Does depth truly win championships? Rethinking NHL playoff success
Depth certainly doesn't hurt, but it's style of play that prevails
The Stanley Cup playoffs are statistically the highest variance playoff tournament of the four major North American sports leagues. The lower seeded team wins in the NHL postseason at the highest rate of the big four (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL) and it’s largely due to hockey’s high degree of randomness. It might upset some, but failing to acknowledge the degree of variables in hockey will leave you staring at the ceiling at 3 am thinking about former New York Rangers winger Rick Nash having a shot deflect off the shaft of a stick with an open net in front of him during a Stanley Cup final more than a decade later.
One of the beautiful parts of hockey is that we’ve yet to reach an optimum efficiency within the game. MBA-style efficiency thinking has rapidly changed the landscape of the three other North American leagues in a short period of time.
Baseball is a land of three true outcomes where hitters are incentivized to walk or hit a home run and not to worry about striking out. In basketball, players are rigidly disciplined to only taking shots they have a high chance of making with an emphasis on the corner three pointer though there are some mid-range darlings that hold over. In football, teams are getting the ball out of their QBs hands faster than ever to perimeter players in space because defenses are playing more conservatively than ever.
In hockey, we’ve yet to have a widespread efficiency revolution. The biggest tactical development of the post-2005 lockout NHL has to be teams opting for a fourth forward on the power play as opposed to two defensemen. We’ve seen some teams, like the Los Angeles Kings, boldly take another step and go up to five man forward power play unit to strong success.
But, by and large, there is no one size fits all means of constructing a roster. Hell, decision makers across the league put together teams in vastly different ways. Teams like the New York Rangers, Toronto Maple Leafs and Vegas Golden Knights pay high-end prices for a few elite players to carry a bulk of the load and try to fill in the rest with varying degrees of unproven or depressed value players.
Even within that sub group, you have discrepancies where the Rangers are set to pay their number one defenseman Adam Fox and goaltender Igor Shesterkin north of $20 million combined per season till the end of the decade. On the other hand, Vegas and Toronto are investing a bulk of their money in high-end skater talent and opting for more of a piecemeal approach in net.
But, as recent Stanley Cup champion history proves, it’s not so much what a team looks like as opposed to the production it generates. The Florida Panthers went to consecutive Stanley Cup finals and won the second time with the richest free agent contract ever awarded to a goalie, Sergei Bobrovsky, in net. The first time they went to the final and lost to the Golden Knights, Vegas won the cup with Adin Hill making $2.175 million against the cap.
Game control
According to the NHL’s own data, between 70 and 75 percent of games are played at even strength. The overall goal scoring environment has trended upward for much of the last decade after a post-2005 lockout depression in offense. In the Stanley Cup playoffs where the name of the game is survival, having as many paths to victory as possible is imperative. That’s where we come to the first principle of game control in the contemporary NHL.
Quality vs Quantity
The Carolina Hurricanes are an experiment in hockey brutality. For the duration of Rod Brind’Amour’s tenure as head coach, the Hurricanes have consistently been one of the NHL’s highest effort teams. This manifests most directly in the tandem of their unrelenting forecheck and high volume offense.
Under Brind’Amour, which dates back to 2017-2018, the Hurricanes have never finished lower than 5th in scoring chances or shots on goal per 60 at 5-on-5. A scoring chance is defined as a goal, shot on goal, missed shots or blocked shots, a shot on goal only those that reach the net and are saved by the goalie or result in a goal.
The Hurricanes are a team that consistently has control of the puck and plays with a ferocious energy to get it back when they don’t. This volume based offense comes at a cost though, as the Hurricanes consistently struggle to convert their scoring chances because they’re of a lower quality. In that same window with Brind’Amour as coach, the Hurricanes have never finished higher than 11th in 5-on-5 shooting percentage and their average finish is 21st.
This creates a paradox, where at a glimpse, the Hurricanes have a majority of puck control, they spend a majority of the game in the other team’s offensive zone and it plays to the strengths of the team. However, in the postseason, where the average quality of opponent is higher, finishing talent becomes all the more valuable.
The 2024-2025 iteration of the Hurricanes feature as much shooting talent as they have at any point. For the current NHL season, the league’s average shooting percentage was 10.2 percent. Of the Canes’ 12 most common forwards in the regular season by total ice time, 11 clear that league average threshold.
It’s not a coincidence that this year, Carolina has their highest playoff shooting percentage of any permutation under Brind’Amour. While 10.3 percent in all situations might not seem like a massive breakthrough, considering the Hurricanes playoff shooting percentage during the Brind’Amour era is 8.83 percent, that marginal improvement matters. Remember, if Carolina is a volume offense, that 1.47 represents a large amount of goals.
However, as the Tampa Bay Lightning, Florida Panthers, New York Rangers and Boston Bruins have all taught the Hurricanes at various points, game control has multiple layers. A high-volume of offense is a strong baseline for success in the regular season and early rounds of the playoffs, but as the stakes get higher, the threshold for star power rises.
