With the Penguins in the midst of their bye week and ideas for other articles in the embryonic stage, I thought I’d pluck some low-lying fruit and answer a question that’s been buzzing around in the back of my brain.
Specifically, which teams are we beating and which teams are beating us? It’s been my sense that the Pens have struggled against the better teams in the league going back to the second half of last season. An indicator of our decline in status from a potential Cup contender to also-ran.
I decided to look at our record against every team in the league, broken down by Conference and Division but also by playoff and non-playoff teams for games played through January 30.
| Eastern Conference (12-8-9) | |||
| Atlantic | W-L-OL | Metro | W-L-OL |
| BOS | 0-1-1 | CAR | 0-2-2 |
| TOR | 1-2-0 | NJD | 0-1-1 |
| TBL | 1-0-0 | NYR | 1-0-0 |
| BUF | 2-1-0 | WSH | 1-0-1 |
| FLA | 2-0-0 | PIT |
|
| DET | 0-0-1 | NYI | 0-1-0 |
| OTT | 1-0-1 | PHI | 1-0-0 |
| MTL | 0-0-2 | CBJ | 2-0-0 |
| Playoff | 2-3-1 | Playoff | 2-3-4 |
| Non-playoff | 5-1-4 | Non-playoff | 3-1-0 |
| Total Atlantic | 7-4-5 | Total Metro | 5-4-4 |
| Western Conference (12-8-0) | |||
| Central | W-L-OL | Pacific | W-L-OL |
| DAL | 1-0-0 | SEA | 0-2-0 |
| WPG | 1-1-0 | VEG | 1-1-0 |
| MIN | 1-0-0 | LAK | 1-0-0 |
| COL | 0-0-0 | EDM | 0-1-0 |
| NSH | 0-0-0 | CGY | 1-1-0 |
| STL | 1-0-0 | VAN | 1-1-0 |
| ARI | 2-0-0 | SJS | 0-1-0 |
| CHI | 1-0-0 | ANA | 1-0-0 |
| Playoff | 3-1-0 | Playoff | 2-4-0 |
| Non-playoff | 4-0-0 | Non-playoff | 3-3-0 |
| Total Central | 7-1-0 | Total Pacific | 5-7-0 |
Buoyed by our strong record against the Central (7-1), we’ve done reasonably well against the Western Conference (12-8). Against our Eastern Conference brethren? A deceptively bad 12-8-9 (12-17 if you lump overtime losses into the loss column.)
Here’s a table displaying our record against playoff and non-playoff teams by division.
| Playoff | W-L-OL | Non-Playoff | W-L-OL |
| Atlantic | 2-3-1 | Atlantic | 5-1-4 |
| Metro | 2-3-4 | Metro | 3-1-0 |
| Central | 3-1-0 | Central | 4-0-0 |
| Pacific | 2-4-0 | Pacific | 3-3-0 |
| Total Playoff | 9-11-5 | Total Non-Playoff | 15-5-4 |
Again, no great surprise here. We’ve bullied non-playoff teams (15-5-4) to the tune of .708 points percentage and been bullied by playoff teams (9-11-5, .460 PTS%).
As for our remaining schedule? We have 15 games against playoff teams and 18 against non-playoff teams. Doing some convoluted math, if I apply our present points percentages to the remaining games in each category, we’ll finish the season with 96-97 points.
For the record, last season’s Eastern Conference playoff cutoff was 100 points.
Yikes.
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