The first month of the NHL season is a great time for fans and media to jump to conclusions based on what they’ve seen from a limited sampling of games, and this season has been no different.
The Avalanche are doomed to regress after their surprising 112-point season a year ago. The Islanders have turned themselves back into a playoff team again almost overnight. Montreal is unstoppable. The Boston Bruins might be in some trouble. The Buffalo Sabres are probably the worst team ever.
OK, maybe some of that, at least as it relates to the Sabres, is going to end up being true.
The funny thing about early season kneejerk reactions is that when it comes to individual player performances, those early conclusions can often times be misleading and flat out wrong. The NHL season is an incredibly long grind that will be filled with extreme highs and lows. Every player in the league, to some degree, is streaky and the very best players are going to go multiple games in a row without scoring while third-liners will have stretches where they score like top-liners. You just tend to notice the hot streaks and the cold streaks when they happen early in the season more than you do when they happen in January or February.
But when you keep things at the team level, a lot of times that initial reaction you get based on the first few games of the season can tend to be pretty accurate.
I went back over the last three full 82-game seasons (I excluded the 48-game lockout shortened season of 2012-13) and looked at how every team did in their first 10 games of the season and whether or not they ended up making the playoffs.
Surprisingly, the first 10 games is a pretty solid barometer as to whether or not a team is going to succeed or not in that season. Let’s break it down.
Over the past three full seasons...
- Teams that posted a points percentage of at least .700 over the first 10 games of the season made the playoffs 73 percent of the time and won two of the three Stanley Cups (the 2010-11 Boston Bruins and 2011-12 Los Angeles Kings).
- Teams that were between .600 and .699 over their first 10 games made the playoffs 60 percent and won the other Stanley Cup (the 2013-14 Los Angeles Kings).
- If a team was between .500 and .599, their playoff chances dropped down to 46 percent. Any team that was below .500 over the first 10 games only had a 39 percent chance, and it goes down to only 26 percent for teams .400 or worse.
- If you go back over the past eight full seasons, 12 of the 16 Stanley Cup Finalists had a points percentage of at least .550 in their first 10 games and nine of them were over .600. Only three teams that went on to reach the Final were lower than .500 in their first 10 games, and none of them won it.
A fast start doesn’t guarantee a team a trip to the playoffs (last year’s Maple Leafs, for example, started 7-3-0 and missed the playoffs thanks to a stretch that saw them lose 15 of their final 21 regular season games), just as a slow start doesn’t automatically doom your team (last year’s Rangers started 3-7-0 and ended up making the Stanley Cup Final).
It’s just that it greatly impacts your odds. And really, that’s all any of this is about when it comes to projecting performance - giving yourself the best odds.
It also shows us that even through it's only an eighth of the season, the points a team gets in October are still pretty important, and any points they lose or leave on the table can be pretty difficult to make up as the season goes on.
