Four NHL stories to watch in the second half

Travis Yost

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A couple of weeks ago, a reader asked me what I thought was the most interesting storyline of the 2016-17 NHL season. It’s a question I’ve received many times in the past and there are usually a couple of obvious answers.

This season, though? It has been a strange one, and there’s a lot to disassemble. A lot of the really great stories have been masked by the explosion of two teams –- the Columbus Blue Jackets out east, and the Minnesota Wild out west – to the top of their respective divisions.

I figure at least four other developments are worth discussing at the halfway point of the regular season, especially as the playoff picture starts to take shape. So, in no particular order, four stories I think should be on everyone’s radar as we push towards April.

1. The Toronto Maple Leafs are a legitimate playoff contender

There has been growing sentiment that this team has accelerated upward on the rebuilding curve, thanks in large part to the force first-overall pick Auston Matthews has been down the middle of the lineup. A lot of fans seem guarded about how seriously to take this team, especially since they’ve been fighting through the middle of the Atlantic Division since October.

Remember, the Leafs have the lowest number of games played this season, which means that all of the points teams around them have banked are inflated. The Leafs’ point pace after beating the Senators on Saturday night is 96, which is likely to be good enough to finish as one of the top-three teams in the division.

The year-over-year development of the team is a build on the structural strengths the Leafs instilled one year ago. Remember, the 2015-16 Leafs – a roster and team that had zero business contending – actually out-shot their opposition over 82 games, controlling about 51 per cent of the play. Mike Babcock’s system was in place. What was sorely missing was two-fold: individual shooting talent, and someone who could stop pucks in the net.

I think a lot of fans expected their shooting percentages as a team to normalize (moving from 6.4 per cent at 5-on-5 to 8.5 per cent this season) with the increment of Matthews, Mitch Marner, et al. But there was a lot of hoping and praying that the newly acquired Frederik Andersen would fix the other problem for Toronto.

The goaltending hasn’t been great all year, but it’s been good enough. Save percentage has increased by more than a full point, which means the 25th best puck-stopping team from a year ago has evolved into the 10th best.

Combine their usual shot or scoring chance advantage with guys who can find the back of the net (or keep pucks from the back of their own) and you have a team that’s gone from lottery-bound just a couple of years ago to legitimate threat to secure one of the eight spots out East. It’s a great turnaround. 

2. The Carolina Hurricanes are also a legitimate playoff contender

This one might seem a bit stranger, especially if you live in the Toronto area and are subject to the adulation over the performance from the young Maple Leafs this year.

But, it’s true! Despite playing in easily the toughest division in the league, the Hurricanes have played to a 93-point pace over the first half of the season. What’s amazing is the fact that the goaltending, which has been a problem area for years in the later stages of the Cam Ward era, has remained just as problematic during this stretch (their 90.9 per cent save percentage at 5-on-5 is 28th best in the league).

One of the points I’ve made during the last couple of seasons while watching Hurricanes games is that, if you simply watched the skaters and pretended there were no nets on the ice, they would look fantastic. This seems silly considering the entire premise of hockey is about putting pucks into mesh, but the point I was trying to get across is that, territorially, the Hurricanes can skate with just about any other team in the league. This wasn’t your standard lottery-talent team that sat five across in the defensive zone and was bombed on for 60 minutes. No, this team was scrappy.

Much like the Leafs, the Hurricanes have been able to manage out some of their weaknesses and turn them into strengths. There’s no better example of that than the penalty kill, which for my money has been just as good as the much-heralded Blue Jackets power play. Do you know what the Hurricanes have netted on goals when shorthanded?

That’s four goals for and 11 goals against. It’s a ridiculous number when benchmarked against the rest of their competitors, and it’s mostly predicated on their ability to slow volume – the 44 shots against per 60 minutes short-handed is third best in the league.

I think the best way to articulate how dominant of a season they are having short-handed is to compare it against what we have seen from some of the other elite penalty kills in years past. Here’s how they fare historically:

In short: if they keep pace, they could realistically finish with the best penalty kill we have seen since at least 2007-08. That, and remaining competent at 5-on-5, has put the Hurricanes in striking distance in a brutal Metropolitan Division. 

3. The Dallas Stars have had a bizarre season

It seems like almost no one is talking about Dallas at the national level this year, and that’s what happens when your team goes belly-up after last year’s fantastic run. The consensus seems to be that the Stars haven’t been able to figure out the defence/goaltending issues that plagued them even when they were great, especially against elite Western Conference competition.

But that’s actually a misnomer. The Stars have outscored their opposition at even strength this year (50.7 per cent of the goals), and they’re doing it thanks in large part to not conceding much defensively. Dallas’ 2.02 goals-against per 60 minutes is seventh best in the league, ahead of teams we think of as stronger defensively, like Anaheim (2.10), Boston (2.12), Ottawa (2.23), and St. Louis (2.36). Not surprisingly, save percentage is also in the top-10 at evens – the Kari Lehtonen/Antti Niemi duo and the defence in front has been more than adequate.

Now look back up at the penalty kill graph in the Carolina section and find Dallas. Where the penalty kill has lifted the Hurricanes, it has absolutely crushed the Stars. It’s one of the big reasons why their actual goal differential (a ghastly -16) doesn’t look anything like their more-than-acceptable +2 goal differential at evens. Here, Niemi/Lehtonen are barely stopping 80 per cent of the shots they face, which, excluding the lockout year, would be the worst short-handed save percentage we have seen in the modern era.

The penalty kill isn’t the only thing hurting the team’s output. The Stars’ offence – once unequivocally the deadliest attack in the league – has sputtered. Look at how their rate-scoring has trended in the Lindy Ruff era, and note how disparate the results are this season.

This is more theory than anything, but I do think this is where the questions about the defence are legitimate. So much attention has been spent on bunkering down and trying to unburden Niemi/Lehtonen that the forward and defence groups have sort of operated in a segmented, silo-like manner. There’s no fluidity on the breakout and none of the electric counterattacking we had grown accustomed to. It’s a problem, and one that might keep the Stars from the playoffs this year.

4. Let’s learn to love the [5-on-5] goal-scoring race

Some guys just don’t get a ton of power-play time. Those guys don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell at winning the Rocket Richard Trophy.

That’s why I want all of you to learn to love the 5-on-5 goal-scoring race. There are some incredible names at the top of this list. Many of you know that Sidney Crosby (16) and Matthews (16) are at the top of the hierarchy. But do you know that two other guys – a pseudo castaway in Patrick Maroon and the always-struggling-to-finish Michael Grabner – have the same number of even-strength goals?

Just look at some of these names! Matthews, a 19-year-old rookie, is the projected favorite on a pro-rated basis (teammate and possible trade candidate James van Riemsdyk is also right there). Grabner and Maroon, if they can sustain this run, can reasonably finish in the top five – two players, keep in mind, on $1.6 million and $1.5 million cap hits respectively. A bunch of other kids – Rickard Rakell, David Pastrnak and Patrik Laine in particular – are well within striking distance.

That’s the other fascinating thing to note about this race – how many of these players have a large portion of their careers still ahead of them. Even with elite goal-scoring veterans in Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin here, two guys who will always find a spot regardless of their age and what season they’re playing in, the average age is about 25.5 years. Six of the players are 25 or younger, including teenagers Matthews and Laine.

Who’s the favourite? I don’t bet against Crosby, but the field is an enticing second pick. In that group you’ll find some really fun stories that deserve your attention.