NHL season proving that parity is overrated

I often reference the 2014-15 season when assessing the wellbeing and overall watchability of the NHL. That spring Jamie Benn finished with a flurry on the final night of the season, scoring a hat trick and four points to rip the Art Ross Trophy away from then-New York Islanders captain John Tavares.

Scenes, right? Well, kind of.

It was an immensely special and likely once-in-a-lifetime achievement for the Dallas Stars captain, but Benn’s season when considering any historical context was pedestrian at best.

In no world should 87 points be enough to win a scoring title.

Fortunately, it’s an entirely different landscape in the NHL when fast-forwarding seven seasons to today. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that the product has never been better in spite of all the noise created from the financial fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, issues with Player Safety, questions involving officiating, matters of integrity related to salary cap circumvention, and everything in between.

This is assuming that scoring is the thing that draws the majority of fans to the sport in the first place.

Since it bottomed out in the early-to-mid 2010s after rule changes initially led to more goals following the lockout, we have been travelling the inverse bell curve to levels of scoring that hockey fans have grown unaccustomed to.

Led by some of the most productive rosters in this era of hockey, teams are scoring more than 3.1 goals per game on average in 2021-22. It’s been the highest-scoring season in the last quarter century in the NHL, and when compared to last season there has been an increase of more than a third of a goal on average per game. What’s best: scoring isn’t being driven by an uptick in power plays unlike the first few seasons out of the lockout, and instead even-strength production has been nearly solely responsible for the changes in the game.

There isn’t a catch-all reason as to why this is shaping up to be the highest-scoring season in modern history, but when…