· Jaroslav Bezdek · Analysis · 2 min read
The NHL Team Rankings: Introduction
The 2024/2025 regular season is almost over. Which teams are heating up before playoffs, and which have been hot from the season beginning? Before we dive into the results, let’s take a look at the methodology of the upcoming analysis!
With the 2024/2025 regular season coming to an end, it’s the perfect time to take a closer look at how every team has performed and determine which ones are best prepared for the upcoming playoffs!
Since hockey isn’t just about scoring goals but also preventing them, I’ve analyzed each team in three key areas: offense, defense, and goaltending. Each aspect will be explored in more detail in separate articles that will be published over the next few days—so stay tuned!
Methodology
Before diving into each aspect of play, let’s break down the methodology behind this analysis.
So, what did I do?
- I downloaded all shot data from the 2024/2025 regular season.
- Special teams (power plays & penalty kills) are crucial in hockey, but they can significantly skew team performance evaluations. To account for this, I filtered the data to include only 5-on-5 situations, excluding special teams from the analysis.
- I computed 6-8 advanced statistics for each area of play (offense, defense, and goaltending).
- I ranked all 32 teams for each statistic and assigned them a league percentile based on their performance. This means the best team receives a value of 1, the worst team a value of 0, and all other teams are assigned a proportional value in between. I chose a percentile-based ranking system because it provides a more accurate reflection of the differences between teams compared to a standard ranking.
- Finally, I calculated the average percentile across all statistics within each category and multiplied it by 100 to create the Offense, Defense, and Goaltending Scores. This means each score ranges from 0 to 100, with 0 representing the worst performance and 100 the best.
And that’s it! 😊
What’s Coming Next?
Over the next few days, I’ll be publishing the following articles:
- The NHL Team Rankings: Offense – Analyzing which teams generate the most scoring chances in terms of both quality and quantity.
- The NHL Team Rankings: Defense – Identifying the strongest defensive teams and determining which teams allow their opponents the most scoring opportunities.
- The NHL Team Rankings: Goaltending – Using advanced statistics to evaluate each NHL team’s goalie tandem.
- The NHL Team Rankings: Overall – Combining all three aspects to rank the best and worst teams in the NHL and highlighting which teams have fine-tuned their form for the playoffs after the 4 Nations Cup.
If the link is clickable, the article is already live! If not, follow me on LinkedIn to stay updated!
