If there’s a Brian Burke philosophy that I share, it’s that the NHL is a superstar driven league. Everywhere he went, Burke looked to get stars for the top of his lineup. Ultimately, it’s hard to win four rounds of the playoffs if you’re going to be playing series in which the other team’s best players are better than yours. With that in mind and thinking about who will be around into May or June, I wanted to take a look at what teams are getting this year with the forward who meets the following criteria on the ice at 5-on-5:
- Played at least half of his team’s games;
- Highest average 5-on-5 time on ice of all forwards dressed for the game.
Before getting into it, it’s worth remembering that whenever you do something like this, even if your peg is the forwards, you’re still implicitly looking at the rest of the team. The results are the product of more than just the forwards involved. That’s kind of the challenge for management in figuring out where their teams need to go — which changes do you need to make to get to the highest level? It also bears mentioning that this is more of a high level view type thing, as opposed to going deep into the weeds of why things are happening.
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The starting point for any analysis of how individual parts of teams are working is goal difference. Here’s how the NHL’s 31 teams have done at 5-on-5 this year with the team’s highest ATOI forward on the ice. For the sake of convenient reading and writing, I’m just going to call these “first lines” from here on out. (For those curious, I’ll append a list to the bottom of the players involved.) The red line represents league average for first lines.
Focusing on the players involved a little more than the teams, you’ve got 10 teams getting a goal difference of +1.0 GD/60 or better with their first line on the ice. The players serving as first-line proxies on those 10 teams have tended to be Sidney Crosby, Nathan MacKinnon, Jack Eichel, Alex Ovechkin, John Tavares, Tyler Seguin, Mark Stone, Mark Scheifele, Connor McDavid and Nikita Kucherov. That’s a pretty good list of NHL superstar forwards. Stone is the most stunning inclusion on this list to me ; when he’s not on the ice, the Senators are a pretty horrific team.
Los Angeles and Chicago are of particular interest, given that they’re both trying and failing (at the moment) to find a way to compete in the tail end of the primes of players who helped them win multiple Stanley Cups. Los Angeles is getting significantly better results with their highest ATOI forward (generally Anze Kopitar) than Chicago is with theirs (generally Patrick Kane).
At the really bad end of things, Vancouver (Bo Horvat), San Jose (Evander Kane), Detroit (Dylan Larkin), the Islanders (Mathew Barzal) and St. Louis (Vladimir Tarasenko) are all teams that catch the eye, for different reasons. Taransenko is supposed to be a fully formed star; it’s not working for St. Louis when he’s on the ice. Barzal is younger but absolutely crushed it last year. The Sharks fancy themselves Stanley Cup contenders but have had their first line get caved in. Horvat and Larkin are both players who carry hopes that they’ll be difference makers on contending teams in the not-to-distant future.
Once you know how things are going, you can start to get into questions of why. The following graphs are organized by GD/60, with the idea being that you can read them with a sense of whether a given team is producing goal difference or not. A good first starting point is Corsi%.
If you’ve got Sidney Crosby and you’re getting nearly 58 per cent of the attempts when he’s on the ice, good things are probably going to happen. The Penguins are basically giving six forwards a push in the offensive zone relative to the rest of the team: Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Phil Kessel, Jake Guentzel, Dominik Simon and Carl Hagelin/Tanner Pearson. It’s not just that though. When Crosby’s on the ice for an on-the-fly shift, he’s 29th amongst NHL forwards in Corsi% (58.2 per cent) and first in GD/60 (+5.1 GD/60). His line is killing it.
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The next five teams on the list by goal difference/60 haven’t even been average from a possession perspective. That tells us something — there’s probably some air to come out of the tires in their numbers, which we’ll get to when we look at shooting and save percentage. Looking at this a little more closely, I noticed that three of the five first lines — Dallas (44.3 per cent), Colorado (46.6 per cent) and Buffalo (47.1 per cent) — are in the league’s bottom four in terms of on-the-fly Corsi%. The league average first line is posting a 51.9 per cent Corsi%, so that’s a lot left on the table.
Looking at Washington, their first line (Alex Ovechkin) just seems to be doing slightly worse than league average everywhere. This has to be a little troubling for the Capitals — there’s no obvious area where they’re struggling from a possession perspective that might be fixed with a tweak or two. They just get generally overwhelmed compared to other first lines and live off the percentages.
Twelve of the next 13 teams are all about average or better in terms of possession. Los Angeles is a notable exception here, given that Kopitar has been good at this in the past. It’s a little unnerving to see Kopitar struggling, given his age (31) and the fact that he’s got another five years left on his contract after this season. It’s not a huge sample when put up against the rest of his career, but you can add this to the list of blinking red lights that the Kings need to figure out.
