Now that the trade deadline is gone and the clocks have told us that Winter is apparently over, it’s time you'll hear players, coaches, GM’s, and media all echoing the same thing: the Playoffs are coming. And with that, teams who haven’t shipped out their entire roster just to miss out on the #1 draft pick will all want to put everything they can into gearing up for the post-season. But what does it mean to get ready for the playoffs? Is every game a must-win? Does every team want to be 2015-Ottawa-level hot as they head down the stretch? Does a final winning streak heading into the 1st round lead to more success? Well, it’s time to look at the data for teams who have made it to the post-season and find out what the best strategy is while preparing for the playoffs. Taking data from NHL.com for every year from the 04-05’ lockout to the end of the 2015 season, I put together a set of every playoff teams’ record over the last 25 games of the regular season and their ensuing post-season results.
To start, let’s look at a team’s final streak right before the big show and see just how far they were able to ride that wave. Quickly, a streak works the way you’d think, so if a team won their final 3 games before the playoffs started, their streak would be +3 and if they won 3 then lost 1, their streak would be -1. To simplify things, all shootout or overtime wins will simply count as wins, and any form of loss will count as a loss.
So if blazing success during the final dash to the playoffs isn’t enough to predict who will win the ultimate prize, maybe we should look back a little further. If the mentality after the trade deadline is that every game is a must-win, then perhaps winning percentages over the last 25 games will be better predictors of postseason success. Below is a graph of all 160 playoff teams (keep in mind that Detroit of 05-06’ is a separate data line from Detroit of 06-07’ and so on) and their percentage of wins over the final stretch of the regular season. Note that I am not looking at the teams’ winning percentages over the entire season, but strictly counting how many wins they had in the last 25, 20, 15, 10 and 5 games respectively, and putting these on a line. So for example, if over the last 25 games a team had 10 wins, their winning % at this point would be 40%. And if they recorded 7 of those wins during the last 20 games, their % would drop to 35%. By graphing a line for each team’s winning percentage like this, we can get a greater picture of how hot teams were entering the playoffs and see if this led to a triumphant run. For illustration purposes, you can see that the 10 Cup winners’ lines are coloured gold to differentiate them from the dotted-black non-Cup winners’ lines below.
As there isn’t much of a pattern here, we can try one more approach with teams’ winning percentages. If we clean up the graphs from above and average them by each teams’ playoff-round exits, we can see a bit more of a trend (below). Teams who win the Cup average around 59% wins the whole way through, until this final 10-game nosedive.
So far, we have seen that racking up the most wins doesn’t help and coming in supernova-hot has always led to a fizzle-out, but maybe the key then is what fellow McGill-Alum, Mike Babcock, believes in: Consistency. Let’s see if teams who were more consistent over the final stretch accomplished any more in the playoffs compared to their less-consistent counterparts. To define consistency, I split the final 25 games of the regular season into five sets of 5-games. Next, we can ask the following: In each of these 5-game stretches, how consistently did a team win more times than it lost? So if a team plays 5 games, how often did they win at least 3 (60%) of them vs how often did they win only 2 (40%) or less? From this, we can say that a team had a consistency level (or Babs-Score) of 5 if they managed to win at least 3 times in every one of the 5-game stretches. A team will have a Babs-Score of 4 if they went at least 3-for-5 in 4 of their 5-game stretches. And so on until a Babs-Score of 0, with a team having no 5-game stretches winning at least 60%. By doing this, we can try to differentiate between highly consistent teams versus the teams who struggled to find it late in the season.