From the Wingers Project:
Teemu Selanne: Playoff Evaluation
While we all recognize that he does not have that singular, dominant, Conn Smythe caliber run on his resume, a lot of what he has done gets lost in the shuffle when people look at his cumulative playoff totals.
Consider this: we've been looking at seven-year VsX in the project so that we can better gauge the type of player these players were in their prime. Selanne happens to have exactly seven top-ten finishes in scoring. So what did Selanne's playoffs look like in those seven seasons?
First, let's look at how his teams performed in the playoffs during Selanne's seven top-ten finishes.
Team Playoff Record: 8-19, 68/90 GF/GA
They were pretty bad, lasting only five series, winning just one series. The teams that eliminated Selanne's teams had between 93-101 points. Hebert and Shtalenkov in 1997 provided the only goaltending in these runs that even exceeded .900 - not surprisingly being the tandem that won the only series in Selanne's seven best years, but even they were ultimately and understandably bested by the 1997 Detroit Red Wings who were on their 14-2 steak to close out the playoffs.
The teams Selanne played for in his seven best years did not put him in a situation conducive to a Conn Smythe-caliber run. People's instincts seem to be to put the blame on Selanne, the star player, but how did Selanne perform on an individual level in the playoffs following his seven top-ten seasons?
27 GP, 19 G, 27 PTS, 3 GWGs (1 OT)
He scored 28% of his teams' playoff goals, points on 40% of his teams' playoff goals, three of his teams' eight GWGs, and he was the team-leading goal scorer in every series. Those aren't exactly the ratios one would expect, given his reputation. If he had better support in his best years - whether it be defensively or offensively - he stood a very good chance of having a signature playoff run a la Pavel Bure in 1994 (who thankfully had Kirk McLean and Trevor Linden playing excellent hockey), but the individual runs were all too short. As a whole, however, despite playing for a team that only won 8 of 27 games, Teemu Selanne was an excellent playoff performer in his seven best seasons.
Of course, the NHL playoffs aren't the only measure of how Selanne played during pressure games. He played a lot of international hockey in his career. Consider this: the NHL has sent players to the Olympics five times. Despite playing for a team that is never one of the top-three favorites, Selanne's teams have won four Olympic medals in those five tournaments. Individually, he was the tournament's leading scorer in 1998, the tournament's leading scorer in 2006, and the tournament's Most Valuable Player in 2014. That's three of the five tournaments where Selanne was a major star.
People tend to brush off the 2014 selection as a parting-gift, but the circumstances weren't much different than how Joe Sakic won the MVP in 2002: like Sakic who was also not the leading scorer of the 2002 Olympics (trailing Sundin by 3 points), Selanne (trailing Kessel by 2 points) was the leading scorer of the playoff round (and in Selanne's case, he scored both of Finland's GWGs against Russia and the USA - goals that broke a tie in both games). And besides, if you're that against a player being named Most Valuable of a tournament that he wasn't the leading scorer of, remind yourself that Selanne already did that twice.
If a player stuck behind the Iron Curtain was the leading scorer of two best-on-best tournaments and the Most Valuable Player of a third, how would you treat that? Performing that well in an Olympic tournament once is nice, but not necessarily reflective of anything. Three times out of five though? That's a pattern of elevated performance under pressure.
He also scored 4-5-9 in the 10 World Cup games that were held while he was an NHL player, and in terms of non-best-on-best games, he was the leading goal scorer of the 1992 Olympics and the 1999 World Championship Most Valuable Player as well (that's the tournament a player goes to after their team posts an .874 series against Detroit...).
So how did Selanne get the reputation? Everything after his best seasons - things that would be otherwise ignored had his teams gone deeper in the playoffs when he was a top-ten player - makes up a much bigger percentage of his playoff resume. Despite spending 37.2% of his regular season games as a top-ten scorer, Selanne played just 20.8% of his playoff games in those years. In addition to his seven top-ten finishes, Selanne had another four seasons above a point-per-game. He made the playoffs twice in those years: the 2006 and 2007 (Mighty) Ducks.
