For a hot minute, it looked like NHL fans were about to be treated to the highest-scoring Stanley Cup playoffs in decades.
But now that the second round is complete, that trend has reversed — especially among the four starters that are advancing to the NHL's conference finals. All have had their ups and downs, some more than others, but are headed into the third round after playing some of their best hockey of the year.
It’s been quite a turnaround. Through the 47 games in Round 1, teams were averaging a total of 6.53 goals a game. That’s well above the 2024-25 regular-season average of 6.08 goals per game, and we haven’t seen that many goals in the playoffs since 1988-89 (6.54).
But in the 23 games in Round 2, offense dropped dramatically, to just 5.13 goals per game. That has pulled the NHL's playoff average down to 6.07, right about the same as the regular season.
What gives?
Special teams are a factor, but it’s not about the officials putting their whistles in their pockets. In Round 1, the refs gave teams an average of 3.03 power plays per game, and teams converted at 24.91 percent for 0.76 power-play goals per game. The opportunities dropped just slightly in Round 2, to 2.87 chances per team per game. But the conversion rate fell to 17.42 percent, meaning teams were averaging only 0.50 power-play goals per game.
The penalty-killers deserve credit for getting those numbers down, and so do the goalies.
If we zoom out to even strength, we can see similar trends.
Across all situations, average shots per game dropped from 28.43 per team in Round 1 to 26.41 in Round 2. That doesn’t look like much of a difference, but it’s a dip of nearly eight percent. Team defenses have tightened up, and teams that are still alive play what we tend to think of as ‘playoff hockey.’
But the goalies stepped up their games as well. The average save percentage went from 88.51 percent in Round 1 up to 90.29 percent in Round 2.
It’s not just a matter of the weaker stoppers being weeded out, either. Washington’s Logan Thompson and New Jersey’s Jacob Markstrom delivered two of the best goaltending performances of the playoffs today.
Of the goalies who are still in the playoffs, Carolina’s Frederik Andersen leads his peers by a mile in both save percentage (.937) and goals saved above expected (12.2) per moneypuck.com. He has given up just 12 goals in nine games so far.
Jake Oettinger of Dallas is his closest challenger at a .919 SP and 6.8 goals saved above expected — and he picked up his game significantly in Round 2, with a 2.00 GAA against the Winnipeg Jets after he opened the playoffs with 2.88 goals against per game versus the Colorado Avalanche.
The other surviving netminders have followed similar trends. Stuart Skinner averaged 5.50 goals against in the Edmonton Oilers’ first two games against the Los Angeles Kings before Calvin Pickard relieved him. When he returned for Game 3 of Round 2 after Pickard was injured, Skinner gave up four in his first outing before finding his ‘A’ game and eliminating the Vegas Golden Knights with back-to-back shutouts.
In Florida, Sergei Bobrovsky out-duelled Andrei Vasilevskiy in Round 1, giving up 11 goals in five games compared to 16 from his cross-state counterpart. Bob’s bumpy patch came in his first three games against Toronto. He gave up 13 goals before flipping the script with a Game 4 shutout, then allowed just four more goals in the final three games as the Panthers completed their comeback.
By the end of Round 2, the average for the full playoffs was 6.08 goals per game. That’s up from last year (5.73), but lower than the two previous seasons (6.28 in 2023 and 6.31 in 2022). Those playoffs were the first times teams had exceeded six goals a game since the mid-90s.
Heading into the conference finals, all four starters appear to be at the peak of their powers. If they can keep it going and keep getting good support from the players in front of them, we could see more low-scoring contests ahead.
And while we’re only halfway through the playoffs, schedule-wise, 12 of this year’s 15 series are now in the books. Depending on the length of the remaining series, we’re already about 80 percent of the way through the total games played.
Can the goalies maintain the upper hand as the stakes get higher? Or will the explosive scorers like Mikko Rantanen, Connor McDavid and Carolina's breakout star Andrei Svechnikov assert themselves and push those averages back up as we move closer to seeing the Stanley Cup awarded?
Correction: Andrei Svechnikov's team was corrected.
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