As I mention on the homepage and as I will continue to mention to anyone who will listen, the current NHL points system causes some games to be worth 2 points (regulation), and others, 3 points (extra time). To me, this is so insane. As an example of the concrete consequences of this bizarre mode of operation, it's very common for 20+ teams in the NHL to have a Point Percentage better than .500.
But forget that it's just illogical (although I maintain it is), it also brings messed up incentives. Say it's 2-2, there are 45 seconds left, and a bad icing call gets reversed, bringing the draw to center. Nobody has an advantage. Someone wins the draw to a defenseman, the winger creeps toward the offensive blueline, they might be able to get around the opposition's defence, but it'll be close. Does the defenseman try to make this exciting stretch pass? No, probably not. Why should they? In 30 seconds the team will have a guaranteed point, and they can still go ahead and win it and get the full two points.
Finally, there's the idea that if it's still tied after 60 minutes of play, the game was basically even. At this point we've devised a few ways of determining a winner, and yes, as a viewer, this is more enjoyable, but it's not far off from random chance. Somewhat so for overtime, much more so for shootouts. So instead of pretending these wins are just as good as a regulation win, why not acknowledge that even though the winning team did something small to set themselves ahead, they may very easily not have, and that the losing team was just a stroke of luck away?
The systems outlined below, which have been put into practice on the Home page, attempt to address some or all of the above problems with the current system.
I've started with my personal favourite system. In it, each game is worth exactly 5 points. The breakdown is as follows:
And, obviously, 0 points for a regulation loss, as you would expect. It does a good job at taking into account that randomness I mentioned above. Now, obviously you could go too far with this, I mean you could use advanced analytics to figure out which team is actually playing best and set the standings that way if you wanted to. This wouldn't be too fun to watch, because suddenly the entire concept of the game as a unit of hockey, and to some degree the goal as a unit of excellence, become meaningless. The casual viewer's experience of the game starts to have very little relation to the team's standing in the league. So, I think this 5-point system is a good balance of eliminating randomness and preserving the game as a unit and the goal as the most important event.
This system, as the name implies, awards 3 points for every game, and it's simpler than the 5-point version. Here's the breakdown:
I don't like this system as much as the 5-point in the current NHL format, because I perceive the shootout to be significantly more random than overtime, and I think it makes sense to recognize this difference. Still, if the NHL decides to make a change but feels 5 points per game is too radical, I'd vastly prefer they adopt the 3-point than give up on changing. Also, if (as some people advocate) the NHL ever did away with the shootout in favour of unlimited overtime (I'm agnostic on this idea), then I think this is the system you'd want.
This system, in many ways the simples, awards 2 points for any win and 0 points for any loss. Wait, you say, why not just make this a 1-point system? After all, you're already basically just ranking by number of wins, you could use that win column directly. Certainly, that 1-point system is equivalent, but I just think that since people are used to a win being 2 points, it might be just as easy to leave it alone. Anyway, I don't like this system as much as the other two, because it does nothing to address that randomness factor I keep harping on. For some people, though, a win should just be a win, and how long it takes to get it should not affect its worth. I disagree, but those people are welcome to click that 2-point button and see what it would look like. It still addresses my first concern (the absurdity of non-fixed points) fully, and the incentive concern at least partially, in that the tension near the end stays about the same, where our other two systems ratchet it up a little, and the current system drags it down. So, I guess I prefer this system over the current one, though it's incremental. Adopting it would feel like a waste, to me, when the above systems are available.
The byline and welcome text for this site make it sound like it's more than just a list of alternative standings, but alternative standings are all I see. What gives? Well, (glad you asked), that's pretty much all it does right now. I hope to add more stuff, but who knows, this is just a fun thing I do on the side. In the short term, I want to at least add a view where the standings are split into divisions. We could talk about the playoff implications of the different standings, I think that would be excellent. It would also be fun to add player-level rankings based on whatever crazy thing I want to examine, that could be coming at some point. I'd also consider adding in some prose content, kind of like an editorial page, that would be fun too. Really, the sky's the limit.