Montreal probably deserves some special mention here, given how well their first line has done from a possession perspective. As we’ll see, the percentages aren’t quite as kind. As a result, the possession dominance doesn’t really turn into goal dominance. That’s the sort of thing that will happen when your most commonly used forward is Phillip Danault and he plays with Tomas Tatar and Brendan Gallagher most of the time. You’re bringing a knife to a gun fight.
With that said, Marc Bergevin has taken a lot of heat over the years because the Canadiens have seemed sort of rudderless at times. To draw further on the wisdom of Brian Burke, they’ve seemed to be in violation of his dictum that you want to be going up quickly or going down quickly and that the worst place to be is in the middle. What I like about where the Canadiens are right now is that they’ve built an inexpensive middling team. (The Weber/Price contracts don’t really fit with this model but otherwise it seems to hold up.) Given changes to the league’s lottery over the years, which makes tanking less of a sure thing, trying to build a good team that leaves a bunch of money on the table so that it can go after high-end talent if and when it shakes loose doesn’t seem entirely nuts.
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Beyond that, you have Philadelphia, San Jose, Vegas and (surprisingly) Detroit, controlling possession at a rate above the league average for first lines. Three of those teams have had curiously bad starts relative to expectations; at this point, we can reasonably draw an inference that they’re being done in by shooting or save percentage.
Unsurprisingly, the teams that are crushing it in goal difference tend to also be doing well in terms of shooting percentage with their first line on the ice.
Washington pretty much screams off the page here. They’re shooting 13.3 per cent with Ovechkin on the ice. Is that sustainable? Well, here are his numbers for his career since 2007-08: 10.1, 9.0, 11.6, 8.1, 8.8, 10.3, 6.0, 8.6, 9.2, 9.8 and 10.1. I’d take the under there. The problem with that is that if the shooting percentage drops three points from here on out, there goes a quarter of the goal scoring. It’s a vulnerability for the Capitals.
Outside of someone like Crosby, I tend to think of about 11 per cent as being the upper bound for what a team can sustainably shoot at 5-on-5 with their high-end talent on the ice. With Crosby, that number maybe goes up to 12 per cent. (I suspect McDavid will end up there as well.) So on a first pass, I’d expect some decline moving forward for Toronto, Colorado, Buffalo, Ottawa and Columbus. The Maple Leafs are possibly a bit of a special case — there haven’t been a lot of lines over the past decade that have had two talents of the calibre of Tavares and Mitch Marner.
The Oilers number here is fascinating. How do you shoot barely eight per cent with one of the most talented players to ever step on the ice? Prior to this season, the Oilers had shot 10.2 per cent with McDavid on the ice at 5-on-5. This year they’re at 8.3 per cent. That’s actually a pretty good sign for the Oilers, in that it suggests that there’s more offence to come with McDavid on the ice at 5-on-5.
As far as why the Oilers aren’t scoring with McDavid on the ice like they did in past years, it’s not really his inability to score; he was a 13.3 per cent 5-on-5 shooter entering this year and is at 11.9 per cent so far this year. It’s a difference of a single goal, which isn’t all that much over nearly 500 minutes — the Oilers would have another six goals if pucks were going in at the usual clip. In a way, this is a nice thing to be going wrong for Edmonton; you’d expect more pucks to go in as the season goes along.
It’s not all that surprising that a lot of the teams at the bottom end of the first line goal difference scale are struggling to score — that tends to be what happens. The Islanders are pretty stunning though — they shot 9.5 per cent with Barzal on the ice last year and 6.0 per cent this year. The Islanders are making it up elsewhere at the moment, shooting almost 12 per cent when Barzal isn’t on the ice. I’d expect Barzal’s numbers to improve — they’d better if the Islanders are going to stay in the hunt because they won’t keep shooting 12 per cent when he’s on the bench.
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That Detroit shooting percentage is just noxious. Dylan Larkin is the proxy for their first line and they’re shooting 5.3 per cent when he’s on the ice. One of the issues that rebuilding teams run into sometimes is that they have young players, good young players, but they aren’t superstars. You sell them as the next big thing when they’re really guys who might play down the order a little bit on a real Stanley Cup contender. Through 2017-18, Larkin wasn’t an elite 5-on-5 finisher by any means, shooting 8.5 per cent. That’s not particularly good for a forward — league average for forwards this year is at 10 per cent. I believe that’s up a bit over past seasons but the evidence that Larkin is a high-end goal scorer is awfully light.
Add to that Anthony Mantha enduring a Riley Sheahan-esque season when on the ice with Larkin and Detroit’s not getting much from their first line. They almost certainly aren’t *this* bad from a true talent perspective but the lows are lower when your top line doesn’t have really top end players.
