It’s been a while since we’ve had a good old-fashioned Data Dump, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been actively scouring the publicly available data for insights. I spent the better part of my weekend rebuilding my data pipelines so that I could condense things into a few charts to share what I found. This will be all about the Stanley Cup Playoffs to date.

Stanley Cup Playoff series length

This year’s Stanley Cup Playoffs seemed to start out really slowly, with several teams winning their first two games of the series, and we all started to worry that we would see a lot of sweeps. As luck would have it, several teams turned it around to give us some competitive series and a couple of Game 7’s. That said, only three of the eight series went longer than five games, thus bringing down the average games per series.

By the looks of the chart, maybe we were just spoiled the two prior years, which had longer series than usual in Round 1.

I do have some bad news, though. The second round of the last three Stanley Cup Playoffs saw lower average series lengths than the first round.

I would not put too much stock in this since 2019 and 2020 had an average series length of six or more games in the second round.

Stanley Cup Playoff scoring

After a few low-scoring games over the weekend, I wanted to examine how goal scoring in Round 1 compared to the regular season and previous season’s playoffs.

After a string of regular seasons in which the average goal scoring exceeded six goals per game, these playoffs have dipped to under six goals per game for the first time since the 2021 Stanley Cup Playoffs. It’s important to note that playoff averages only include goals scored by the top 16 teams in the league, as half the teams don’t qualify.

Playoff teams have been scoring less in the postseason so far than they did in the regular season.

Another aspect of playoff goal scoring I like to examine is the percentage of goals scored on the power play. I’ve heard a lot about the Edmonton Oilers’ power play, so I was a little surprised to see the Rangers at the top of the list for the highest percentage of goals scored via power play.

Blocked shots

We often hear about the commitment of players to blocking shots in the playoffs. The eye test suggests that shot blocking goes up in the postseason, but is this common narrative true?

So yes, blocked shots do historically go up in the playoffs, but only marginally. I would have expected a higher increase in the playoffs.

Here is a look at a team-by-team breakdown of blocked shots in the playoffs compared to the regular season.

Hitting in the Stanley Cup Playoffs

Another aspect of the game that changes is the number of hits in playoff games. This change can be most noticeable in Game 1 of a series, when teams come out with a lot of adrenaline and look to “set the tone” physically. Here’s a look at the average hits per game per team.

Let’s not forget that out-hitting does not necessarily translate to winning. We examined this during the regular season in the last Monday Musings chart of the week. Here are the winning percentages when you are out-hit (negative differential) versus out-hitting (positive differential) your opponent.

In my definition, a negative differential occurs when the opponent has four or more hits than your team, whereas a positive differential means your team has four or more hits than the opponent.

More playoff Data Dumps to come

I plan to do a couple more Data Dumps throughout the playoffs. The next area I am going to investigate is the roster construction, but if there is anything else you want me to look into, let me know in the comments, and I will see what I can do. In the meantime, enjoy the playoffs.