Randy Carlyle

The Greatest Tank Battle: Penguins vs. Devils, 1983-84

Benjamin Wendorf NHL League-Wide Analysis, NHL Topical Analysis Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
File:Mario Lemieux 1984.jpg

Mario Lemieux with Laval of the QMJHL in 1984; photo by http://www.lhjmq.qc.ca/ via Wikimedia Commons

What do you do when a 6’4″ QMJHL forward who scored 184 points in 66 games in his last underage season scores at a 282-point pace in his draft year? You tank — you tank as hard as you can. In the latter half of the 1983-84 season, the Pittsburgh Penguins and New Jersey Devils were in an unspoken, pitched battle for the bottom of the league and everybody knew it. While the Penguins would ultimately win out, sputtering to a 16-58-6 record (“good” for 38 points in the standings) to New Jersey’s 17-56-7 (41 points), the two teams were coming from distinctly different franchise backgrounds.

Using information from our new interactive charts, we can see what set these teams apart, and led them to take different paths in what turned out to be a pretty wild race to the cellar of the NHL.

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The Art of Tanking: The Pittsburgh Penguins in 1983-84

Benjamin Wendorf NHL League-Wide Analysis, NHL Topical Analysis Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

While tanking is a hot topic in this year’s NHL, the act of tanking is as old as the idea of granting the worst teams a shot at the #1 pick in the draft. Case in-point: the 1983-84 Pittsburgh Penguins, routinely considered the most overt of tankers in NHL history. The graph above is just one example of their tank, and man is that bad. The yellow and grey lines indicate one standard deviation above and below league-average historical possession (using 2-Period Shot Percentage, or 2pS%, explained here). The blue line is a 20-game moving average (the orange is cumulative), and you’re seeing that right; a team close to the middle of the pack dropped nearly two standard deviations, or from near the top to near the bottom of the league. That graph, and all the ones below, are just some examples of the kind of tinkering you can do with our new interactive graphs, which I highly recommend you check out.

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2014-15 Season Preview: The Atlantic Division

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Image from Sarah Connors via Wikimedia Commons

Finishing last season with an average of 87.6 points per team, the Atlantic/Flortheast Division was the worst in the NHL. I see that gap widening, not narrowing, in 2014-15.

The battle at the top of the division will, in my eyes, come down to two teams: the Boston Bruins and the Tampa Bay Lightning. The Bruins have placed either first or second in their division (the Atlantic or the former Northeast) in each of the past four seasons. The 2nd place Lightning finished a full 16 points behind the Bruins in 2013-14, but a strong off-season combined with a full season of Steven Stamkos and rookie Jonathan Drouin potentially making an impact has them near even money with the Bruins.

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