NHL’s “let them play” playoffs are spoiling the product

There’s been a festering undercurrent surround the NHL’s post-season for a long time now. Hockey fans are extremely tribal in the belief that no sport can compare to the intensity of the National Hockey League’s playoffs.

While the intensity is palpable from the first round to the Stanley Cup Final, and emotions ride high for highly engaged fans, the fact of the matter is that the quality of hockey being played in the NHL’s playoffs is dropping.

Sometimes, it takes someone who isn’t an all-in hockey person to point out how out of control things can get. James Dator from SB Nation wrote up a column on Game 3 between the Florida Panthers and Edmonton Oilers, wherein the Oilers tried to play the Panthers’ game of line-crossing physicality and agitation, only to be penalized, and then embarrassed by a Panthers team built to play that way.

Make no mistake, the Panthers are built for this. Not only did they lead all teams in penalty minutes per game this season, but last season as well, and in 2022-23 they finished 2nd behind the Ottawa Senators. But while Dator credits the Panthers with understanding the line in the playoffs, I’m going to take a different tack.

There is no line

Like anything we experience as human, what appears to be a line in the sand can shift and change over time. Repeating something often enough, no matter the merit of it, will result in that idea being accepted by many as truth.

For example, think back to literally any playoff series loss you have seen your team suffer in hockey. How many people in media said the team needed to get bigger and tougher because of that loss? Does it ultimately matter if those areas were important factors to winning or losing the series? Not at all. It’s just something we all have been conditioned to accept as reasonable analysis.

Likewise with penalties in the playoffs, there is no objective line to not cross with penalties. There’s no magical veteran savvy that allows someone to know what the line is or where it lies. The line will change game by game, even shift by shift, depending on who is doing what, and the frequency of infractions.

It’s tempting to isolate the Panthers specifically as a dirty team that the NHL seems to favour come playoff time, but the Panthers aren’t unique, they’re just well built to fit into the style of play the NHL chooses to let dominate in the playoffs.

Like many teams before them the Panthers have figured out the exact same exploit that politicians have abused for years; flooding the zone. That isn’t a systems plan, it’s a strategy. If a politician lies constantly, their opponents are stuck spending so much time rebutting those lies that they lose their own message. Not only that, if your opponent calls you a liar too often, they lose credibility, even if they’re correct. For authoritarians, you break rules and norms at such a great pace, that even if some plans are stopped, enough seeps through to do damage to the structure of the state.

Hockey is much less serious of course, but the exploit is the same. Cross the line constantly. Habitually. On every play available to you, you step over that line. Sometimes you’ll get called — there’s a reason why the Panthers are the most penalized team in the league — but most times you won’t.

It’s not a skill issue, it’s a daring issue. Playing this way is a direct challenge to the officials. If you call everything, you look absurd. You can’t call everything.

Because you’ll end up getting away with a majority of those infractions, you’re going to gain an advantage at even strength that isn’t earned through play, but by cheating. And yes, breaking the rules is cheating. Even worse, hockey has an even-up culture with officiating, so the more penalties you take, the more you’re likely to draw as well.

The Panthers have taken a ridiculous 117 penalties during the 2025 NHL playoffs, and they’ve drawn 110. That’s 44 more penalties drawn than the high-flying Edmonton Oilers, with Connor McDavid routinely wearing opponents as a backpack.

Layer into this that hockey culture doesn’t take kindly to complaining. A team who is being railroaded by a lack of officiating will be labelled whiners before their opponents are labelled dirty. Not only have you controlled the game on the ice, you’ve controlled the narrative too.

The end result is always going to be a net positive for those who exploit the rules under this paradigm. You gain at even strength through territorial advantages, attrition, and the frustration of opponents, but you face minimal, if any, punitive actions against. Heck, the Oilers and Panthers have nearly identical penalty for/against ratios over the last two post-seasons, despite the Panthers being involved in 21% more penalty calls.

The Panthers may be unique in their ability to abuse this exploit that the NHL creates for the playoffs, because you can’t play that way in the regular season, with a roster that features a Hall-of-Fame-level squad of agitators in Brad Marchand, Matthew Tkachuk, Sam Bennett, Evan Rodrigues, and more, but they’re far from alone.

More than Florida

We saw in the first round between the Montreal Canadiens and Washington Capitals how this kind of officiating plays out. It’s not like the Capitals were dirty at unprecedented levels against the Canadiens, though they were exceptionally dirty at times. What left so many viewers of that series with a sour taste in their mouths was how blatant it all was.

The Panthers, for their part, are relatively sneaky. They’re adept at moving the line for themselves further. What the Capitals showed in Round 1 is that in the modern NHL you don’t need to be sneaky anymore, it’s good enough to just use volume. You don’t need a sneaky slash to the wrists or back of the calf when the ref isn’t looking, Alexander Ovechkin can just take six strides from centre ice and lead with a knee in a check on Alexandre Carrier that removes him from a game for a period. Then Tom Wilson will just lay a blatant shoulder to the head check that removes him from the game and causes a goal.

