The foundation of the modern analytics movement in sports started with a simple question: How many runs would it take for a baseball team to make the postseason? So, let’s figure out how many goals it would take for the New York Rangers to qualify for the tournament.
Analytics is not unique to sports, most walks of life with competition use some form of measurement to find inefficiencies. The greatest area for improvement, profit and ultimately success is finding where the market has not yet adapted. In baseball, it was understanding that on-base percentage was just as valuable as batting average.
In the hockey universe, the defining metric in the analytics community was scoring chances for and against measured through both Corsi and Fenwick. The former is a measure of the percentage of scoring chances at even strength that a team creates. The basic idea being that if a team creates more scoring chances, it should score more goals as well.
In terms of scoring, the average NHL team scores 2.73 goals per game. Meaning that most nights, a team is going to need to tuck three goals into the back of the net to at least have a chance at winning. As the rules have changed to favor the offense, this figure has and will continue to trend upward.
Based on the teams that made the playoffs last year, we can draw a baseline of which to compare.
2017-2018 postseason
Of the 16 teams that made the playoffs last year, 14 of them finished in the top 16 in goals for per game. The two that didn’t, the Los Angeles Kings and Columbus Blue Jackets were both teams eliminated in the first round. So conservatively, let’s estimate that a team would need to average 3.10 goals per game to have a realistic chance at earning a playoff birth.
If we multiply the 3.10 figure times the 82 games in an NHL season we come to 254.2 goals over the course of an entire season. Again, using last year’s teams as a baseline, ten of the sixteen playoff teams last season finished with at least 250 goals on the season.
An NHL team features 18 skaters in its starting lineup, but the 12 forwards are expected to shoulder the burden of picking up the offensive load. Obviously, teams with players capable of scoring 40 or 50 goals help lead the attack, but we can speak in terms of averages.
We’ll say that the 12 forwards need to pick up about 220 goals and the six defensemen need around 30 of them to make the playoffs. Some teams, like the San Jose Sharks, can more evenly distribute goal scoring between forwards and defensemen but for the most part, it’s heavily skewed one way.
Where the Rangers are
Through 25 games, the New York Rangers have scored 71 goals which average out to 2.84 goals per game. The team is 20th in goals for and 22nd in goals for per game, both of which are below the league average this year. Of course, it’s early on and the team still has time to get on a hot streak as players find more of a footing.
Now we get to the fun part: trying to figure out where the Rangers are going to get these goals from. The issue for a team like New York is that it lacks a bonafide elite goal scorer. Sure, Chris Kreider is on pace to shatter his career high in goals but he’s always subject to a dry spell. Through 25 games he has 13 goals, this puts him on pace for 42.64 for the year.
If Kreider manages to put up 42.64, that would put the Rangers in a decent spot. The real issue is a lack of heavy goal scorers. Sure, the team has a handful of guys capable of putting up between 15 and 20 goals, but it would take ten of those players to have a chance at sniffing the previously mentioned figure of 250.
So, projecting out the regulars in the lineup as well as the injured Pavel Buchnevich and Mats Zuccarello we come to 186 goals for the 2018-2019 New York Rangers. That figure puts the team well below our required 250 goals to qualify for the playoffs.
The hope for those who want to see a playoff run would be the players that have struggled to score even though they usually score. The main hopes would be seeing Zuccarello and Vlad Namestnikov find their respective shooting touch and jump from an expected six goals on the year to 13 or so and the team at least gets closer to 200.
There is a formula in which a struggling offensive team can win with superb goaltending. As long as Henrik Lundqvist is in the crease for the Rangers, it may be able to stay afloat in spite of a lack of goal scoring.