Just Gonna Leave This Here

This spreadsheet-like image was posted to Twitter by Dimitri Filipovic yesterday, and I found myself studying it pretty hard. As you can probably deduce, I added the overall NHL rankings as of last night to the chart to make it a little easier to see, but aside from a few outliers, the percentage of time leading a game almost correlates directly to placement overall in the league's standings. To be fair to all teams, there isn't a margin of error that I can deduce between the percentage of time leading, percentage of time trailing, and the overall placement in the standings, but it seems pretty clear that top fifteen teams in terms of percentage of time leading are also the top fifteen teams in the NHL standings. The exceptions are Colorado (10th in time leading vs 18th overall), so they're actually worse as a higher-ranked team with the lead while Philadelphia (16th in time leading vs 11th overall) and Los Angeles (21st with the lead vs 14th overall) seem to play better when trailing.

In any case, it's something you can look over and see if you can find some numbers that jump out at you. For you analytical types, it would be interesting to see these numbers versus time of possession numbers or PDO numbers to see how much those two scenarios have on time leading versus time trailing. As we've always been told, if you have the puck more, the other team doesn't with possession, and teams that get on hot streaks will certainly see their PDO go up, but does that have a significant swing on the time leading versus the time trailing?

If you feel like it, have at it. I give you these numbers that Dimitri published as a starting point!

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!