CBS Sports NHL Power Rankings

Author

Brooke Aho

CBS Sports - NHL Power Rankings

Being both a numbers and sports person, I have loved exploring individual player or team stats. With that being said, over the past few years, CBS Sports experts and analysts have developed what they call “NHL Power Rankings”. Each season, they give their two cents on what teams are looking good and those that are not doing so hot. Additionally, they provide projected rankings at this point in the season.

I decided to breakdown this data even further (which will be explained below) to answer questions like which teams had the most wins/losses over the past 4 combined seasons, and which conferences and/or divisions had the most ties in the most recent season (2023)? I decided to look into ties because to me, it is a way to show overall competitiveness, and something that is not as talked about as much as wins and losses.

Collecting Data

In order to gather the data I needed to make my analysis, I scraped it from the CBS website. I was able to go back 4 years and collect the data from the 2020-2021, 2021-2022, 2022-2023, and 2023-2024 seasons. From the websites, I was able to collect: ranking, team name, short review of how the team has been performing, and record.

Although all of these elements were very useful, I wanted to go even further in my analysis so did some of my own data wrangling and added a few extra columns. First, I simply added which season the ranking and review was from (2020, 2021, 2022, or 2023). Then, I divided up the record by creating a wins, losses, and ties column and made these variables numeric so that I could use them in my analysis. The last thing I did was indicate whether or not each team is in the eastern or western conference and then which division they are a part of - central, metropolitan, atlantic, or pacific.

Analysis

Most Wins

The first question I wanted to look further into was on average, what teams comparatively have the most wins over the past 4 combined seasons?

team_name average_wins
Rangers 55
Hurricanes 52
Jets 52
Panthers 52
Stars 52
Avalanche 50
Canucks 50
Oilers 49
Bruins 47
Predators 47
Maple Leafs 46
Golden Knights 45
Lightning 45
Kings 44
Blues 43
Red Wings 41
Capitals 40
Islanders 39
Sabres 39
Wild 39
Devils 38
Flames 38
Flyers 38
Penguins 38
Senators 37
Coyotes 36
Kraken 34
Canadiens 30
Blue Jackets 27
Ducks 27
Blackhawks 23
Sharks 19

From this, you can see that over the past 4 years, the Rangers have had the highest average number of wins - 55.

Most Losses

Next, I wanted to do the same analysis but gauge which teams had the most losses on average over the past 4 seasons.

team_name average_losses
Sharks 54
Blackhawks 53
Ducks 50
Blue Jackets 43
Coyotes 41
Senators 41
Devils 39
Flames 39
Sabres 37
Canadiens 36
Kraken 35
Blues 33
Flyers 33
Wild 33
Penguins 32
Red Wings 32
Capitals 31
Predators 30
Golden Knights 29
Lightning 29
Islanders 27
Kings 27
Oilers 27
Maple Leafs 26
Avalanche 25
Jets 24
Panthers 24
Canucks 23
Hurricanes 23
Rangers 23
Stars 21
Bruins 20

It is evident that the Sharks (54) have had the highest average losses over the past few seasons with the Blackhawks (53) not far behind.

Comparing Conferences

Another thing I wanted to look into was whether or not there was a difference in the number of average total ties in each conference in the most recent season (2023)?

This visual is easier to compare in table form which is looks like this:

conference average_ties
eastern 9.5
western 7.5

We see that the eastern conference had a higher average number of ties, 9.5, compared to the western conference slightly below with an average of 7.5. This could mean that the eastern conference is more competitive, or made up of teams that are closer in skill level than the western conference.

Comparing Divisions

Lastly, I wanted to see which division had the highest average ties in the 2023 season.

Again, this visual is easier to compare in table form which is looks like this:

division average_ties
metropolitan 9.75
atlantic 9.25
pacific 8.25
central 6.75

Here, we see that the metropolitan and atlantic divisions have a higher average number of ties (9.75 and 9.25) with the pacific and central being a bit lower at 8.25 and 6.75, respectively. This makes sense since the eastern conference is comprised of the metropolitan and atlantic divisions, whereas the western conference is comprised of the pacific and central divisions. It is evident that the central division is much lower than all other divisions.