Now that the trade deadline has come and gone, NHL rosters are relatively stable heading into the playoffs. This is as good a time as any to look at how NHL teams’ rosters are built, or more precisely, how NHL players are acquired on NHL teams’ rosters.
I pulled all the depth chart information on CapFriendly.com of all 31 NHL teams to see how squads are constructed.
Acquisition types
Before we get into the numbers, let us first take a high-level look at the different scenarios in which players can be acquired. There are some nuances and complexities to some of these scenarios, but I am going to keep it at a high level.
NHL Entry Draft – For those unfamiliar, the NHL Entry Draft is the amateur draft that is very similar to all other major sports in North America. NHL Entry Draft eligibility is generally for North American players between the ages of 18 and 20 and for non-North American players between the ages of 18 and 21.
Free Agency – There are three most common ways a player can become a free agent:
NHL player’s contract expires, and he does not sign an extension with his current team, therefore enters free agency and can sign with any team.
A player is not drafted during the years of draft eligibility and therefore becomes a free agent.
A player is drafted but does not sign an entry-level contract with the owner of his rights before those rights expire. The expiration of rights varies by where that player is drafted from (two years from draft year for junior players, four years for non-North American and NCAA players).
Trade – Pretty self-explanatory, but this is where a player is acquired in an exchange with another team.
Waivers – The waiver process is a little more complex. This is where a player has met a certain amount of playing experience, and his team wants to send that player to the minors (or taxi squad this season). In this scenario, another team can claim this player to acquire him. Acquiring players through the waivers process is relatively uncommon.
Expansion – Stating the obvious here but this is where the player was acquired in the NHL Expansion Draft. It’s important to call out that players that were acquired as part of the Expansion Draft via side-deal trades are designated as “acquired via trade” and not as Expansion Draft selections.
Shea Theodore is a good example, as he was traded from Anaheim to Vegas on the condition that Vegas would select Clayton Stoner in the Expansion Draft. In this scenario, Theodore would be acquired via trade while Stoner was acquired via the Expansion Draft.
Building through the draft
The media narrative is that teams are built through the NHL Entry Draft. If you look at the top 10 players in the league by points, nine out of 10 of them are on the teams that drafted them. Only New York Rangers forward, Artemi Panarin, was not drafted by his current team. Without digging much further, this tells me that the best way to acquire the best players in the league is through the NHL Entry Draft. But what about the rest of the team?
Of the 20 active players on each roster, I isolated all the players that were drafted by their current team to determine what percentage of the roster was acquired via the NHL Entry Draft.
The Vegas Golden Knights only have one active player on their roster that they drafted since they joined the league in 2017. It traditionally takes many years for drafted players to crack an NHL roster and with only four NHL Entry Drafts since Vegas joined the league, there has not been enough development time to expect more drafted players on the roster. Vegas also traded two of their players from the 2017 NHL Entry Draft, Nick Suzuki and Erik Brannstrom, for Max Pacioretty and Mark Stone, respectively. Both Suzuki and Brannstrom are regulars in the NHL and likely would have been playing for Vegas had they not been traded.
Trades
The second most common way to acquire players is via trade. Roughly 31% of the players on rosters league-wide were acquired via trade, versus 40% acquired via the Entry Draft.
The percentage of players acquired via trade is almost an inverse relationship of the percentage of players acquired via the NHL Entry Draft with Montreal and Vegas near the top.
Free agency
The last major way that teams acquire players is via free agency. Roughly 26% of currently rostered players were acquired via free agency.
Acquiring players via free agency gives a mixed bag of results. The number of elite players that reach free agency every year is relatively small, and situations where you can build your team around a free agent are very rare. Usually, free agent acquisitions are more complementary pieces to an already strong core of players. The top free agent acquisitions from the 2020 offseason were Taylor Hall (BUF), Alex Pietrangelo (VGK), and Torey Krug (STL). Those three players are higher-end talent, but are not be the best players on their new teams.
