The curse of the second game in two nights came back to haunt the Canadian on Thursday evening in Boston.
It hadn’t been perfect the day before in the 1-0 victory against the Toronto Maple Leafs, but the CH really hit a wall against the Bruins, after a trip to Massachusetts and a short night of sleep. Following this meeting, the players and their coach warned that they did not want to use the lack of rest as an “excuse”. However, Brendan Gallagher, Kaiden Guhle and Martin St-Louis all, without this theme being suggested to them in a question, mentioned that the Habs had played twice without a day off.
It’s hard not to feel a sense of déjà vu. Last season, in fact, the second game in two evenings was a real scourge for the Canadian, the worst team on the circuit in these circumstances with a record of 1-11-1 in 13 appearances. That represented a ranking point rate of 0.115, an outsize compared to the 0.529 (29-23-15) output with a day or more of rest.
Saturday morning, St-Louis reiterated that it was mainly the way his men played in Boston that displeased him. The pilot, however, added this: “The data tells us that it is difficult to win in a second game in two nights. »
PHOTO FRANÇOIS ROY, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
The head coach of the Canadiens, Martin St-Louis
Wishing to verify this assertion, The Press has compiled the records of all NHL teams since the 2012-2013 season, excluding the 2019-2020 (incomplete) and 2020-2021 (reshuffled divisions) campaigns. This resulted in a sample of 10 campaigns.
Two main findings emerge.
The first: year after year, across the league, it is true that the success rate of teams is lower in a second game without rest than after at least one day off… but the difference is not as marked than one might believe.
The second: the ability of clubs to counter this trend is strongly correlated to their overall performance. In other words, successful teams will also be successful when they play matches without a break.
Less than two points
Let’s first look at the drop in speed during a second match in 24 hours. This can be analyzed qualitatively (energy, execution, commitment) or quantitatively (victories, goals scored and allowed, shots, etc.). For the purposes of the cause, we were interested in the impact of the number of days of rest on points in the standings, a statistic made available by the NHL.
Over the 10 seasons in our sample, Tour teams overall had a record of 1786-1725-504 with no days off, for a ranking point rate of 0.508. From year to year, this data is relatively stable around 0.500. With at least one day of rest, this rate is 0.566. The shortfall is therefore 0.058. By applying this difference to the average of “two in two” contested annually by each club (13.5), we obtain a deficit of 1.6 ranking points per year per team.
This confirms the thesis of falling chances of winning, but invalidates that of a major and, above all, systematic impact. Which brings us to the following observation.
The figures presented above being averages, we will understand that the situation is not experienced in the same way by all the teams. Last season, the New York Rangers never lost a second game in two nights in regulation: 8-0-1, .944 percentage, a career high. At the other end of the spectrum, we found the Canadian: 1-11-1, or 0.115.
The informed observer will remember that the Rangers also finished at the top of the general ranking at the end of the season, and the Habs, at 28e rank. The causal link is not direct, since some good teams struggle in a second game in two nights situation, and vice versa. However, the correlation is strong.
Thus, in our 10-year sample, 85% of teams that finished among the top 10 in terms of “two in two” participated in the playoffs. Conversely, 77% of teams among the worst 10 missed the playoffs.
We can therefore ask ourselves whether, generally speaking, it is the quality of a team which dictates its performance in matches without a day off, or whether it is its success (or lack of success) in this situation which influence its position in the ranking.
In either case, the result was that the Habs failed to deal with the tightest stretches of their schedule last season.
The new campaign has started off on the wrong foot in this regard. Excuse or not, the situation can, literally, only get better.
A geographical logic
By adding up all the situations of two matches in two evenings played by each club over the 10 years of our sample, we notice a great disparity. For example, since 2012, the Columbus Blue Jackets have been involved in such a situation 183 times, and the Edmonton Oilers, 120. In fact, it is mainly Eastern Conference teams that have been involved in such a situation. stick – 13 of the 15 most requested clubs are in the East. In proportion to the total number of games played, the Seattle Kraken is subject to the fewest doubles, followed by the Oilers and the Winnipeg Jets. The logic is clearly geographical, since the distances to travel between the cities where the teams are established are shorter on our side of the continent than on the West Coast.