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With the halfway point of the NHL season officially kicking in Thursday night, it seems like as good a time as any to check on the best clutch offensive players in the league.
And the Edmonton Oilers’ Leon Draisaitl is killing it. Like, dominating. Not only is there nobody better when it comes to producing offense at crucial times during the game, nobody’s even close.
How do we know this? Well, because of my NHL Situational Scoring statistic that charts goals by importance.
You know how they say that it doesn’t matter how, but how many? Well, with Situational Scoring, it doesn’t matter how many. It matters how many mattered.
As the name suggests, it measures situational scoring, specifically which players produce offense at the most crucial times in the game.
That’s why a guy like Troy Terry of the Anaheim Ducks can be 62nd in the actual scoring race but is a mind-boggling fifth in Situational Scoring. (It’s actually phenomenal what Terry is doing, considering the Ducks are second-last in league scoring and don’t score nearly as many big goals as better teams.) Or Mikko Rantanen can be third in NHL scoring but not crack the top 25 in this department.
As always, there are a couple of things to note, the most important being that goals are weighted more heavily than assists, with goals worth one point and assists worth half a point.
In this system, goals can be worth more than one point and assists worth more than half a point. For example, the first goal of a game is automatically worth two points, one for being the first goal of the game and one for putting that player’s team ahead in a game. An overtime goal is worth three: one for putting the team ahead, one for being the game-winner and one for the overtime goal. If that is the only goal in a 1-0 game, it’s worth four.
It can all be a little confusing, so here’s a glossary:
FIRST: When a player scores the first goal of the game.
AHEAD: Any goal that puts a team ahead at any point in the game, including overtime.
TIED: Any goal that pulls a team into a tie at any point in the game.
COMEBACK: A goal that is scored when a team is trailing by two goals or more and is part of a series of goals that eventually ties the game, regardless of the ultimate outcome of the game.
WINNER: A game-winning goal, but not by the NHL’s definition. The game-winner in this category is the goal that puts a team ahead in a game to stay. So in other words, you could have a 7-6 game and maybe the first goal of the game was the game-winner.
OT: Overtime goal.
SO: Only shootout game-winning goals are counted in this category.
NHL: Where the player stands in the actual NHL scoring race.
Here are the top 25 NHL situational scorers through the first half of the season:
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