2021-22 by the numbers: A season of smashed records
Sometimes you get so caught up in what lies ahead that you forget to celebrate what just happened. The 2021-22 NHL playoffs are shaping up to one of the most exciting and competitive we’ve seen in years, but the regular season we just witnessed was nothing short of incredible.
The season featured 13 teams that finished with more than 100 points in the standings, including all eight playoff seeds from the Eastern Conference. It also featured a team, the Florida Panthers, that scored more goals (337) than any team since the salary cap was introduced. Overall, league scoring was the highest it has been since 1995-96.
Five teams – the Florida Panthers, Colorado Avalanche, Minnesota Wild, Carolina Hurricanes and Toronto Maple Leafs – set franchise highs for total points in a season. The Calgary Flames and New York Rangers came very close to exceeding their best-ever seasons in terms of regular season total points.
Individual performances were awe-inspiring, with players achieving goal and point thresholds we haven’t seen in a very long time. An astonishing 15 players had 40 or more goals on the season and eight had more than 100 points.
Toronto Maple Leafs star Auston Matthews’ 60 goals were the most scored by a player in a decade and Nashville Predators star Roman Josi’s 96 points were the most we have seen from a defenseman in three decades. Connor McDavid of the Edmonton Oilers led the league in scoring for the fourth time, posting a new career-best 123 points.
Long-standing league and franchise records seemed to fall with regularity in the final stages of the season. Washington Capital Alex Ovechkin continued his assault on the all-time goals list, reaching 50 on the season and 780 for his career, now behind only Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe.
Florida’s Jonathan Huberdeau crushed the NHL record for most assists ever by a left winger with his 85 assists (third ever by any winger). Minnesota’s Kirill Kaprizov set new season-high goal, assist and point totals for the Wild with 47 goals and 61 assists for 108 points. Matt Duchene became the highest goal scorer in Nashville Predators history with 43 goals to go along with Josi setting the team’s all-time assist and point records. Chris Kreider set a new New York Rangers record for most power-play goals in a single season with 26. And so on.
On the blueline, Cale Makar broke the Avalanche all-time record for points by a defenseman with 86. Similarly, Quinn Hughes surpassed Doug Lidster to become the Vancouver Canucks highest scoring defenseman in history with 68 points. Oh, and the 85 points scored by the Lightning’s Victor Hedman were OK too.
We saw a year in which Nick Schmaltz of the Arizona Coyotes had a seven-point game, most in the league since 2012. We also saw a weekend in which the Dallas Stars’ Jason Robertson, one of the league’s brightest emerging stars, had back-to-back hat tricks. And right before the season was about to close, Tampa Bay’s Steven Stamkos put together a string of five games in a row with three or more points, making him the first to do so since Jari Kurri. The 32-year old Stamkos surpassed 100 points for the first time in his great career in the process.
You would think with all the scoring records falling that goaltenders took the season off. On the contrary, we saw some incredible performances by goalies around the league. Igor Shesterkin, a candidate for the Hart Trophy as league MVP, set a New York Rangers franchise record with a .935 save percentage. That’s a team whose alumni include Gump Worsley, Eddie Giacomin, John Vanbiesbrouck, Mike Richter and Henrik Lundqvist. Not too shabby.
Shesterkin wasn’t the only goalie preventing players from smashing even more records. Five other goalies (Ilya Sorokin, Frederik Andersen, Jacob Markstrom, Darcy Kuemper and Ville Husso) had save percentages in excess of .920 and four goalies had at least five shutouts, led by nine from Markstrom.
And what review of the amazing season could be complete without mentioning that both Keith Yandle of the Philadelphia Flyers and Phil Kessel of the Coyotes passed the long-standing NHL ironman streak of 964 consecutive games played, a mark that had stood since Doug Jarvis set it in 1987-88.
We even saw a few things that we’ve never seen before. Trevor Zegras “skilled it up” by introducing us to the lacrosse-style over-the-net assist, and players fired pucks at targets in the Bellagio fountain at the All-Star Game in Vegas.
Any way you look at it, the 2021-22 season was pretty fantastic. The skill level in the league has never been higher. It would be hard to look at the state of the game today and not feel pretty excited about the league’s future. But first, take a moment to appreciate its present.
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Chris Gear joined Daily Faceoff in January after a 12-year run with the Vancouver Canucks, most recently as the club’s Assistant General Manager and Chief Legal Officer. Before migrating over to the hockey operations department, where his responsibilities included contract negotiations, CBA compliance, assisting with roster and salary cap management and governance for the AHL franchise, Gear was the Canucks’ vice president and general counsel.
Click here to read Gear’s other Daily Faceoff stories.
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