Four-goal games are becoming the NHL’s new normal for players

Two weeks into the 2019-20 NHL season, three different players have four-goal games. What’s going on here?

The NHL’s inevitable brand of chaos has made its way back into our lives after a long summer away. Hockey is a sport defined by its random luck, for better or for worse, as it’s been deemed the luckiest of the four major sports by researchers.

Though the conventional wisdom has been that the NHL playoffs have the most concentrated aspect of randomness in the sport, due to the best-of-seven format producing often unpredictable results, the first month of any hockey season often takes its own form of chaos. October hockey routinely produces lopsided results and disjointed play for hockey teams, thanks to teams coming off long offseasons as they get back into the speed of the game.

The 2019-20 NHL season has been no different in that regard. Since the start of the season on Oct. 3, the NHL has had score lines of 7-2, 8-2, 6-5 and more high-scoring, offensive affairs one usually doesn’t see as often as the season settles in. What has been different to start this season, however, has been the amount of players scoring four-goal games.

An arbitrary stat, to be sure, but so far through the first two weeks of the 2019-20 NHL season, three players have netted four or more goals in a game. Through all of last season, the NHL had just four players that hit that mark in the regular season.

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This season, David Pastrnak, James Neal and Anthony Mantha have each tallied four goals in a single game, punctuating an abnormal start to the 2019-20 NHL season. Over the last 10 seasons, including this one, there have been 35 instances where an NHL player has tallied four or more goals in a game, according to Hockey Reference. The most instances where there have been four or more goals scored by players was in the 2017-18 season, when seven different players crossed that threshold, though only one of those was in the month of October.

The 2019-20 season marks the most four-plus goal games by NHL players in the month of October over the last 10 seasons. Plus, this eight-day stretch of three multi-goal games is faster than the previous 10-day stretch of three multi-goal games back in January 2015.

Overall in the 2019-20 season, the statistics across the league signal that boost in offensive production. Compared to the previous year, goal scoring is up from an average of 3.01 goals per game to 3.20 goals per game, while average save percentage is down from .910 to .904 from the previous year, according to Hockey Reference.

To be fair to the numbers, only a fraction of the total overall games have been played in the 2019-20 season. Usually by early November, players and teams have settled in enough that the inflated stats start to trend back to the norm and coaches start to better effectively game plan for situations later in the year. It would not be a surprise to see this season’s totals end up more in line with last season’s when all is said and done by early April.

Even still, this trend of four-goal games by players so early in the season is quite unusual by today’s NHL standards. With the amount of talented hockey players in the NHL this season, it’s hard to rule out the possibility that we could see more than seven four-or-more goal games by players this year. Goal scoring in the NHL has been steadily increasing since the 2016-17 season, and this uptick in production may be the byproduct of that trend.

Hockey is at its best when goals are being scored and highlight reel plays are being made, and with this recent trend of four-goal games by players, it’s hard to argue that this is anything but a good thing for the NHL should it continue.