Waivers
There are only six active players on NHL rosters that were acquired via waivers. Waiver claims are rare because if a player is put on waivers, then this player is perceived as having a low value to their current team. That team is willing to essentially give this player away for nothing. However, in a salary cap crunch period like what the league is experiencing now, it could be that organizations need to create cap space for other players. There could be a slight increase in waiver claims over the next few years as teams try to juggle their salary cap situations.
Expansion
Finally, back in 2017, Vegas acquired 29 players via the Expansion Draft. They would flip some players via trade and let others go to free agency. Of the 29 players selected, only five players remain with the team: William Carrier, Marc-Andre Fleury, William Karlsson, Jonathan Marchessault, and Brayden McNabb.
Wrapping it all up
It will be very interesting to see how the Seattle Kraken roster is built in the first few years of the franchise. Certainly, there will be a large portion of the roster that comes directly from the Expansion Draft via their official selections or trades associated with that draft. Additionally, with the current salary cap situation facing the league, some quality free agents could be available for the Seattle Kraken since they should have much more cap space than other teams.
It has been well documented that the Golden Knights hit the jackpot in year one of the franchise and put themselves on a path to being a legitimate Stanley Cup contender every year since joining the league. This allowed them to trade away some of their developing first-round Entry Draft picks, which bolstered their position to make deep postseason runs now but may hurt them in coming years.
We should not expect Seattle to have the same immediate success as Vegas, as we at Sound Of Hockey believe the Kraken will more than likely hold onto their top prospects.
Earlier this week Greg Wyshynski published an interesting piece on ESPN+ on fighting in the NHL during this pandemic-impacted season. He talked to Nicolas Deslauriers of the Anaheim Ducks about the mentality of engaging in pugilistic activities with no fans in the building during this unorthodox campaign. It is a great piece, so check it out if you can.
The article referenced how fighting is up this season. It triggered me to look into how this aspect of hockey has changed in the NHL over the last 20 years for this week’s Data Dump Saturday.
NHL fighting trends
Over the last 20 years or so, fighting has been going down across the league as traditional “enforcers” have been replaced by younger, more skilled players.
The reasons for the decline of fighting are beyond the scope of this post, but it comes down to a combination of stricter penalties for fighting, awareness on long-term impacts of repeated concussions, and data supporting that skill on the fourth line is more valuable than enforcers.
The increase we have seen in 2020-21 could come from the heightened tensions associated with the all intra-division format in this unique regular season. Teams are playing their divisional rivals more frequently versus the traditional cross-league schedule in which they would face certain opponents less frequently.
Impact of fighting on team performance
Here is how fighting breaks down by team and division in 2020-21.
On one side of the coin you have two of the worst teams in the league this year in Anaheim and Ottawa leading their respective divisions in percentage of games with fights. On the other side, the Buffalo Sabres, a comparable bad team, have close to the fewest games with fights.
Additionally, Tampa Bay and Florida are two of the better teams in the Discover Central Division and are also the top two teams in the division in percentage of games with fights. The summary is that fighting does not correlate to winning or losing records in the NHL.
Fighting in the NHL by player
The next question I wanted to answer is which individual players are still fighting in the NHL. Let’s first look at how many players are fighting in the NHL by season.
Looking at the drop in the number of players participating in fights in 2020-21 is a bit misleading. The season is not complete, and even when it wraps up in May, it will be shorter than previous campaigns. The net result is that this gives less opportunity for players to get in a fight.
I then wanted to look at the percentage of players that are getting into fights and how many of them are getting into multiple fights.
Again, the drop in the 2020-21 numbers of players participating in multiple fights could be misleading for reasons stated above, but the consistent drop over time can be attributed to the fact that there are no longer players that are in the league exclusively for fighting.
Here is a look at the fight leaders in the NHL this season.
It’s interesting to see a player like Brady Tkachuk leading the league in fights this season because he also is tied for the lead in points on the Senators with 30 as of April 24. Tkachuk is a good example of the shift away from the dedicated enforcer role. Austin Watson and Deslauriers may not have the offensive skill that Tkachuk has, but they still contribute with .29 and .22 points per game, respectively.
