NHL Power Rankings: Competition for Avalanche in West; Bruins keep climbing – NBC
26. Detroit Red Wings (LW: 24). The young talent and salary cap situation makes it look like this team is close to taking a big step, but their actual play on the ice lately makes it seem like they are still pretty far away.
This late into the season, somebody bothering to power rank the teams below 20 isn’t spending a great deal of time worrying about whether a team should be 27th or 32nd and I’m not going to fault them for that.
What goal differential can tell us about NHL standings and playoff hopes – Sportsnet
No single stat category tells us everything, and fanbases of every team will look at this and have their “Yabuts.” Yabut our best guys were hurt, Yabut COVID, Yabut the trade, and all those contentions. And certainly many are relevant. But for a wholesale look at the league, you can do worse than starting with the simple idea of “who generally shoots it into the net more than their opposition,” then tease out a few conclusions.
It’s funny that for as much noise an individual player’s plus/minus devalues that stat, it does a pretty good overall job at the team level to simply count goals for and against.