After taking a personal week off and being out of the loop a bit, I wanted to check in on our playing scoring races and see how things stand. I found a couple of things that are worth diving into and I wanted to take a moment to do so in this week's article.

This week on Frozen Tool Forensics: Playoff Scoring Leaders.

When I want to check in on how individual players are faring in the scoring race the Big Board Report is definitely one go-to. It has a really nice combination of stats to give a pretty good overview of what is going on with a player. This week though I am specifically interested in scoring so let's check out the Scoring Leaders Report for the 2019-20 playoffs. This data was pulled as of Thursday (9/10/20).

There is a fair bit of overlap with the Scoring Leaders Report and the Big Board Report. They both give some basic info about the player, including team, position, age, etc. They both also contain your basic scoring information (goals, assists, shots, power-play points, etc.). Big Board expands beyond that to include more time on ice information and contract status info. That information isn't really necessary for what I want to look at so it is a bit easier to just pull the data I need.

So, without further ado, here is what the Scoring Leaders Report looks like. Below is a list of the top five scorers for the 2019-20 playoffs sorted by total points.

This snippet highlights one of the things I wanted to touch on today, and that is the dominance of Nathan Mackinnon. He and his Avalanche are currently out of the playoff picture, but he sits atop the scoring leader board by four points. Moreover, if we look at the players remaining in the playoffs the competition falls off pretty quickly.

Of the remaining active players, Miro Heiskanen is clearly the closet to catching MacKinnon, and Brayden Point and Nikita Kucherov are a lot closer after the Lightning's 8-2 drubbing of the Islanders on Monday and their five-point nights.

At their current paces, it is going to take Heiskanen, and Point about three and a half more games to catch MacKinnon, while Kucherov will need about five and a half, with Shea Theodore and Josh Bailey needing about eight more games. For Heiskanen though, his point pace has fallen off significantly. He had 17 points in his first 23 playoff games, but only three in his last nine games. With the Dallas-Vegas series currently tied (again as of Thursday), he is guaranteed at least three more games. That would be close to enough to catch MacKinnon if he keeps up his playoff pace, but likely not enough if this new slower pace continues. Point and Kucherov are currently up two-zero on the Islanders so are only guaranteed two more games in this series, however, they have both been on a bit of a tear lately, so their chances of catching MacKinnon look better. Obviously, if either team (Dallas or Tampa) advances to the finals will have at least four more games so their chances of catching him would be pretty good in that case. Even guys like Josh Bailey and Shea Theodore have a much better chance if their team's advance. The wild thing, in that case, is those players will have had two additional rounds of games to catch MacKinnon.

One additional note on MacKinnon here. One reason he was doing so well? The power play.

His power-play unit had combined for 25 points over his 15 games. The next closest unit was seven points back. (Sidebar: it happened to feature Radek Faksa, Denis Gurianov, Roope Hintz, and Corey Perry. How is Dallas' second power-play unit the second most productive unit in the playoffs?). You can combine the fourth and fifth most productive power plays and only equal Colorado's top line.

But enough about MacKinnon. The other thing I wanted to highlight was the coming-out party that has been the 2019-20 playoffs. Lead by Heiskanen, defenders (and particularly young ones) are stepping up in a really big way. Look at the defensive representation we have in the top 20 scorers.

We already saw Heiskanen and Theodore, but add Quinn Hughes, Cale Makar, John Klingberg, and Victor Hedman to that list. Even more impressively the top four here are 25 or younger and Makar and Hughes are rookies. Makar and Hughes had history-making seasons, so we shouldn't be all that surprised at their continued playoff dominance, but it really has been a fantastic showing for Theodore and Heiskanen who have been good the last couple of seasons, but not this good.

There has been some expectation around Theodore for a few seasons since he was an up-and-coming prospect with Anaheim, but 2019-20 was the first time he broke a 40 point pace. It is a similar story with Heiskanen, albeit with a smaller sample size. In both cases, strong 2019-20 seasons and playoffs will certainly increase their price come draft day for the 2020-211 season, and with good reason, they are likely here to stay (though the point per game pace might be a little rich).

That is all for this week. Thanks for reading.

Stay safe out there.

Want more tool talk? Check out these recent Frozen Tool Forensics Posts.

Frozen Tools Forensics: Playoff goaltending

Frozen Tool Forensics: Winners of the Losers

Frozen Tools Forensics: Stats from the first week of play-ins