Svencouver
Registered User
I've always lied somewhere between endlessly fascinated and endlessly frustrated by the existence of special teams in Hockey. My team has lost games because of the powerplay, and has won games because of the powerplay. We've been privileged to have had some of the worst penalty killing in the history of the league, and two of the greatest powerplay minds of all time in the Sedin twins. If anyone would have lost as much sleep over the powerplay as I have, it would more than likely be another Canucks fan. As I've looked around at other sports over the years (between bouts of tossing and turning over game management and ill-timed shorthanded backbreakers), I've come to find quite a bit of intrigue on the nature of penalization and how different sports handle it.
Hockey, like in many other regards, is fairly exceptional in regards to penalization. While football, basketball, and baseball have discrete, predictable punishments for infractions that result in some controlled gain of advantage for the rule-abiding team in order to offset the unfair advantage attempted by the rule-breaking (free throws, loss/gain of yardage, outs/bases earned), Hockey eschews such predictability and stability (as it often does) by completely shifting the game into an entirely different state for two minutes. As far as I can tell, there's nothing quite like this in other sports. Soccer, the other sport with similar scarce scoring, has free kicks, but there are both very few direct free kicks per game, and the conversion rate is far, far lower than that of a powerplay.
Messi, himself one of the most prolific free kick scorers of all time, has scored just 65 free kick goals in his career. McDavid scored 21 powerplay goals last year.
Another way to contextualize the relative significance of penalties on the outcome of games would be to consider the proportion of goals/points earned at advantage versus in regular play. With the Oilers scoring 325 goals last year, and 89 scored on the powerplay, roughly 38% of their production during the regular season came on the man advantage. Currently, Joel Embiid gets some of the most FTA and FTM in Basketball, scoring 354 out of his 1187 points on the season at the line, or 29%. Given that this is a team stat comparison versus an individual stat comparison, it seems fair to bring in McDavid's production last season into the picture: 71 out of his 153 points were on the PP - an eye-watering 46%! Fascinatingly - a team or player can have more of their total production come from the chaotic powerplay in Hockey than a basketball player can from completely unobstructed shots 15 out.
Hockey may have, then, the most significant special teams - and penalties - in all major sports. Which begs the question - how did we get to this point? Why the powerplay? Fans consistently lament the presence of 3on3 OT and the shootout for not being representative of the game in its purest, neutral state: so why make the powerplay how infractions are dealt with, and so central to how games in the sport are won?
I'd like to, then, pose a question to people with much more historical knowledge than me: why does the Powerplay exist, how did it come into being, was its nature ever challenged by other standards for dealing with infractions? How has it changed in the rules over the years - and how have rule changes such as the puck over the glass penalty changed the nature of the powerplay? How much can variance in eras, and scoring over time, be attributed to changes in the powerplay (I think, of course, of Sidney Crosby's supernovic 2006-07 Season, which had his career high point total driven by his highest number of powerplay points, even today)? What are some of the all time great powerplay teams in hockey, and who are some of the greatest all time powerplay strategists in the sport? How have scoring schemes and the strategies those teams have come up with over the years changed - especially in the analytic era? Perhaps most critically in our current discourse of all: how is our perception of a players ability - or even greatness - influenced by the powerplay?
There are an almost infinite number of questions or angles to take with a fixture in our game that I think is both strange and taken for granted, and I'd love to start a long-form discussion on the powerplay and it's affects on hockey with you all.
Hockey, like in many other regards, is fairly exceptional in regards to penalization. While football, basketball, and baseball have discrete, predictable punishments for infractions that result in some controlled gain of advantage for the rule-abiding team in order to offset the unfair advantage attempted by the rule-breaking (free throws, loss/gain of yardage, outs/bases earned), Hockey eschews such predictability and stability (as it often does) by completely shifting the game into an entirely different state for two minutes. As far as I can tell, there's nothing quite like this in other sports. Soccer, the other sport with similar scarce scoring, has free kicks, but there are both very few direct free kicks per game, and the conversion rate is far, far lower than that of a powerplay.
Messi, himself one of the most prolific free kick scorers of all time, has scored just 65 free kick goals in his career. McDavid scored 21 powerplay goals last year.
Another way to contextualize the relative significance of penalties on the outcome of games would be to consider the proportion of goals/points earned at advantage versus in regular play. With the Oilers scoring 325 goals last year, and 89 scored on the powerplay, roughly 38% of their production during the regular season came on the man advantage. Currently, Joel Embiid gets some of the most FTA and FTM in Basketball, scoring 354 out of his 1187 points on the season at the line, or 29%. Given that this is a team stat comparison versus an individual stat comparison, it seems fair to bring in McDavid's production last season into the picture: 71 out of his 153 points were on the PP - an eye-watering 46%! Fascinatingly - a team or player can have more of their total production come from the chaotic powerplay in Hockey than a basketball player can from completely unobstructed shots 15 out.
Hockey may have, then, the most significant special teams - and penalties - in all major sports. Which begs the question - how did we get to this point? Why the powerplay? Fans consistently lament the presence of 3on3 OT and the shootout for not being representative of the game in its purest, neutral state: so why make the powerplay how infractions are dealt with, and so central to how games in the sport are won?
I'd like to, then, pose a question to people with much more historical knowledge than me: why does the Powerplay exist, how did it come into being, was its nature ever challenged by other standards for dealing with infractions? How has it changed in the rules over the years - and how have rule changes such as the puck over the glass penalty changed the nature of the powerplay? How much can variance in eras, and scoring over time, be attributed to changes in the powerplay (I think, of course, of Sidney Crosby's supernovic 2006-07 Season, which had his career high point total driven by his highest number of powerplay points, even today)? What are some of the all time great powerplay teams in hockey, and who are some of the greatest all time powerplay strategists in the sport? How have scoring schemes and the strategies those teams have come up with over the years changed - especially in the analytic era? Perhaps most critically in our current discourse of all: how is our perception of a players ability - or even greatness - influenced by the powerplay?
There are an almost infinite number of questions or angles to take with a fixture in our game that I think is both strange and taken for granted, and I'd love to start a long-form discussion on the powerplay and it's affects on hockey with you all.