A lot of seasons will represent a downward trend from 2011-12. Maybe the players bought into their own hype, too.
There are 82 games in a season, with the representation that a perfect record is worth 164 points on the year. A non-perfect record is 0 points. 82 points as the mean. Once the NHL starts going to declaring win % as the determinant, then I absolutely agree with what you are saying. But in this case, I don't know if I can agree with how you presented the argument, b/c the nature of this format means that a tie was granted for regulation play, and therefore can't be counted against, even if someone gets the golden goal or wins in a shootout. As another example - last year, a team with a losing record (Toronto) made the playoffs over a team with a winning record (Tampa Bay).
Toronto: 40-27-15, 95 points (40-42)
Tampa Bay: 42-30-10, 94 points (42-40)
If you want to use a true W-L to work with, that is fine. If we really wanted to, we could strip out all games that went to OT and the shootout, but that would be getting rid of 20 games or so for all teams and I wonder how much that would bring certain teams closer to .500 Obviously the top 5-8 teams in the entire league are not going to be that affected, but a team like the Rangers in this season would be 12-11-0, and not 16-11-3 if we took into account OT or SO wins and losses. San Jose would be 14-10-0 if taking away their OT wins/losses. Yet, both teams have the same amount of points, albeit with SJ playing 1 less game. So, I would be more cautious in lumping OTL as simply losses, but whatever floats your boat.
There are all sorts of arcane arguments that we could get into regarding the NHL's points system and whether it represents an accurate accounting of a team's performance, but for me it comes down to a very simple calculation - how many wins and losses a team has.
The fact that a so-called "loser point" is awarded in an overtime loss is incidental to the fact that the team didn't win. Now, is it an accurate measure of a team's performance if they lose in a shootout? That's a fair question. The NHL does not want tie games, and neither do I, the inherent unfairness of a crap shoot like the shootout aside. If the league were to be equitable about things, IMO they should change the points format to a three-point system - three points for a regulation win, two points for an overtime win, and one point for a shootout win. No points for a loss at all.
But the NHL doesn't want to do it that way because at the end of the season they want to artificially create "Game 7 Moments" throughout the league. They don't want to lose gate revenue because a fan base believes a team is out of the playoff picture. During the 2013-2014 season, we fooled ourselves into believing our team was playoff-worthy because our record
appeared to be over .500, but the reality is we were nowhere near playoff-worthy. We had
fifteen points generated from losing games. If that's not record inflation, I don't know what is.
Now, saying all this, I want to reiterate that I'm not saying all this to bash Tippett. What he did in his first three seasons, especially given the context of what was going on off the ice, was beyond anyone's wildest expectations, and he deserved the Jack Adams for doing it. But every coach has an expiration date - even Scotty Bowman got canned - and we had clearly hit DTs by the time he and Barroway worked out the buyout of his contract.
The Tocchet hire, IMO, has turned out to be a mistake. I see why Chayka hired him, although I don't agree with his reasoning. But Tocchet pretty clearly hasn't been the room presence that he needs to be with these kids, and given the team's performance, neither have his assistant coaches. But again, that's the risk you take when you undertake big changes. It's really a coin flip - it was equally likely at the time that Tocchet could have galvanized this team to greatness.