Era Adjusted Playoff Stats: A New Post-Season Tool to Compare Generations
By now, you’re likely familiar with the concept of era adjusted statistics.
Hockey Reference’s method places all regular season performances in the same environment for goals, assists, schedule length and roster size to level the statistical playoff field.
But it’s never been done to measure the league’s most important time of year — the playoffs.
Until now.
Last April, era adjusted stats (and why they matter) were introduced in this primer here at Daily Faceoff. A year later, we’re tackling the post-season. Armed with this new weapon, we’re able to start fresh conversations and settle generational debates.
Over the balance of this year’s playoffs, we’ll pour gas on hard-hitting questions. Which stars are the biggest playoff overachievers and underachievers? Who’s had the most dominant individual post-season performances? Who is the greatest career playoff performer since expansion? Let’s dive in.
How Does It Work?
Attempting to place a player in a different era is impossible.
Would Patrick Kane thrive in the clutch and grab, lumber-heavy 1980s? Would Brett Hull keep up to the high-octane pace we’re watching nightly in 2024?
Unless the NHL introduces a time machine at its next board meeting, no one can answer these questions. But era adjusted stats allow us to compare players based on how they performed relatively to their own era.
The visual above emphasizes how significantly playoff scoring has shifted in the last 55 years.
During the Islanders dynasty in 1981, you could expect nearly eight goals per playoff game (7.94). Incredibly, an average NHL team that post-season was almost identical to this year’s miserable San Jose Sharks in goal prevention. Different times, to say the least.
Fast forward a couple of decades to 2004. Here’s where you could have easily confused the NHL playoffs for the pulse-pounding, back-and-forth action of… soccer. As Tampa Bay raised its first Cup before the lost lockout year, playoff scoring had shriveled to 4.36 goals per game. Today, playoff scoring hangs somewhere in the middle of the extremes, averaging 6.28 goals per game in 2023.
So, how we will compare such unrecognizable periods?
We want every playoff year scaled to a scoring environment equal to the dotted red line (6.0 goals per game) in the chart above — a level playing field. We’ll do this by using each post-season’s scoring rate. Simple enough.
It doesn’t matter whether Wayne Gretzky used a wooden Titan, inhaled second-hand smoke in the locker room, and shot on a 160-pound goalie, or if Nathan MacKinnon trains upside down at altitude with Navy SEALS and crushes plant-based rocket fuel for breakfast. We’re simply taking their respective performances and putting it on the same scale:
- 6 goals per game
- 10 assists per game
- 18 players on a roster
An example: Two decades apart, both Sidney Crosby (2008) and Esa Tikkanen (1988) scored 27 points in impressive playoff runs. Crosby’s feat occurred in a post-season with just 5.4 goals per NHL game. Tikkanen’s 27 points, meanwhile, came in a playoffs featuring 7.6 goals per game.
Putting these two in the same environment, Crosby earns 31 era adjusted points and Tikkanen just 22 — a nine-point swing. This makes sense — Crosby tied for the 2008 playoff point lead, while Tikkanen was fourth on his own team.
Questions
How far back will we go? We’re going back to 1968, the first year after expansion. This is when teams started to play three playoff rounds. In the Original Six, three teams won 25 of the 26 Cups (Toronto 10, Montreal 10, Detroit 5), making the playoffs both incomparably short and a three-team competition. We’d effectively have to double Rocket Richard’s playoff career — it’s just too much projecting to carry any weight.
Does scoring drop in the playoffs? Not like it used to! By eliminating the weakest teams, scoring typically falls off in the post-season. The average dip for nearly 40 years through 2009 was about 8%. But since 2010, the drop is only about 1% in terms of the average goal count. When you factor in sudden death overtime, the decline is larger given all that scoreless time not possible in the regular season. But one thing is clear: we’re just not seeing the final score of games shrink in the post-season as dramatically as it once did.
What about different playoff formats? Since expansion, we’ve seen a varying number of NHL teams and playoff spots. At some point, there’s been three rounds, a bye system, and best-of-five series. But since 1987, except for the 2020 pandemic play-in, we’ve had 16 teams playing four rounds of best-of-seven series. Will players before 1987 get shortchanged a few games in their careers? Potentially. But at one point 16 of the league’s 21 teams made the playoffs, offsetting much of any perceived disadvantage in game count.
Ultimately, we’re trying to have some fun here. We can’t let perfection be the enemy of a good approach.
Sneak Peek
With the introduction out of the way, you’ll see freshly squeezed era adjusted playoff stats in this space throughout the 2024 post-season. It’s going to allow for playoff player comparison not previously possible. As a preview, let’s check the career adjusted playoff leaders in some key categories (Note: all stats through the 2023 playoffs).
Takeaways: By the NHL’s count, the top four spots in career playoff points are four forwards from Edmonton’s decade of dominance. With proper context, however, Gretzky (-27 points) and Messier (-16) draw closer to the pack, while Kurri and Glenn Anderson drop from third and fourth, respectively, to sixth and 12th. Crosby remains the active leader, while fellow franchise cornerstone Malkin jumps from 13th among forwards into the top 10. Kucherov (170 adjusted points before the 2024 playoffs) is the only other active forward in the top 20.
Takeaways: Adjusted for era, we get a new career leader — Nicklas Lidstrom. While the Red Wings’ maestro passes Coffey in a 36-point swing, he does so over 69 more games. Among defensemen, there’s not a ton of movement from the original leaders. Hedman is the active leader (115), while Kris Letang (97) is the only other active blueliner in the top 20. Electric playoff stud Cale Makar (65) is already in the top 40 and if he repeats his Conn Smythe-winning pace could sniff the top 20 by June.
Takeaways: Lastly in our preview, we’ve got the era adjusted goal leaders. Gretzky just barely hangs on to the career lead, staying one goal ahead of Hull in an 18-snipe swing. While Ovechkin and Crosby (tied for 10th) are usual suspects for greatness, creeping just off the list is Dallas’ Joe Pavelski (76). Goalless through five playoff games, if he can squeeze out three this post-season, he would slide into the top 10 since expansion. An incredible feat for an unheralded player. Malkin (76, tied with Pavelski in 14th) is the only other active player in the top 20.
Closing Thoughts
The arrival of era adjusted playoff stats are long overdue.
With today’s primer launched, we can now dig into exciting playoff debates by cutting through the noise of inflated and deflated playoff numbers spanning generations.
But most importantly, we can place the playoff feats of the current era of superstars — McDavid, MacKinnon, Kucherov, Makar, Draisaitl — on even ground with the ghosts of playoffs past.
Follow @AdjustedHockey on X; Data from Hockey-Reference.com, NHL.com
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