From the outset of the series, the Capitals employed a strategy of exceedingly late hits to establish the tone, something you can’t do in the regular season because you’d be in the penalty box constantly. Similarly, it’s a lot easier to win puck battles when you can cross-check opponents in the face while they’re looking for the puck. Just ask the 2021 Montreal Canadiens’ defensive group.

That’s right, it’s not about bias against your team! Your team has likely done this before too, even if they aren’t built to right now. Did the Habs get the other side of it against Washington? Absolutely. But it had nothing to do with what team they were, I think it had far more to do with the fact that they’re a young team, and officials do not give the benefit of the doubt to younger players.

Why, though?

There are a few explanations for why the NHL doesn’t like penalties being called. The length of the broadcast is one: more whistles mean a longer game. Another is that more whistles do genuinely disrupt the flow of the game. Neither of these reasons hold up under scrutiny though, as the NHL has shot itself in the foot with lengthy offside reviews that are far more disruptive than a tripping call. In my opinion the biggest reason is that a lot of hockey people at the highest levels believe that this style of play is ‘true hockey.’

Hockey fetishizes the struggle to win the Stanley Cup. It’s why our media power players breathlessly type out the lists of injuries people were playing through when the Cup is awarded. The more we lean into abandoning the rulebook, the tougher the grind is, the greater the victory, I guess.

This isn’t a new thing, we have 61 seasons of penalty data for the NHL through Hockey Reference, and from it we can see some trends.

The biggest increase in power-play opportunities in the league’s history happened post lockout season in 2005-06, and since that moment the NHL has consistently clawed those power plays back, to the point that we are currently in the era of the fewest penalties being called in the sport, ever.

In fact, the 2.7 power-play opportunities per game that an average team could be expected to get in 2024-25 is the lowest mark in NHL history. Fourteen of the 20 least-penalized seasons in NHL history, and the 11 fewest penalized overall, have occurred in the last 14 seasons.

On average through the last 61 seasons, a team could expect 3.9 power-play opportunities per game. We’re currently seeing under 75 per cent of that over the last five seasons.

At the end of the day, the NHL is trending this way because the league wants it to. Just like the divisional restrictions to playoff seeding that forces rivalries every post-season, the NHL does not trust its own sport to be compelling on its own.

So they manufacture matchups to ensure rivalries. And through a lack of application of the rules, they manufacture frustration to get emotions high, and ramp up intensity in the playoffs. They are after the drama, but like the crowd noise in Boston, they put it in there themselves. The drama should be team versus team, but in reality it’s team versus team versus league.

Preparing for the paradigm

For their part, the Canadiens’ administration through Kent Hughes and Jeff Gorton clearly aren’t ignoring this trend. There’s a reason why they appear to be so careful in managing Arber Xhekaj, I believe they see him as a key cog in being able to face opponents like these. His ability to play a regular shift, and intimidate and punish both within the confines of the game and after the whistles, gives him value beyond traditional metrics when the rules get tossed out the window.

With the rookie season he just had for the Laval Rocket scoring 24 goals and 39 points in 69 games from the fourth line, Arber’s brother Florian adds a similar versatility at forward that has the potential to tilt the scales in the future.

Kaiden Guhle, Josh Anderson, Jake Evans, Brendan Gallagher, and prospects like Luke Tuch, David Reinbacher, Jared Davidson, and more are all players that thrive when things get rough. Building a team with the versatility to play a skill game and a grinding game is an excellent strategy to prepare for a contention window; just look at the Panthers, or the Lightning before them. But if this trend continues, how unwatchable will the next era of playoff hockey be?

Between late hits, head shots, interference, offside reviews, fights, and missed calls, you can be treated to digital board ads where cars race around the boards to distract you from where the puck is, and the play-by-play team regales you with the latest odds for every prop bet you can waste your limited expendable income on. Doesn’t that sound fun?

You could argue that there has never been more talent in the sport of hockey than now. The pace of the game has likely never been better. And yet the league itself is determined to make it worse. That seems bad, to me.

How about you?

Andrew Berkshire is the former managing editor of Eyes on the Prize, and the founder of Game Over Network Inc. A Canadian, employee-owned sports media startup focused on platforming young creators across the country. Find Andrew live on YouTube after Habs games with Game Over Montreal, where you can also find Marc Dumont, Kay Imam, and Conor Tomalty to bring you interactive postgame analysis. You can join the Game Over Network’s Discord, and support us on Patreon as we employ over 30 young sports journalists and analysts across Canada’s seven NHL markets.

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