The quality of your offense
There is no one correct way to assemble an NHL roster, if anything, the league’s high variance environment lends itself to multiple interpretations of the game. One of the fascinating components of evaluation, on a team or player wide basis is the points of emphasis which often stem from the evaluator’s own training as opposed to some greater truth. This means two people watching the exact same game can have vastly different takeaways and why intermission panels during TV broadcasts lean on dogma while you’ll often see more detailed analysis of the game from an anonymous account with 37 followers on the website formally known as Twitter.
One of the reasons a team like Carolina has faltered in later rounds is the high-end talent of their opponents. Of the teams to defeat the Hurricanes in the second round or later like the Bruins, Lightning, Panthers and Rangers, if we were to abide by an idea I call Gym Class theory, it’s pretty straightforward as to why Carolina keeps falling ever so short.
Gym Class theory-If you were to line both teams up for a game of ball hockey in gym class in a traditional snake draft, which team would make up more of the early round picks.
For example, if you lined this years Hurricanes and Panthers up next to each other and had the first overall pick in a snake draft for a game of ball hockey, who would you take first overall?
I’d make the case you’d be best served going with some permutation of Alex Barkov, Matthew Tkachuk, and Gustav Forsling before even considering a Hurricane. While I personally think Seth Jarvis has room to potentially get into this conversation with a bit more polish to his game, he’s simply not in the discussion as a top 20 or 30 player in the entire NHL yet. Hell, if you wanted to get it out of the way early and roll with the proven Stanley Cup champion and future Hall of Famer in Sergei Bobrovsky, you could realistically select four Panthers before Jarvis or Sebastian Aho came off the board.
Now, this isn’t exactly a scientific metric, it more so sounds like a bar stool philosophy concocted over half a dozen light domestics. But, the later in the playoffs a team goes, the more star power matters.
If you’re still on the fence about the star power vs depth argument, think about it like this: The later in the playoffs a team goes, the more likely the other team has comparable star talent, it plays better team defense and features stronger goaltending. In these tight-checking, harder to come by space environments, that’s where players that operate outside of structure and have the capacity for flash plays rise above the fray.
Consider the often maligned Mika Zibanejad of the Rangers who’s been on the other end of this conversation at the hands of those very same Panthers and Lightning. In 152:25 of 5-on-5 minutes against the Hurricanes between the playoff series in 2022 and 2024, the Rangers were out chanced 161-141 but only outshot 75-72.
That means more than half of the Hurricanes scoring chances didn’t actually end up on net in Zibanejad’s minutes. Then, when accounting for quality of scoring chance, the Rangers were out high danger chanced 38-20 and out expected goal’d 7.9-6.4. So, by conventional shot tracking metrics, New York was thoroughly out possessed and had less game control than Carolina.
In spite of that game control, the Rangers won Zibanejad’s minutes 7 goals for to 4 against. There are factors to consider including the types of offense both teams prioritize, the Rangers off of the rush, the Hurricanes off of the cycle and it made the environmental circumstances ripe for Zibanejad to pounce.
The trouble for New York, both times, came in the subsequent round against teams where their high end players could not outplay the game situation. It’s one thing to lose the underlying scoring chance battle but still have opportunities for your star players to make splash plays and swing games. But against a team like the Lightning or Panthers, who feature even more high-end players, both factors working against you is too much to overcome.
Putting it all together
Naturally, after reading this far, you’re likely drawing the conclusion that teams need to strike a proper balance between quality and quantity in their offensive chance creation. It might seem like pigeonholing your team into a singular preference has too many drawbacks and isn’t malleable enough to accomodate the fluctuations within a given game.
However, the actual secret sauce isn’t necessarily assembling a roster in a certain way at all. If anything, the Panthers winning a Stanley Cup largely constructed with acquisitions from free agency and trades was proof that long, laborious rebuilds might not be necessary if a team can hit on its swings.
This brings us to the 2024-2025 Stanley Cup playoffs and a final eight littered with high-end star power. Across the Edmonton Oilers, Winnipeg Jets, Washington Capitals, Toronto Maple Leafs, Golden Knights, Winnipeg Jets, Dallas Stars and Hurricanes there are more than a dozen future locks for the hockey hall of fame.
The Oilers are a perfect example for our working theory. If we were to compare this permutation of the Oilers to the last five cup champions: Panthers, Golden Knights, Avalanche, Lightning and Lightning, they might not meet the overall talent threshold. On paper, the Oilers lack the secondary high-end talent these other teams featured. Yet, after a resounding game four victory on home ice against the Golden Knights, the Oilers are on the precipice of a third Western Conference Final in four years.
Coming into the postseason, I was skeptical of the Oilers’ skater depth both at forward and on the back end, plus the goaltending tandem of Calvin Pickard and Stuart Skinner combined for the lowest save percentage of any playoff team in the last ten NHL seasons. This iteration of the Oilers more closely resembled an earlier McDavid/Draisaitl era team that would go as far as its superstar forwards could drag them.
It took two games against the Kings in the first round to wake the Oilers up and since the midway point of game four, they’ve demonstrated the highest ceiling of any team in the Stanley Cup playoffs at five-on-five. Edmonton’s game control and play at even strength has been so good, it’s been able to withstand sub 900 goaltending from its wonder twin goaltending tandem.
