How the NHL’s quality of competition changes in the playoffs

When the puck drops for the opening faceoff, most players know their assignments for the night. For Phillip Danault on the opening night of last year’s playoffs, that assignment was the toughest one in hockey: Connor McDavid.

At five-on-five, Danault played 18:07 in Game 1 and all but three minutes were spent matched up against McDavid. That’s 83 percent of Danault’s minutes, a trend that mostly continued throughout the series. The Los Angeles Kings may have lost the series, but Danault deserves a lot of credit for how he handled his assignment. In the 58 minutes the duo matched up together, the Edmonton Oilers were held to just a single goal.

That’s a massive win for Danault, one made even larger by the degree of difficulty. No player had a tougher assignment in last year’s playoffs than Danault, whose competition had an average Offensive Rating of 9.6. Playing almost exclusively against McDavid will certainly have that effect.

Playing tough minutes is nothing new for Danault, who played some of the most difficult minutes last season and does so consistently each year. But there’s a world of difference between what that means in the playoffs and the regular season. Danault’s quality of competition there? An average Offensive Rating of 2.8. That’s 6.8 goals less than what he faced in his opening-round battle against McDavid’s Oilers.

That difference is a big reason why teams focus so much on a player’s ability to handle tough minutes when roster building. It’s not just a big difference for Danault because he had to match up against McDavid, it’s a difference applied across the board. In the playoffs, every matchup is tougher.

That should be an obvious statement given the competitive field shrinks to the league’s top 16 teams, but it’s not often applied when thinking about playoff usage and how much harder the minutes get.

Throughout an 82-game regular season, every team plays every team and that’s part of what causes the dilution in the spread between the easiest and toughest minutes. Getting the matchup assignment against Edmonton is very different than getting the matchup assignment against San Jose.

Here’s what that means in practice from a defensive perspective. The average projected Offensive Rating in the league among regulars (anyone above 41 games) is plus-1.2. Take out the league’s likely non-playoff teams and that almost doubles to plus-2.0. Plot every player side by side from best to worst and it’s plain to see there’s a sizeable discrepancy between an average playoff and non-playoff team. That’s especially true at the top end where every playoff team has a big-time threat to match up against. The average Offensive Rating for a top-50 playoff player is plus-14.1, nearly five goals higher than the average non-playoff player at plus-9.7.

The stakes are higher in the playoffs and each game becomes more and more challenging. It starts with more grueling matchups from top to bottom in which the…