To help understand how the makeup of players fighting in the NHL has changed, let us now compare the top 10 fighters from the 2000-01 NHL season.
The number of fights these guys had in that single season is the first thing that stands out. Even if you doubled Tkachuk’s six fights and extrapolated that to a full season, it is still less than half of Andrei Nazarov’s 27 fights in 2000-01. Nazarov had only six points in 79 games that year. Of the list of top 10 fighters, only Matthew Barnaby and Tie Domi contributed beyond the fighting and intimidation role the others played in their careers. This validates the theory that we are seeing fewer and fewer one-dimensional enforcers in the league now.
Summary
Although fighting is indeed up this season compared to last, supporting Wyshynski’s comments, there are still indicators that fighting in the NHL has fundamentally changed. Even a small increase in games with fights this year is probably not a strong indicator of any changes to the trend we have seen over the last 20 seasons.
In this week’s Data Dump Saturday, I dig into the playoff races in the Central and West Divisions by looking beyond the points in the standings to get an idea of who might claim the fourth playoff spot in each division.
Earlier this week we did a round of Buy, Sell, or Hold on the Sound Of Hockey podcast where we discussed if Nashville or the San Jose Sharks were playoff bound teams. We talked about ‘games at hand’, ‘goal differential,’ and who is ‘hot’ right now as justification for our picks in qualifying for the playoffs.
Let us take a current and data-focused look at these two divisions with interesting playoff races.
For the more casual fans:
GP is games played.
PTS is the points earned (teams are awarded two points for a win, one point for an overtime or shootout loss, zero for a regulation loss).
P% is percentage of points earned versus what is possible.
GF is goals for goals for.
GA is goals against.
I am focusing on Arizona, St. Louis, and San Jose in the West and Nashville, Chicago, and Dallas in the Central. In my opinion, these are the only teams vying for the fourth and final playoff spots in their respective divisions.
Points percentage
Both San Jose and Nashville have made recent surges in the standings which have launched them into contention over the last few weeks. I want to see how these teams are trending by looking at their five-game moving average of point percentage.
In the chart below, you can see that Nashville has been outperforming Dallas and Chicago lately. Additionally, Chicago has been underperforming with a point percentage lower than 50 percent over the last 10 games.
In the West, you can see St. Louis underperforming has provided Arizona and San Jose the opportunity to be in contention in the playoff race.
It should be noted that we cannot assume that these trends will continue. There could be underlying conditions that are driving performance such as injuries, hot goalies, or coaching/strategy changes, but that is beyond the scope of this post.
Goal differential
Another stat to look at is goal differential which is the sum of goals scored minus the sum of goals scored against.
Nashville appears to be reaching another level in goal differential, scoring 18 more goals than it has allowed over the last 10 games. If you look at the goals for and goals against numbers you can see Nashville is doing it with a combination of higher-than-normal goal scoring and being stingy with the goals allowed.
Shot differential
One of the first things I look at when trying to understand how well a team is playing is shot differential. It does not account for everything, but in general, if a team is producing more shots than the opposing team, then they are getting more opportunities to score. From a statistical perspective, it is a way to broaden the sample size instead of simply looking at the number of goals in a game.
It is a little surprising to see Nashville with a negative 18 shot differential because in goal differential they were (coincidentally) a plus 18. This would imply a heavy reliance on goaltending. A quick look at Juuse Saros’ stats and it shows that he is averaging less than 1.25 goals against average and a save percentage of .965 over his last 10 starts.
Chicago’s shot differential has correlated with their points percentage obtained over the last 10 games.
As we stated earlier, Arizona and San Jose have been playing better over the last 10 games that has created the opportunity to get back in this playoff race, but the shot differential of -31 and -27 respectively is a bit surprising. This would imply that they have been more effective with their shots (i.e. scoring at a higher rate) or that they are relying on their goaltending as well.
