For this week’s Data Dump Saturday, I investigate the ages of players in the NHL. Age will be one of the critical factors the Seattle Kraken will need to consider when drafting players in the Expansion Draft this summer. I thought this would be a good topic to dig into to help understand how most teams are built in the NHL.
Average age of NHL players
As you can see, the average age of NHL players has changed over time. Before you make any assumptions about the average age getting older the last few seasons, keep in mind the last two seasons are tough to evaluate as a comparable of the prior seasons.
Last year’s regular season was cut short by a month. The last month of a season is a time where teams tend to call-up their prospects from the AHL or possibly get their major junior and college prospects some games if their regular season has ended. These players will be younger and therefore drive the average age down a bit.
This season is obviously incomplete, so it does not have the late-season call-ups accounted for either. The shortened training camp and elimination of the pre-season also prevented coaches and general managers from getting a look at some of the younger prospects. So those guys may not have had the same chances at making NHL rosters out of camp.
Average age of NHL players by position
Nothing too surprising here other than it really illustrates that goalies tend to break into the league much later compared to other positions. Ilya Sorokin, Kevin Lankinen, and Ville Husso all made their NHL debuts this season and all of them are over 25.
Average age by team
Everyone seems to enjoy looking at the average age by team, so here you go.
Zdeno Chara (43.5) and Craig Anderson (39.3) are inflating the Capitals numbers a bit, but even when you look at the median, they are still the oldest team in the league.
Of course average age does not tell the whole story, so I plan to dig into this a bit more over the next few days to help paint a better picture of how ages come into play when building rosters.
As always, let me know if you have any thoughts, questions, or suggestions for Data Dump Saturday. Enjoy your weekend.
In his 369th career NHL game, Connor McDavid registered his 500th point to tie Sidney Crosby as the eighth-fastest player to reach that milestone. This week on Data Dump Saturday I plan to visualize McDavid’s scoring pace.
I grabbed the game logs from a sample of former and current NHL players to showcase how they stack up. The list of players is relatively arbitrary so if you have complaints about who is included or not included, please file them with Sound Of Hockey’s complaint department.
Average NHL points per game
This next chart is a little noisy but I wanted to look at a points-per-game average over time to see pace and any drop-off. It’s hard to pick the perfect number for the moving average, but I settled on 50 games. That felt like the right number to showcase how these players were performing at various stages in their careers.
A couple interesting points that might be worth exploring:
Draisaitl (bottom orange line) started relatively slow. His spike is probably related to playing with Connor McDavid.
Ovechkin has been surprisingly consistent over his last ~800 games, hovering around the one-point-per-game mark.
Gretzky’s decline was slow and consistent, but he still ended his career at an impressive one-point-per-game pace.
By contrast to Gretzky, Crosby’s point production has declined significantly in the last ~300 games.
Milestone pace
I also took a quick look at how quickly these players hit each 100-point milestone leading up to 500. Numbers in the chart below represent how many games it took to hit the next notable plateau.
By now it seems pretty clear that comparing any of the current players to Lemieux or Gretzky is futile, but one thing that pops is that McDavid is increasing his pace of scoring. Ovechkin also had a relatively short time between 400 and 500 points with just 59 games.
That is another edition of Data Dump Saturday. If you liked this one, you might like my post on scoring across the league. Feel free to send me any suggestions or questions to John@NHLtoSeattle.com.
It seems like every season we hear the narrative that goal scoring in the NHL is up year over year. Instead of taking someone’s word for it, I like to dig into it to A) see if it is true and B) identify changes at the individual team level.
As you can see above, scoring is up but only slightly from 6.07 goals per game last year to 6.12 this year. Heading into this season, there were a lot of questions around the long downtime for the seven teams that did not qualify for the NHL Playoff bubble last summer, shorter training camp, and the lack of pre-season games possibly impacting the scoring in the league this year. Those factors might have an effect on the games in some manner but at this time it seems to be immaterial to draw any conclusions based on scoring.
Scoring by NHL Team
There might not be a material change for the league at large, but there certainly are changes in scoring by individual teams. Here is a rundown of the scoring change year over year by team through Friday’s games.
Margin of victory
Another broad metric I like to look at is the ‘average margin of victory’ in games. The general consensus is that the smaller the margin of victory, the better the game, and I tend to agree. Let us take a look.
As you can see, the games are closer this year compared to last year and a heck of a lot closer compared to the 2018-19 season. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues through the rest of this campaign or if it is just an early season blip.
Goals for and goals against
Of course goal scoring is one thing, but goals against is another important factor in how teams are performing (just ask the Vancouver Canucks). If you want to look at individual teams’ performances over time in the ‘goals for’ and ‘goals against’ categories, I’ve created an interactive visual below.
It is too early in the season to draw any hard and fast conclusions, but it will be something we keep an eye on as this shortened season progresses. If you have any questions or data requests, message us at the @Sound_Hockey twitter account.