Team Playoff Record: 25-12, 104/81 GF/GA
And here are Selanne's playoff stats for what are the 8th and 9th best seasons of his career relative to his peers.
37 GP, 11 G, 29 PTS, 4 GWGs (1 OT)
He was no longer a point-per-game player in the playoffs in his 8th and 9th best seasons, and while it is clear that he did not meet his regular season expectations on the powerplay in these runs, he was just as good at even-strength as he was in the accompanying regular seasons. 10 of his 11 playoff goals came at even-strength (0.27 per-game, same as in the regular season) despite him scoring 49% of his goals on the powerplay in the accompanying regular season. It wasn't a matter of him wilting under pressure; teams game-planned around Selanne being the league's best power-play goal scorer.
And these weren't exactly pushover defensive teams he was facing: of the seven playoff series in these two years, the (Mighty) Ducks faced both Jennings winners, two more top-five defensive teams, another top-ten defensive team, and Chris Pronger's Oilers. The closest thing they had to a break were the 2006 Avalanche, and not surprisingly, the Mighty Ducks swept them and Selanne was a point-per-game player.
Selanne was the team's leading playoff scorer in 2006, and tied for 2nd in 2007 behind breakout star Ryan Getzlaf. Cumulatively, no Anaheim player posted even a .80 point-per-game figure over their two deep runs, with only two players having anything above 0.65, so it isn't as if Selanne was a passenger; he was still the best offensive player over the two years.
1. Selanne, 11-18-29 (0.78)
2. Getzlaf, 10-14-24 (0.65)
3. McDonald, 12-11-23 (0.62)
4. S. Niedermayer, 5-17-22 (0.59)
5. Perry, 6-12-18 (0.56)
6. Beauchemin, 7-10-17 (0.47)
6. Penner, 6-11-17 (0.50)
6. Pahlsson, 5-12-17 (0.46)
9. Marchant, 3-13-16 (0.59)
10. Pronger, 3-12-15 (0.79)
I remind you, this is analysis of how Selanne played in the playoffs in the 8th and 9th best seasons of his career relative to his peers.
During these two runs, he scored big goals in big games. In 2006, Selanne had a game-tying goal in Game 6 against favored Calgary waived off for interference that happened after the puck was in the net...
...so Selanne scored the game-tying goal again, and then scored the opening goal (and GWG) in Game 7.
In 2007, the team faced adversity in only one series. Down 2-1 in the Conference Finals to Detroit, Selanne scored 6 points in the final 3 games to help take the series, including the last-minute game-tying assist in Game 5, and the OT GWG in the same game.
He wasn't as good as Scott Niedermayer or Chris Pronger (who played for Anaheim in 2007 but not 2006), but he was the next best player on the team in his 8th and 9th best seasons. People sometimes point to rounds where Selanne did not score enough points, but if you look at that list of Anaheim players, every one of them was held to 2 points or less in a series at least three times except for Selanne (once in seven series) and Pronger (once in four series). It might not have been the offensive contribution of his peak years, but it was still the most consistent series-to-series offensive contribution of a team that went deep twice.
The remaining portion of Selanne's career - the sub-point-per-game seasons caused by injury or age (all of them in his 30s or 40s) - contained the following anchor of a playoff record:
66 GP, 14 G, 32 PTS
Included in these are playoffs such as 2001, probably Selanne's best regular season of this sample.
But just because these years make up the largest sample of Selanne's playoff career does not mean that they should be reflective of how he was as a pressure performer. At that point, you're double-counting injury and age against him. We know why he wasn't particularly good in these 66 playoff games: he wasn't a particularly good player when he appeared in them.
Between how he performed in the playoffs when he was a top-ten player on a horrible team (19 goals in 27 games for 8-19 teams), how he performed in best-on-best tournaments (three exceptional Olympics), and how he was still the leading offensive contributor for the 2006 and 2007 (Mighty) Ducks (five points more than the 2nd place player), it's time to give some real consideration to Selanne.