I focused on the last 10 games for these teams, but again, there is no guarantee that their trends will continue over the remaining ~16 games of the season. The next 10 games facing these teams will be critical considering several of them will play each other and the stakes will be that much more significant as they jockey for position in the playoff hunt.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments or how you would evaluate a team’s performance in the playoff race.
A big story earlier this week was the comment caught on a hot microphone by now former NHL referee, Tim Peel. The quote was, “It wasn’t much, but I wanted to get a #$&%*! penalty against Nashville early in the…”. An unfortunate comment but it confirms what a lot of fans have felt for a long time that NHL referees manage the game and call penalties accordingly. We commonly hear commentators say things like, “The refs are putting the whistle away” or “Looks like a make-up call,” etc. Depending on who you ask, you might find people that have no issue with that approach to the game. Others tend to argue that a penalty is a penalty whether it is the first minute of the game or the last minute of the game.
I am not advocating for how the game should be refereed in this post, I just want to look at the data to gather any insights on how and when penalties are called in a game.
NHL Penalties Called by Period
Already this is a bit of a ‘tell’ on how penalties are called in the NHL. Of course, our analysis will not stop here so let us dig into this a bit.
Third Period Penalties Called
It is worth exploring the third period a bit. Conventional wisdom says that referees tend to “put their whistles away” towards the end of a game. I chose to breakdown the period in five-minute increments and compare how penalties are called in the period.
A couple interesting things to see is that the third period tends to have the most even distribution of penalties called in these five-minute increments when compared to the other two periods. The first and second periods tend to ramp up in penalties called during the course of the period while the third period stays relatively flat. Also compared to the other periods, the third period has less penalties called in the last ten minutes.
…But that is not telling the whole story.
NHL Penalties by Period with Game Context
What we need is context of the penalties relative to the game situation. For this I use goal differential. However, we cannot simply look at how many penalties are called based on the goal differential in a game because the data would be inherently biased due the fact that games start in a tie and one-goal games are more common earlier in the game compared to two-or-more-goal differential games.
30 percent of game minutes are played when the game is tied; 36 percent are played with a one-goal differential; 18 percent are played with a two-goal differential, which leaves 16 percent at a goal differential of three or more. If we just look at volume, the data will be skewed toward tie and one-goal games since there is more time (opportunity) to call penalties. To figure out a rate of penalties called I have landed on “penalties per 60 minutes”.
This agrees with the belief that referees tend to avoid calling penalties in tight games (either tied or one-goal games). Let’s go to another level of detail by looking at this spread by period.
Ok, now we are getting somewhere. This says that there is an average of 2.4 penalties called per 60 minutes in the third period compared to three and 3.6 penalties called per 60 in the first and second period respectively.
Now if we just isolate the third period and we break the period into five-minute chunks, we see that the tie games in the last five minutes of the third period has the lowest rate of penalties called per 60.
There is still more work to be done here, but directionally it would appear that managing the game and putting away the whistle is common across the NHL relative to game differential based on this quick analysis.
I hope this gave you some insight into some of the narrative around the referees this week. If you have any questions or feedback feel free to drop me a note in the comments section or on Twitter. Thanks for reading.
Earlier this week there was an AP article talking about secondary scoring in the NHL. I tend to believe that the more spread of scoring you have through your lineup, the better your chances for success in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. I thought it might be a fun concept to dig into a bit on this week’s Data Dump Saturday. This will take a little exploring.
% of team scoring by the top three scorers
The first thing I want to look at is the percentage of goals scored by the top three scorers on each team. Secondary scoring in this analysis is scoring done by everyone else. There is some context missing from this type of analysis such as injuries, trades, etc. but this is just intended to be a directional exploratory analysis.
Boston appears to be the most dependent on their top three goal scorers while Detroit is the least dependent on their top three scorers.
Let us next look at the last three years’ conference final teams (highlighted) to see if there is a pattern relative to secondary scoring during the last regular seasons.
