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There’s no doubt Mike Babcock had the quote of the weekend. After a wild 8-5 win against the Rangers, Babcock remarked: “It’s kind of fun, eh? But it’s dumb.”

Never has a quote captured the spirit of the modern era of hockey. Coaches are militant about maintaining perfect structure and play from the defensive zone out, with net protection the most critical of focus areas. Among other things (like the improvement of goaltending, generally, around the league), this “defence wins championships” style of coaching has permeated through the league.

It’s hard to blame coaches for adapting to the changes. Teams have generally realized that in an era where there is such a premium on scoring, sucking the air out of games – especially as teams look to preserve leads – can be a winning strategy. What that’s usually meant for the NHL is low-scoring affair after low-scoring affair.

Low-scoring doesn’t always mean not entertaining, but there’s some relationship. Enough that the league has at least recognized they need to think about ways to move the goal-scoring needle in the right direction, though many of those ideas have either been killed or have taken excruciatingly long to implement.

Back to Babcock’s quote for a moment: He was obviously referencing his team’s free-wheeling play against both Winnipeg and New York, but the opened-up play wasn’t unique to the Leafs organization. Across most of the NHL, it seemed like there was incredible end-to-end action. Although it didn’t mean large goal numbers in every game, the general theme was a lot of scoring chances and a bunch of oohs and aahs from crowds in attendance.

Anecdotally, it felt that way. But the data through the NHL’s first week supports this, too. Keep in mind that in the modern era, performance numbers have rarely moved in any meaningful direction. Teams have always generated about 55 shots and 2.3 goals per-60 minutes of 5-on-5 play. Goalies have stopped about 92.1 per cent of shots. Year after year, it’s generally the same thing.

We’re only a couple of dozen games into the 2017-18 season, but play sure seems to have opened up. I’m rather skeptical that this continues – we have almost a decade of perfectly flat offensive performance numbers – but it’s a notable deviation.

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How do you read this? It’s pretty simple. Through the first five days of the NHL season, teams generated five more shots per-60 minutes, which is an 8-per-cent increase over what we are used to. But these shots were also coming much more frequently from prime scoring areas. Expected goals, which take into consideration both shot volume and the likelihood or probability of any individual shot finding the back of the net, were up nearly 20 per cent. These are remarkable deviations. Just in case you’re curious, the same conclusion is reached if we compare the first 60 games of this year versus the first 60 games of any other year. Even just looking at this October versus previous Octobers, the numbers are definitively up.

Toronto was a huge driver of this change, but again, they weren’t the only ones. Edmonton, Carolina, Florida, and Chicago all saw monstrous jumps in their offensive production numbers. Even the teams who didn’t play particularly well saw more offence being generated in their first few games – it was just more likely that those teams were also bleeding chances and goals against in their own zone.

The one interesting note here is that actual goal scoring didn’t move much, at least at even strength. Based on what we know about shot volume and quality, it’s reasonable to assume that goaltenders actually had a fantastic opening week. Any time you see such a substantial divide in expected versus actual goals, that’s generally going to be the case.

Even-strength hockey wasn’t the only piece of the game that saw a dramatic change, though. The whistle-happy officiating from the preseason didn’t completely carry over, but teams in the opening games saw a higher rate of power-play opportunities and a higher conversion rate. Through the same timeframe, teams are averaging about 4.3 power plays per game – about one power play more than the historical average of 3.3. If even a piece of that carried through the remainder of the season, it would be a remarkable change.

Again, I’m sort of skeptical that any of this is a definitive trend just yet – it’s super early in the season and October tends to lend itself well to a looser style of play that tends to die as the season wears on. But, if you are a fan of up-tempo hockey with a bunch of scoring opportunities, the first week of action was a blessing from the hockey gods. Teams let their playmakers make plays, and the end result was highly entertaining hockey across North America.

Data via Corsica and Hockey Reference