At some point before this week is up, every NHL team will have completed at least one third of their regular-season schedule. Each passing game provides us with another checkpoint of confidence in our growing data set, but we're still at the point of the campaign where the numbers are susceptible to all sorts of potentially misleading shenanigans.
This is particularly true of the early-season standings, where a team's raw win-loss record at this point isn't necessarily all that indicative of how good a team really is, nor is it predictive of where they'll finish by season's end. In the pursuit of painting a clearer picture of team performance thus far, we'll need to peel back a layer and look at some underlying trends to figure out what's sustainable moving forward and what's not. In that way, we can examine which teams which have gotten off to a surprising start are for real, and which will fade by season's end.
Note: Data in this piece is courtesy of Corsica, Natural Stat Trick and Hockey Reference.
Anaheim Ducks
Let's start with a breakdown of how often teams have spent their respective games up on the scoreboard versus playing from behind. And yes, this seems like a basic concept, but there are some interesting takeaways this season:
The top right quadrant is where you ideally want to reside as a team. The Tampa Bay Lightning are unsurprisingly leading the way by being up nearly half of the time they're out on the ice, while only trailing roughly a quarter of the time. The basement-dwelling Los Angeles Kings, by comparison, are leading less than 20 percent of the time, while facing a deficit over 40 percent of the time.
The Ducks are currently occupying one of the three playoff spots that the league is contractually obligated to award to the Pacific Division, but their claim to it is as flimsy as it gets. Only the lowly Kings and Detroit Red Wings have held a lead less frequently than the Ducks, and only five teams have trailed more often. Some of those ugly results can be chalked up to having to use young players that weren't ready for the opportunity created for them by the litany of injuries the team dealt with to open the schedule, but there are deeper rooted issues there.
Any way you slice it, they've been overly reliant on the brilliance of their goaltending. They're 30th in both shots against and shot share at even strength, and are dead last in expected goals. The only reason the Ducks aren't the worst team in the league is because John Gibson and Ryan Miller have combined forces to give them the best 5-on-5 save percentage in the league, but Anaheim is playing with fire if it keeps playing this brand of hockey.
New York Islanders
The Islanders are keeping good company in terms of how often they've been leading, and sit in a playoff spot in the Metropolitan Division for the time being, but their grip on that is similarly tenuous to that of the Ducks. It's tough to say just how much their inflated percentages will normalize, because Barry Trotz teams have historically outperformed their underlying numbers, but it's clear that the Islanders' true talent level isn't on par with their results thus far:
In typical Trotz-coached-team fashion, they've slowed things down and really tightened the screws defensively, bouncing back from an abominably porous campaign last season, so it's not necessarily outlandish for their goaltending to reside in the top 10 in save percentage at both 5-on-5 and overall. However, the shooting percentage north of 10 percent at 5-on-5 is an anomaly; when that eventually comes back down to earth, their being 28th in shot attempts and 27th in shots on goal will make it awfully tough for them to remain in the playoff picture. Even if they're able to continue to grind games out by limiting shot attempts, it's difficult to envision them being able to generate enough offense to win on a consistent basis.
Carolina Hurricanes
In what's become a rather depressing annual tradition, the Hurricanes find themselves on the other end of the extreme from the Isles. Unlike in previous seasons, their goaltending has been largely fine thanks to the steady play of Curtis McElhinney. He hasn't been a world-beater, mind you, but for a team that hasn't been able to buy a save for years, sitting firmly in the middle of the pack in save percentage is a huge development.
The issue has instead been on the other end of the ice, where the rate at which they've been converting shots into goals has been abysmal. They're currently shooting a measly 6.5 percent as a team in all situations, and join the 2014-15 Arizona Coyotes and 2013-14 Buffalo Sabres as the only teams to be under 7 percent in that figure since 2007. Typically, healthy possession rate and shot totals (as they've been generating) are largely encouraging indicators of future success, but considering how snakebitten this franchise has been lately in one way or another, we can't really say with any confidence that things are guaranteed to improve. You'd bet against them continuing to be historically feeble offensively, although if anyone is capable of pushing the boundaries of what's possible it's them.
The silver lining is that they've been a joy to watch regardless, from style of play to postgame celebrations following wins. If we use combined shots for and against as a proxy for the pace at which a team plays, only the Toronto Maple Leafs have played a faster brand of hockey than they have:
San Jose Sharks
San Jose has been rather disappointing considering the preseason hype following the acquisition of Erik Karlsson, but there are plenty of signs pointing to the Sharks as a sleeping giant in the West. It remains to be seen whether they'll eventually have as much bite as their mascot, but they're clearly better than a roughly .500 team with a negative goal differential.
They've currently given up 11 more goals than they've scored at 5-on-5, due to a ghastly combination of being 26th in shooting percentage and 31st in save percentage as a team. The fact that they've even been able to keep their heads above water speaks to the struggles of the Pacific Division overall, but also due to the nearly unparalleled volume of shots they've been generating to counteract the inefficiency.