It would be foolish to draw any hard and fast conclusions based on this quick analysis, but it appears that teams that are more dependent on their top line tend to not fair well in the playoffs, nor do teams that spread scoring across their lineup.
Team Goal Scoring
An important point for context not shown above is the team goal scoring. If you were to look at the first graph above, you might think Detroit is doing well because they are not dependent on their top three scorers. However, Detroit is not having a great season. We need to incorporate the average goal scoring to provide additional context and to explore just a little bit more.
Now we are getting somewhere. Tampa Bay (34%), Carolina (38%), Florida (34%), and Washington (33%) are scoring a lot per game and they are getting secondary scoring with the top three scorers accounting for less than 40% of the team’s goal total. Toronto (44%) and Edmonton (43%) are scoring a lot, but are more dependent on their top three scorers. Meanwhile, Boston (50%) is not scoring a ton AND they are dependent on the top three scorers.
Again, this is just a quick exploratory analysis on the concept of secondary scoring and would need a much more thorough and complete analysis to draw any conclusions, but it is something to ponder during the playoffs.
As the Seattle Kraken hockey operations team looks toward the Expansion Draft, the age of each NHL player will factor into their selections. On Saturday, we posted a broad look at the average player ages of NHL teams, but that just scratches the surface of understanding how teams are constructed. Today, we take a deeper dive into the ages of players and wrap it up with how this could factor into the Kraken’s selection process for the Expansion Draft.
Average age by position and line
Let us start by looking at the median ages of NHL players by position and how they stack up on depth charts.
A couple interesting points to call out here. First, the youngest line in hockey tends to be the first forward line with a median age of 25.8 years old. Conversely, the oldest line is the fourth forward line. Last, the median age of goalies is older than any of the forward or defense lines. This makes sense, since goalies typically take so much longer to develop than skaters.
Average ages by team and line
Here are a couple fun call-outs when looking at this data:
The Vancouver Canucks have the youngest forward line in the NHL (21.8), which is their first line: Elias Pettersson (21.9) Nils Hoglander (19.8), and Brock Boeser (23.6).
The Jets have the oldest forward line in hockey (34.2), their fourth line: Nate Thompson (36.0), Mathieu Perreault (32.7), and Trevor Lewis (33.7)
The Ottawa Senators have the youngest team across all positions with an average age of 25.5 years old.
Washington has the oldest team in the NHL at 31.0 years old. Thank Zdeno Chara (43.5), Craig Anderson (39.4), and Alex Ovechkin (35.0) for driving the age up for the Caps.
The Avalanche have the youngest defensemen in the league, averaging just under 23.9 years old.
Here is a data visualization you can use to dig into the detail of age distributions by team.
Seattle thoughts
Player age alone will not be a deciding factor in the Kraken’s selections in the upcoming NHL Expansion Draft this summer, but it will be a component in some of the decisions to be made. An important piece in incorporating a player’s age in the decision-making process is how many years are left on a player’s contract. How might the players contributions decline over the remainder of the deal?
Example:
Dustin Brown has 11 goals and six assists in his 20 games in the NHL this year and will turn 37 in November. Brown has only one year remaining on his contract with a salary cap hit of $5.9 million per year.
TJ Oshie has five goals and nine assists in his 20 games in the NHL this year and will turn 35 in December. Oshie has four years remaining on his contract with a cap hit of $5.7 million per year.
Both players are expected to be exposed in the Expansion Draft. Even though Brown is two years older, he probably carries the least amount of risk between the two because he only has one year remaining on his contract. In the salary-cap-strapped era the NHL is going through, Brown would probably be more tradeable at the trade deadline next season since teams only need to fit his salary in for the remainder of the year.
The Kraken will also need to evaluate players that are just entering the NHL to forecast what their upside might be. In San Jose, both Dylan Gambrell and Alexander True should be exposed in the Expansion Draft. Both play center. Gambrell is one year older than True and has been a regular in the Sharks lineup this year. True has played this season in the AHL and has five points in six games. They seem to have very similar capabilities, but does the one-year age difference change any of the NHL projections for either player?