Finally, save percentage. This will be the statistic over which forwards have the least control. Some guys will benefit from pucks staying out, some won’t. Speaking of guys who haven’t had that benefit…
Look, this hasn’t been Vladimir Tarasenko’s best season. Still: good lord. More than a third of the way into the season and he’s sailing along with an .868 on-ice save percentage. There’s a lot undermining the results for St. Louis’s first line but you can’t overcome those goaltending numbers.
At the other end of things, Arizona, Dallas, Los Angeles and Edmonton all stand out as teams that are probably due some significant downward correction in the save percentage department with their first line on the ice. Edmonton’s probably best situated of those teams to deal with it — the Oilers are due some more goals and are outperforming the typical first line in terms of scoring. Arizona, who just lost Antti Raanta for what seems likely to be the rest of the season, is not well placed to deal with it. Not quite on the same level but still due for some regression are the Avalanche, Jets, Bruins and Hurricanes. (I believe this is the first time I’ve ever thought the Hurricanes were due to have the goaltending level off.)
So where does all of this leave us, in terms of identifying teams that really have the high-end first line to go late in the season? Well, despite Pittsburgh’s struggles, Crosby’s still an absolute monster. My instinct was that the first line success in Colorado and Buffalo was a little illusory, but then you contrast them with Toronto, the shape of their performance is pretty similar in terms of why they’re succeeding. Eichel hasn’t been a big on-ice shooting percentage player to this point in his career, but then neither was MacKinnon at the start of last year. Even high-end guys can take time to figure out how to apply their tools in the NHL.
There are huge red flags around the Capitals by virtue of the extent to which they’re relying on shooting percentage. I’d probably withhold judgment on the Stars for the time being — they’ve suffered a lot of injuries to their defence so far this year.
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I haven’t had much to say about Toronto, Tampa Bay and Winnipeg throughout this piece — they look fine. Stick them on the contenders list. You really can’t say enough about Ottawa with Mark Stone on the ice. When he’s not on the ice, Ottawa’s performance has a similar shape to that of the 2014-15 Buffalo Sabres who, of course, were tanking. They’re a running a bit hot in terms of shooting percentage when he’s on the ice but they’re otherwise at the top end of this list on merit. Stone can’t re-sign until Jan. 1, but if he can’t reach an extension in Ottawa, the Senators are going to be in a position to really alter the landscape of Cup contenders. Columbus is in a somewhat similar position, although their first line hasn’t hit Ottawa’s heights this year and the team isn’t a mess.
McDavid is McDavid. Whenever the Oilers get a team around him, they’re a contender. Somewhat similarly, I think the Bruins are going to move up the rankings here too, assuming Patrice Bergeron hits a run of good health. Outside of this group, there are a couple of lines that really stand out to me as having some promise in terms of making the leap up as the year rolls along: Calgary, Carolina (stop me if you’ve heard this before, if they start scoring), Philadelphia, Nashville, Vegas and San Jose. In a lot of cases, the difference between the first line on those teams and the ones that are having a lot of success right now comes down to getting saves or not.
As far as the rest of the league goes, it’s harder to see a path for them to elite production from their first line this year. These aren’t necessarily the sorts of things that you can fix overnight either. Different cities will have different solutions — it’d be great to see Vancouver’s young forwards with a good defence — but it’s more of a long-term issue. However it’s accomplished, it’s seemed virtually impossible to win in the NHL without doing so.
Forwards Used
ANA: Rickard Rakell (6 GP), Ryan Getzlaf (26)
ARI: Clayton Keller
BOS: David Pastrnak
BUF: Jack Eichel
CAR: Sebastian Aho
CBJ: Artemi Panarin (28), Pierre-Luc Dubois (1)
CGY: Johnny Gaudreau
CHI: Jonathan Toews (1), Patrick Kane (30)
COL: Nathan MacKinnon
DAL: Tyler Seguin
DET: Dylan Larkin
EDM: Connor McDavid (29), Leon Draisaitl (1)
FLA: Aleksandr Barkov
LA: Anze Kopitar (29), Alex Iafollo (1)
MIN: Jason Zucker
MTL: Phillip Danault
NJ: Taylor Hall
NSH: Ryan Johansen
NYI: Mathew Barzal
NYR: Mika Zibanejad
OTT: Mark Stone
PHI: Claude Giroux (2), Sean Couturier (26)
PIT: Jake Guentzel (3), Sidney Crosby (25)
SJ: Evander Kane
STL: Vladimir Tarasenko
TB: Nikita Kucherov
TOR: John Tavares
VAN: Bo Horvat
VGK: Jonathan Marchessault
WPG: Mark Scheifele
WSH: Alex Ovechkin
(Top photo: John McCreary/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)