Will Rust Affect The Panthers?
Florida will enter the Stanley Cup Final after one of the longest postseason layoffs ever.
Now that we have our Stanley Cup Final matchup, we can finally drop the puck and decide a champion! Well… eventually.
After the Vegas Golden Knights eliminated the Dallas Stars on Monday night, the NHL announced that Game 1 of the title round will take place on Saturday at 8 p.m. ET. That is, of course, June 3 — or 10 days after the Florida Panthers wrapped up their unexpected sweep of the Carolina Hurricanes.
Certainly days off matter at a time like this, in a sport like this. But at a certain point, it may also be difficult to re-summon the necessary intensity when a team has to wait a week and a half between playoff games. So in the eternal battle between rest and rust, which has tended to get the upper hand in the past?
Including this year’s Panthers, nine teams in NHL history have waited 10 or more days to start a best-of-seven playoff series. (Excluding the teams from the 2020 bubble, who waited in excess of 140 days to restart their season during the COVID-19 pandemic.) Of the previous eight teams in that group, three won their series — or only 37.5%.
Two of those teams had to wait 11 whole days before a playoff series: The 2003 Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, who made the Final against the New Jersey Devils, and the 2019 Boston Bruins, who were in the Final against the St. Louis Blues. Both lost the Cup in 7-game heartbreakers.
Looking at things more broadly, 38 previous teams in NHL history were inactive for at least nine days before Game 1 of a best-of-seven series. Those teams collectively fared better, going 20-18 in their series (a 52.6% winning percentage), including 5-4 in the Stanley Cup Final. Clearly, the rust factor wasn’t too detrimental for them!
Granted, that’s a pretty oversimplified approach. For one thing, it’s not wrong to guess that teams with long layoffs would be stronger by definition, simply on the basis of finishing off their previous opponents in a shorter series.
So if we account for how we might predict our group of teams to do (using a logistic regression model to predict each series based on home-ice advantage and both teams’ regular-season SRS ratings), we find that the “rusty” teams do tend to underperform their expected winning percentage in series after long layoffs. For instance, we’d expect our group of teams coming off a 9+ day break to win 20.6 of those 38 series — a number they undershot slightly in reality:
The numbers are even worse for the Florida-like 10+ day layoff group, who “should” have won 4.4 series instead of just 3.
The good news for the Panthers, though, is that these differences are still far from statistically significant. Maybe the downtime of sitting a week and a half without game action really does prevent a team from being fully sharp — but at the same time, the benefits of rest on team health could offset most or all of that rust. Or perhaps we just haven’t seen enough evidence to truly conclude there’s an effect either way.
The Panthers should be underdogs in this Stanley Cup Final. They had a worse goals-per-game differential than Vegas in both the regular season (+0.21 versus +0.52) and the postseason (+0.44 versus +1.00). Despite Matthew Tkachuk’s brilliance, Florida is still only barely scoring at an above-average rate in the playoffs. Instead, they’re relying heavily on mercurial netminder Sergei Bobrovsky to keep playing like the best goalie on the planet. It hasn’t happened yet in the postseason, but nobody would be surprised if the magic of Florida’s run suddenly goes poof in the Final.
But if that happens, it probably won’t be because they were dulled by the time off or lost the momentum of their 5-game winning streak, any more than the benefit of rest would be the secret to refreshing them if the Panthers end up winning. Even at the extremes of the NHL schedule, sometimes a nice, long break is just an excuse to hang out or spend some family time before the grind starts again.
Filed under: NHL