.
The power-play stuff is extremely fixable. Call more penalties. Maybe not at the post-2005 rate of 4.9-plus, but let's get in line with historical averages and see how that treats us.
But, as the league continues to adjust to having a few dozen new jobs, and reaches an equilibrium, it does feel like we're just not gonna stay north of teams scoring three or more goals per game forever. It's a trend we're already seeing and even that is, again, propped up by a historic number of ENGs.
It's probably never going to get bad enough again where guys are back to winning scoring titles with under 100 points — I still can't believe that happened as recently as 2015 — but without more expansion, I think we should probably start wrapping our heads around what games with fewer than 6 goals per game look like again.
That's just the way it goes in the NHL.
What We Learned
Anaheim Ducks: Damn so it was all wishful thinking the whole time? Who could have seen that coming for weeks?????
Boston Bruins: Sounds about right.
Buffalo Sabres: Only four?
Calgary Flames: How many guys on the team would they have had to leave at home before the idea of a "snub" even starts feeling true? They seem pretty loaded down the middle, no?
Carolina Hurricanes: This is gonna be real interesting to monitor.
Chicago: Feels like this is undeniable, at least on the ice.
Colorado Avalanche: Stuff like this is how they trick you! Never hold out hope for that mythical "one last move of the summer" that will make you feel better. If it comes, great. If not, at least you didn't set your heart on it.
Columbus Blue Jackets: No, no, probably not.
Dallas Stars: Every team should be doing this.
Detroit Red Wings: Click on this article and try not to do a spit take when you see the defenseman the Wings almost gave huge money to this summer. What an organization.
Edmonton Oilers: Okay but is the feeling mutual?
Florida Panthers: Yeah I guess that's true.
Los Angeles Kings: I have to agree that these are guys I would trade for if I were the Kings.
Minnesota Wild: I guess "nothing to report" is preferable to "it's going badly," but also we have to keep kayfabe in mind. If it were going badly, why would you say that out loud to someone?
Montreal Canadiens: Wow.
Nashville Predators: If it's not finished, why write the article? I know it's mid-August but that's no excuse.
New Jersey Devils: I'm gonna hit ya with a big ol' "nope."
New York Islanders: Pretty interesting.
New York Rangers: Given the franchise's recent history, why put this particular cart before the horse? This is crazy. Let's wait until like two of these guys make it.
Ottawa Senators: This article doesn't have the worst ideas (i.e. that cities should invest in something other than giveaways to private businesses owned by billionaires) but as soon as you say something along the lines of "is a sportsball happening?" I'm just gonna assume you're a dweeb and tell you to get lost. So: Get lost.
Philadelphia Flyers: They used to call sports stadiums "The Olympic" and "The Spectrum." We live in a sick society.
Pittsburgh Penguins: Surely that's the end of that. What? It definitely isn't? Wow.
San Jose Sharks: Didn't know this was up in the air, but okay. Congrats on the new deal.
Seattle Kraken: For what team? Definitely not Canada.
St. Louis Blues: I'll take your word for it.
Tampa Bay Lightning: Ohhh don't make me choose.
Toronto Maple Leafs: How are we still talking about this? Literally none of the guy answering the question, the coach, and the player involved aren't there anymore. Find a new angle.
Utah Mammoth: Hope they're not both at home or that could get tricky.
Vancouver Canucks: What do you mean the Canucks don't appear to have a good plan? How can that possibly be right? There's no way!!!
Vegas Golden Knights: Another interesting one.
Washington Capitals: You mean apart from the extremely obvious reasons?
Winnipeg Jets: At least someone is.
Play of the Weekend
Thank you to Marcus Nordmark for giving us a really sick goal in the middle of August. What a guy.
https://x.com/sellishockey/status/1956441869879255551
Gold Star Award
Last week I predicted there would be a notable trade. There wasn't one. I will instead say I meant this week. Haven't you read "When Prophecy Fails?"
Minus of the Weekend
Still a month to go before training camps start. Which means less than a month until rookie tournaments. Which means people will be live-tweeting rookie camp games. The worst crime of all.
Perfect HFBoards Trade Proposal of the Week
User "Dead Coyote" is painting a tunnel on the side of a mountain.
MTL/SEA - Beniers for Slafkovsky