"Playoff Appearances" isn't a good KPI
If your goal is to win the Stanley Cup you need to win playoff series
For many years the Marc Bergevin regime emphasized two things: (1) they want to win the Stanley Cup and (2) the first step is to make the Stanley Cup playoffs. On the surface this is perfectly reasonable, and indeed a simple fact, but it is worth looking further into what was really being said when the GM of the Montreal Canadiens brandished famous refrain “In the playoffs, anything can happen”.
Anything can happen
By December of the 2011-2012 season the Los Angeles Kings felt they were in a bad way and fired their coach Terry Murray. Upon recruiting longtime target Darryl Sutter they went on to finish the season as eighth and last seed in the Western Conference on their improbable road to winning the club’s first Stanley Cup later that spring.
At the time of Murray’s firing, his team was last in the NHL in goals scored and found itself 12 of 16 in the Western Conference. With expectations being raised, the notion of missing the playoffs was unacceptable and then GM Dean Lombardi felt he had no choice but to fire the head coach and salvage the season.
The historically unlikely outcome of the 2012 Playoffs cast a long shadow on the rest of the NHL. An eighth seeded team that was known for defensive, grinding hockey went on to win the Stanley Cup (and then win it again a few years later). Other clubs took notice and adjusted their expectations of bottom playoff seeds but some took the wrong lessons: this was unprecedented in the modern era, and the Kings weren’t even that bad to begin with.
It seems the rhetoric around Marc Bergevin’s Habs was heavily influenced by the Kings’ success. While the high-flying Chicago Blackhawks and perennially confident Pittsburgh Penguins also won multiple Stanley Cups during this era, it was the LA Kings who seemed to most easily imitable. The Habs under then head-coach Michel Therrien also relied heavily on their goaltender and defense and also didn’t score many goals at all. The Habs got into the playoffs as eighth seeds and the lowest scoring playoff team more than once — and this wasn’t cause for concern for the GM.
After all, make the playoffs and anything could happen.
Usually the same thing happens
What misses the point is in the previous two seasons the LA Kings had made the playoffs two years in a row, and with a respectable 46 wins in each of the previous seasons and a c. 600 pt%. They weren’t a badly assembled team and still it wasn’t enough to save Murray’s job, because they were an underperforming team.
There was too little goodwill earned on Terry Murray’s side from merely making the playoffs and losing in the first round. GM Dean Lombardi made the right call in the 2011-2012 season when he felt compelled to make a change because the club was not going as far as the GM felt was possible.
If a team with low expectations scratches and claws their way into a playoff position, it’s hard to believe they stand a chance to beat the NHL’s best teams in four straight series. Thus, merely making the playoffs and losing in the first round is only acceptable if you can build on it in the following years, otherwise it is a four-to-seven game extension to an already long 82 game season and nothing more.
Playoff opponents matter
Around half the teams in the NHL do not finish a given season in a playoff position, leaving the other half to compete for the Stanley Cup. As the last playoff seed, 50th or 51st percentile isn’t particularly impressive, in North American schools a 50% grade is a failure. What happens next is what effectively distinguishes the relative success of a team’s season.
Simply put, competing against top-half teams means a lot more — these aren’t teams that are tanking, that are disillusioned, that are sputtering due to injury. Every season there are some teams that start off flat and write-off the year (2-3 teams), they might earn the surprise win but on the whole they’re unimpressive opponents. By midseason there are some surprise collapses — due to injury or dramatic underperformance — so leading up to the trade deadline the other few bottom teams (5-6 teams) try to sell assets and join the first cohort as “dead rubber teams” for the final stretch of the season.
By the trade deadline it is clear: a third of the league is hopeless, a third are pretenders, and a third are competitive teams.
Once they’re all done beating up on each other at the season’s close, the playoffs contain the competitive teams and some of the better pretenders. So the quality of competition is significantly higher — there are no hopeless teams to bully anymore.
The statistical likelihood of facing a hopeless team goes from 33% to 0 and the likelihood to face a competitive team goes from 33% to 50% (or 100% if your team is a pretender who squeaks into the playoffs as the 15th or 16th seed)
That said, every team that is in the playoffs is competitive enough to think they can compete in their playoff series and lower-seed upsets happen quite often enough in the first round.
Clearly a team that can’t pass the first round isn’t good enough to celebrate. What’s the point of making the playoffs if your team immediately loses to other playoffs teams?
Therefore, if a team wins in the first playoff series they’ve overcome a worthy-enough opponent to become one of the top eight performing teams of that season. If you want to measure success, then being top quarter, or first quartile, is an appreciable target.
Fun with definitions
If merely “making the playoffs” and tallying playoff appearances was the Key Performance Indicator then Marc Bergevin’s Montreal Canadiens made the playoffs six times in ten seasons (including the 2021-2022 season), so 60% and not particularly impressive.
If we consider “finishing in a playoff position” as the actual definition then the 2020 playoffs no longer counts as the Covid-stricken NHL insisted on some play-in games to determine playoff positions and had the 24th ranked Habs set to face the 7th ranked Pittsburgh Penguins. The Habs defeated Pittsburgh and promptly lost in the first playoff round in five quick games anyway. Now we’re at 50% , already a fail — especially for a team that spends as much as the Habs do on salaries and bonuses and didn’t sell-off or plan on tanking at any time thus far.
If we consider the more logical “winning a playoff series” as the KPI then the picture changes for the worse. Habs fans enjoyed playoff success in just three of ten seasons, they weren’t remotely considered contenders in any of the last seven playoffs and weren’t trending in the right way.
Unfortunately for Habs fans, the Cindarella-style run of the 2021 playoffs turned into a pumpkin before the playoffs were over and the beatdown at the hands of the victorious Tampa Bay Lightning in five quick games ensured there was a damper to the celebration.
And to be uncharitable, all put together the Marc Bergevin Habs won a combined six playoff series out of a theoretical upper limit of forty, and zero in the five years of futility between 2016 and 2020 inclusive. A pathetic record if one were so inclined to expect a Stanley Cup every year — but despite what the goons in the Montreal Media space have to say about Habs fans, nobody serious feels entitled to a Stanley Cup every year.
As we can see above, it isn’t too much to expect more from the club than winning one measly playoff round every three years. Merely making the playoffs just to lose in the first round isn’t anything to brag about and more often than not the 2012 LA Kings don’t suddenly erupt out of a bottom-seeded playoff team. A reasonable performance indicator for the success of a given NHL season should therefore be playoff series won and not playoff appearances.