The Oilers four most common line combinations this season show a team that has several paths to victory
In nearly 230 minutes of 5-on-5 hockey, the Oilers have outscored opponents 19-8 and done that in a sustainable way. While the shooting percentages might seem gaudy and not easily translatable game to game, it’s important to note that the Oilers are both holding their own in terms of shots on goal and high danger chances.
The beautiful part of the Oilers lineup and why this group is poised to overcome such poor goaltending and the worst penalty kill in the playoffs is their depth helping with game control. It’s insane to write after years of the opposite being a bellwether for other team’s roster construction, but Edmonton might have stumbled upon the ideal responsibility allocation throughout their four lines.
When the first line, that features a combined five Hart trophies by the way, is on the ice, the all world talent causes chaos between the circles and opens up space for Perry around the net front. The Kane, Nugent-Hopkins-Hyman line operates below the goal line and works a heavy cycle game that makes other team’s uncomfortable.
The difference this year is that Edmonton’s bottom six isn’t just empty volume offense that holds the puck in the offensive zone, it’s generating high danger chances, in particular off of the rush. In last year’s run to game seven of the Stanley Cup final, the Oilers finished their 5-on-5 minutes with just a plus one goal differential overall.
Over the course of the 25 playoff games Edmonton played last season, with at least one of McDavid or Draisaitl on the ice, the Oilers outscored their opponents 41-31. Without either of their big dogs on the ice, opponents outscored the Oilers 21-12.
This year, Edmonton’s depth is rising to the occasion and entirely canceling out the fact the Oilers went from best penalty kill in the playoffs last year to one of the worst 12 months later. To have that depth of goal scoring both in theory and practice to entirely erase a woundingly bad penalty kill and regressing power play is nothing short of miraculous within the context of the Oilers regular season.
The Oilers lost 32 goals year over year and started their postseason run by losing two straight games to the Los Angeles Kings where five of the seven goals in those games had McDavid or Draisaitl factor in on the contribution. It looked like Edmonton would be overly reliant on its two best players, burn them out early and even if they could advance, the ceiling would be limited.
Instead, the Oilers are on the precipice of making another conference final and have four lines humming simultaneously. Imagine how dangerous this group could be if its goaltending were average or if its penalty kill could get on a heater?
Final thoughts
There is no definitive truth in the NHL as far as efficency. The smarter franchises are finding ways of creating replicable chance creation environments and trying to fine tune the personnel to their exact vision for what a Stanley Cup winning team looks like. Yes, even in the NHL’s final eight, you see GM pet projects earning playing time.
As the Stanley Cup playoffs develop further, expect the teams that feature lines that play a diversity of styles to advance. It’s not just enough to have elite players to activate star power like Mario Kart nor is it enough to have a bottom six that can chip in the occasional goal. Striking the perfect balance isn’t just a talent consideration either, it’s more a matter of complimentary hockey.
Think of it in football terms.
In football, you want your defense to hold the other team’s offense to their side of the 50-yard line so that when it comes time to punt, your own offense won’t be operating off of their own goal line. In a hockey sense, that means your bottom six being able to hold offensive zone time and generate game control. That creates a positive trickle up effect where the goaltending and defense won’t be responsible for as difficult of minutes.
Generally speaking, the later teams go in the playoffs, superstar players trade haymakers and come close to canceling each other out at 5-on-5. This is where depth, and quality depth, not flash off the rush plays come in handy. While the occasional rush goal off the counter is always welcome, the bottom half of the lineup has a meaningful role to play in the game control battle.
Of the four games so far between the Oilers and Golden Knights, Edmonton effectively dominated even strength for two of the four contests. The Oilers have played so well at 5-on-5, they’ve been overcome a penalty kill that’s still operating at just 65.62 percent and a goaltending tandem providing an aggregate .876 save percentage so far in the postseason.
Honing in on even strength play is far easier than it sounds and it gets to the root of one of hockey’s foundational principles, lines and shifts. Traditionally, the further down a lineup a player plays, the more specialized your skillset. Some would frame the conversation in the inverse, that the lower in a lineup a player plays, the more limited their skillset.
But, in an ideal world, your bottom six brings a differing approach from your top six and forces your opponent’s defense into working harder. In an ideal world, your top six is littered with high-end talent that creates dangerous scoring chances off of the rush that force the goalie and defenders to move while the bottom six milks offensive zone time to wear the game down.
That’s not a one size fits all rule because some team’s top-end players prefer a heavy cycle game, but based on recent Stanley Cup winning teams, you need to have a variety of ways of beating your opponents and specializing the roles of your lines to fit a specific goal is a strong way to maximize what you do have.
Bill Belichick is attributed as saying “there’s no such thing as a bad football player. If you got to the NFL, you have to be good at something and it’s a coach’s job to find out what that is.” In the world of the NHL there might not be 24-year-old instagram models lurking in the shadows of a Kris Knoblauch interview with Sportsnet, but Kris Knoblauch has found a way to not just survive his depth’s minutes but actively thrive.