The Buffalo Sabres 2020-21 season is in the books. Another season that ends without a playoff berth and another where they finish at the bottom of the NHL standings. The good news for the club is that they finished the year on a positive note.

When you look at the final 25 games of the season they finished with a .420 points percentage over that stretch. That doesn’t appear like a strong finish on the surface, but it does when you think about how they carried a .296 points percentage in the 27 games under Ralph Krueger. Combine that with the fact that we saw some younger players thrive with more opportunity down the stretch.

The Carry Over

Now, we’ll hear folks discuss how a strong finish will be good for this team going into next season. Logically, it makes sense. Players can take confidence into the offseason and know that they can have success at this level. However, do the numbers back this up? We are a “data” site after all.

I decided to see if I could figure out the answer or see some kind of trend on non-playoff teams ending strong over their last 25 games of the season. I pulled four seasons’ worth of data going back to the 2016-17 season. I looked at the non-playoff teams that ended their last 25 games on a run of playing over .500 hockey. I then compared that to the first 25 games of the next and the full season point percentage of the following year to see if the success carried over.

The Sabres would not have fallen into this group playing over .500 hockey down the stretch, but we’re working off the premise that they finished strong. I didn’t want to go investigate the season of every non-playoff team going back to 2016-17. Therefore, I felt pulling out teams with at least a winning record in their last 25 games made the most sense.

The Results

The results of this study were interesting, but at the end of the day, I got a definitive answer. Let’s start with the 2016-17 season.

Eight teams finished the season above .500 in the last 25 games of the season but missed the playoffs that year. You’ll see those four teams below in a moment. The chart below is broken into three columns for each club. One bar for their points percentage in the last 25 games of the 2016-17 season, one bar for their points percentage in the first 25 games of the 2017-18, and the last bar is their full season 2017-18 points percentage.

I wanted to see how each of these teams started the next season and how they finished overall. Essentially we would be answering two questions. Does a strong finish mean you expect a hot start the following season? Does a strong finish indicate you’ll be a good team overall the following season?

You’ll see this same breakdown in the three other datasets we look at.

Alright, let’s get to the first chart.

Of the eight teams listed above, four of them did make the playoffs (Lightning, Kings, Flyers, and Jets) in the 2017-18 season after a strong finish the year before. Also, we see all of these teams, except the Flyers and Red Wings had a strong start to their season.

In the final 25 games of the 2017-18 campaign, only three teams finished their last 25 games with a points percentage above .500.

Unlike two of the clubs in the previous year, none of these three teams made the playoffs in the 2018-19 season. You can also see above that while all of them did play above .500 in the first 25 games of the 2018-19 season, none of them performed at the same level as the final set of games in the season before.

In our last dataset here, we’ll see six teams fall into our criteria at the end of the 2018-19 season.

Of these six teams, only the Edmonton Oilers would have made the postseason under the regular format when the season was paused. We also see here that four of the six teams performed at the same or higher rate than they did at the end of the 2018-19 season.

When all is said and done, only five of the 17 teams that met the criteria over the last three years made the postseason following a strong end to the season prior. You’ll see those five teams in the black bars below.

I didn’t pull the 2019-20 season against the finish to this season because of COVID and the new playoff/division alignment. I didn’t feel it would be a correct apples-to-apples comparison. However, for what it’s worth, there are seven teams that would have met the criteria we had in place for this exercise from the 2019-20 season. Only two of them (Canadiens and Panthers) made the postseason this year. That breaks out to a 29%, which is the same rate we saw over the three years prior.

The interesting part in this is that 9 of the 17 teams (53%) did start the following season in the first 25 games with a higher or equal points percentage to that in the final 25 games the year before. Six of the 17 clubs carried a higher or equal points percentage over a full season.

Let’s circle back to our two questions going into this exercise and answer them.

Does a strong finish mean you expect a hot start the following season?

Based on this exercise, we can say that there’s around a 50% chance that the team will carry a strong finish into the start of the next season with 53% of the teams doing just that in the three-year sample we looked at.

Does a strong finish indicate you’ll be a good team overall the following season?

As I expected going into this, we see no correlation of that being the case. Only 29% or 5 of the 17 teams in this dataset made the playoffs the following season. Based on the full season point projections of the teams in this group, they had a median point total of 84. The average of the dataset was slightly higher at 87 points due to the two outlier 110 point seasons from the Jets and Lightning in the 2017-18 season.

Ten of the 17 teams finished with a point total of 85 points or lower the following season after finishing with at least a .500 points percentage.

At the end of the day, year to year hockey can have randomness to it. It’s why when evaluating players you’re better off taking at least a multi-year sample size to try to mitigate your chance of running into outliers. A 25-game bender to a season can be driven by a high team shooting percentage or a goaltender getting hot, which could have inflated these flawed teams in this snapshot.

The Sabres didn’t particularly have either of these things happen to them down the stretch. All that really happened is that they regressed up to the mean. Under Krueger, they had a PDO of .964. In the last 25 games under Granato, they had a perfect PDO of 1.0 in all situations, according to Natural Stat Trick.

This is a story that Sabres fans have seen played out before. In the final 35 games of the 2015-16 season, they won at a 94 point pace. The following year they finished with 78 points. Remember the strong finish under Ron Rolston to end the 2012-13 campaign?

It’s not to say that you can’t take anything away from how this season ended. How some players like Casey Mittelstadt, Rasmus Asplund, Dylan Cozens, and Arttu Ruotsalainen looked in the final two months of the season should give Kevyn Adams a good feeling that they’re pieces for next season. Sam Reinhart successfully transitioning to center is a huge takeaway from the end of the year.

I don’t imagine any general manager would feel that they don’t need to do much to their roster when his team finishes the last 25 games winning at a 68 point pace. Having said that, this exercise that I went through should put to bed any real notion that team success to end the regular season can carry over to the following year.

Photo Credit: Bill Wippert/NHLI via Getty Images