They're behind only the Hurricanes in terms of possession, and they're fifth in expected goal rate. Eventually Martin Jones -- whose minus-12.1 ranks dead last out of 63 qualified goalies in goals saved above average -- will need to be better. But considering the quality of the team in front of him, all they really need is for him to be the league-average netminder he's been over the past three seasons. In the limited flashes of brilliance where they've put it all together, the highest gear they've been able to reach is right up there with the best teams in the league, and there's too much talent in place for them not to figure out how to maintain it for longer stretches.
Vegas Golden Knights
They're not the only Pacific Division team that looks like it could be headed for more wins in the near future. After everything that could've gone right did go right for the Golden Knights in their inaugural season in the league, it was a complete 180 to start the 2018-19 season in Vegas. Marc-Andre Fleury sputtered out of the gate after coming off of a career year, the top line couldn't buy a goal after being one of the most dominant forward units in the league, and No. 1 defenseman Nate Schmidt was suspended for the first 20 games.
Yet because no one really ran away with the division while they sputtered out of the gate, they were afforded an opportunity to hang around in the conversation. Now they've finally started to rattle off some wins in the past couple of weeks, and if they keep playing the type of inspired hockey that they have then you figure that'll only continue as their fortunes improve.
While it would still be foolish to expect a repeat of their magical inaugural season, there's got to be a middle ground somewhere in between. Even as they were piling on all the victories on their way to the Stanley Cup Final, there was no shortage of doubters and critics pointing to the wave of favorable bounces they were riding to get there. Now that that's been stripped from the equation, they'll have an opportunity to prove that they're just legitimately good, and no fluke.
Colorado Avalanche
It's surprising to see the Avalanche positioned where they are on the pace-of-play list, since they don't profile as a plodding team, but that's more of a stylistic discussion than anything else. The bigger red flag with them is that based on most of the underlying numbers and shot data, they constantly come up looking like more of a middle-of-the-pack team than one that should be challenging the Nashville Predators for Central Division supremacy. They keep winning, they keep putting up impressive offensive totals, and they look tremendous if you catch them on the right night.
But the overall depth and persistently pedestrian 5-on-5 performance is certainly concerning enough to warrant keeping a gap between them and the other truly elite few. Despite those warts, they're undeniably a tricky team to contend with because of the formula upon which they've stumbled. There's reason to believe that based on the talent in place atop the depth chart, they can continue to outperform those underwhelming percentages to at least some degree.
They've got two goalies they can alternate, a lethal power play (that's currently converting on a league-high 32.2 percent of its chances), and arguably the best line in hockey. Regardless of what you think of the rest of the team, it's impossible to overstate how dominant the combination of Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen and Gabriel Landeskog have been since being united early last season. With the three of them on the ice at 5-on-5, the Avalanche are outscoring teams 26-11 this season, and 73-38 dating back to last season. To put that into perspective, the next best combinations in those two time frames are Buffalo's Jack Eichel, Jeff Skinner and Jason Pominville at plus-10, and Dallas' Jamie Benn, Tyler Seguin and Alexander Radulov at plus-25, respectively. That alone makes them a nightmare to plan against.
Buffalo Sabres
Let's end on the Sabres, whose rise up the standings has been the best story going in the NHL through the first two months of the season.
Similar to the Avalanche, they've relied on stellar goaltending and a dominant top line to carry them up the standings. They're currently sitting within striking distance of the Lightning and Leafs and ahead of the Bruins in the Atlantic Division, boasting the fifth-best points percentage in the league. They're coming off of a 10-game winning streak, which stunningly represents nearly half of their annual win totals in a couple of the tanking seasons of the Tim Murray era. Any way you look at it, the numbers are staggering.
If there's one mitigating number to point to as a reason to pump the brakes, it's how reliant much of that success has been on squeaking out victories in one-goal games. Only the Ducks have found themselves in a higher number of such games, and up until last week, they hadn't lost a single one without salvaging at least a point. Since then, they've lost four straight one-goal games, although it's hard to fault them too much for falling at the hands of the Lightning, Predators and Leafs. Of their 10 wins during the winning streak, nine were of the one-goal variety, and seven of them were in extra time. As good as they've been, they've been just as fortunate to have as many wins under their belt as they do.
While we typically glorify that type of run, suggesting that the team running hot is 'clutch' or is a 'winner,' the reality is that it's more subject to chance than we'd care to admit. Close games like that can go either way, and in the grand scheme of things, we'd usually expect them to balance themselves out. That's why the truly great teams are ones that routinely blow teams out, not leaving the outcomes hanging in the balance.
That said, all of this is relative. The future in Buffalo is not only bright, but finally visibly perceptible. After years of misery and losing, there's now something to show for all the high-draft picks they've been using. In a very short period of time, they've already come a very long way. Everything else beyond that this season is just gravy.