Does Being an NHL Superstar Give You a Better Shot at Being on a SportsCentre Highlight Reel?
Can a middle-six grinder make the fans cheer as much as Connor McDavid?
I had a fun thought a few days ago: do good players have better highlights? If we picked out a random goal and assist from the superstars in the league and compared that to a collection of middle-sixers, would there be a noticeable difference?
Finding that out is rather subjective, but I took a stab at it anyway. I looked at the most recent 5-on-5 goal and assist from last season’s top 200 forwards in points per game (minimum 20 games played) and gave them a grade, 1–10, for how impressive each play was.
I sorted players by their 82-game point pace (no rounding) as an indicator of their talent level. In the graphs below, red will represent 100-plus points, orange 90–99, yellow 80–89, green 70–79, blue 60–69, purple 50–59, pink 40–49, and black 30–39.
Before starting this experiment, I didn’t expect there to be any meaningful correlation between talent and quality of highlights—some, but not much. Over a full-season sample, maybe, but not with only the last goal and assist players scored. But to my surprise, the league’s better forwards typically produced more impressive highlights, even though said highlights were random.
Note: The last 5-on-5 goals and assists were tracked using @nhl_goal_bot’s account on Twitter/X. Unfortunately, there was a high-ranking goal that I later realized was the last one posted on the account, but not the player’s last goal—I’ll elaborate when we get to it.
Diving into the Data
Let’s dive into the data. On the y-axis are the players’ goal grades, while the x-axis shows their assist grades. I averaged the totals of players in each respective point-scoring category and graphed them below (top right having the most impressive highlights, bottom left having the least impressive):
To preface, I tried to make the grades as consistent as possible and went in with an open mind—no confirmation bias. But aside from the 60-point group, every time the point-scoring group improved, so did their highlights. The visual shows that.
Again, how I ranked goals and assists is subjective, and I’ll get into some examples for transparency. But I was more impressed by what better players were doing, on average. Even a 10-point bump in scoring pace was enough of a gap.
It’s a lot more chaotic, but here’s a graph of all 200 players I tracked. Despite the volume of players heavily favoring the mid-scoring tier (40, 50, and 60 points), there are still some star standouts. Take a look:
The top right corner happens to have two of the best players in the NHL: Connor McDavid and David Pastrňák. But it’s mostly a big blob of players in the middle.
Method of Grading
Let’s get into a few examples of how I graded these, just so we’re on the same page. You might disagree with some of them, but those disagreements should hopefully be minor.
Let’s start with the player who had the best combined goal and assist grade (maximum of 20): McDavid, with 18. His goal, shown below, got a perfect 10.
While the Florida Panthers were stuck in their zone, nothing happens here if McDavid isn’t on the ice. He gets the rebound off of Evan Bouchard’s shot, absorbs a blow from Sam Reinhart, passes it back while falling, and has a clean look at the net all of a sudden.
But most players still don’t score here, despite having an in-tight 3-on-2. With the patience to dangle out Anton Lundell and netminder Sergei Bobrovsky, he made Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final a little closer. In my eyes, that’s a masterful dissection of an elite defense—it’s not something you see every day.
Now, for a 1 out of 10 goal. That’ll usually be the case when the player is laughing to himself, the play-by-play commentators on both sides are in disbelief, and the fans put their hands over their heads. Artemi Panarin’s shot from behind the net went off of Bo Horvat’s skate, who was also behind the net, and off of goaltender Marcus Högberg for the score.
Here’s a 10 out of 10 assist, starring Clayton Keller. He steals the puck and draws two Nashville Predators over to him, leaving a wide-open Logan Cooley. An exceptional backhand pass helped give the Utah Mammoth a 3–1 lead.
Now, for an assist that got a 1, here’s Reinhart. At the end of a shift, he softly dumps the puck into the Edmonton Oilers’ zone and gets off the ice. But despite being outnumbered, Carter Verhaeghe won the battle and centered a pass to Lundell for a 3–0 strike.
I was unwilling to give Reinhart any credit here. It’s not often you see a player credited with a point when they weren’t on the ice. So, he’d probably agree with me—this is a textbook example of a minimum grade.
Players Who Impressed the Most
Out of the 400 goals and assists, I only deemed 11 of them worth giving a 9 or better on the grading scale. For goals, those were the following:
