Is Individual Power-Play Scoring Sustainable from Season to Season in the NHL?
Do players sustain their high power-play numbers?
When star players are in their prime, you expect consistency from season to season if health permits it. For example, Nathan MacKinnon, who has recorded three consecutive 110-point campaigns, will probably do it again in 2025–26. A significant uptick or dropoff in production is, for the most part, rare.
But what if we look exclusively at power-play production? Is it any more volatile than even-strength scoring?
Methodology
I looked at the top 50 skaters in power-play points over the past three seasons and their isolated production in 2022–23, 2023–24, and 2024–25. Then, I compared the absolute value of percentage change in power-play points per game for each player from 2022–23 to 2023–24 and 2023–24 to 2024–25. I did the same with even-strength scoring.
To put that in simpler terms, MacKinnon’s power-play points per game were the following over the past three seasons: 0.48, 0.59, 0.48. The absolute value of the percentage change between 2022–23 and 2023–24 was 22.24%, and 17.83% for 2023–24 to 2024–25.
At even strength, he had the following per-game totals: 1.08, 1.12, 0.99. The absolute value of the percentage change from 2022–23 to 2023–24 was 3.54%, and from 2023–24 to 2024–25, it rose to 12.00%.
What the Power-Play Numbers Say—And What They Mean
For power-play scoring, the percentage change is 28.32% on average. To give an example, a player who records 25 points is expected to either rise to 32 points or fall to 18.
Interestingly, power-play volatility is more of a team metric than an individual one, just eyeballing it. Tampa Bay Lightning forwards Nikita Kucherov and Brayden Point are two of the most consistent players in the sample. Sticking in Florida, Aleksander Barkov and Matthew Tkachuk aren’t too far behind for the Panthers.
Conversely, the New York Rangers saw their man advantage’s effectiveness deteriorate, and it was hard on all of their players. Adam Fox, Artemi Panarin, and Mika Zibanejad all saw drops of 39% or more between 2023–24 and 2024–25—a huge storyline from the team’s narrow playoff miss.
