When you are evaluating each team’s viability as a Stanley Cup contender, you must overweight two components: the sustained ability of a team to win at even strength (where the lion’s share of game minutes are played), and the efficacy of the goaltending.

If a team cannot reasonably check both boxes, they are ripe for an early exit in the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Beyond that, we know the importance of special teams – a team can smooth over average even-strength play or mediocre goaltending if they possess a dominant power play or penalty kill. On the surface, it may seem that these two special-teams units should be equally weighted, but in the NHL’s heightened scoring environment, the mathematics have certainly changed.

A nearly two-decade NHL trend I continue to find fascinating is the increasing importance of a high-calibre power play, and the reduced importance of an elite penalty kill. In the defensive era of hockey 10 or 15 years back, most Stanley Cup champions possessed a penalty kill that ranged from good to great.

But over the past decade (a decade that’s seen both a surge of offensive skill enter the league, coupled with changes in tactics and deployment strategies intended to juice scoring), that relationship has flipped. Most eventual champions now carry a higher-end power play, while the........

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