Taylor Hall’s Point Streak and It’s Effect On New Jersey Devils’ Record

Taylor Hall’s point streak for the New Jersey Devils has come to an end. His Hart Trophy candidacy has not, and the contrarian takes remain.

The other night, Flyers reporter John Boruk tweeted this baffling thought. Hockey twitter ripped into him.

We should go easy on Boruk, since having Bad Takes is one of the conditions for being sports credentials in Philadelphia. Either way, this needs to be addressed.

First, a quick word on how we define “value” in “Most Valuable Player.” It’s a debate as old as time, but the NHL defines it as “player judged most valuable to his team.” That doesn’t necessarily mean “best player” – if it did, Connor McDavid would win that award from now until the end of time. It means the player that had the biggest impact on their respective team. It’s why Corey Perry won it in 2011 over Daniel Sedin, or why Henrik Sedin won it over Alex Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby in 2010. A good-to-great player on a stacked team gets less consideration for a reason – and it’s one of the reasons we don’t here much about Kucherov anymore, despite his consistent play.

Boruk mentions Erik Staal of Minnesota having similar numbers, but on a team with a better record. Staal is having a great season, yes, but he’s also playing alongside better players. Two other players on his team have over fifty points, and he’s also played in front of steadier goaltending.

Taylor Hall, on the other hand, has about 30 more points than the next top scorer on the team, and he plays alongside a bunch of teenagers who are clearly getting gassed playing 82 games. If Staal vanished from the Wild, they’d still be at least a bubble team. If Hall vanished from the Devils, they’d be bad – but how bad?

I decided to find out.

So I re-scored every single game of Taylor Hall’s point streak to see what would happen.

The answer is “Buffalo bad.”

Methodology

For this experiment, I went through every single game of Taylor Hall’s point streak and removed any goal with which he had a hand. Goal, primary assist, or secondary assist – if Hall’s credit, it’s scrubbed from the record books. The rest of the game stays as-is – the penalties, the empty netters, everything else.

This experiment is admittedly brute force, largely for the sake of timeliness. It doesn’t take into account that a few empty net goals likely wouldn’t have happened if either team had a three goal lead instead of a two goal lead. It also doesn’t take into account Hall’s talent for drawing penalties. This experiment does, however, give a baseline guide to how much offense Hall provided during his streak.

A few games ended in ties, given that there was no overtime nor shootout. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll count those as overtime losses.

Results

Without further ado, here’s the chart.

The Real Devils went 12-13-1 through Hall’s 26 game point streak. The Hall-less Fake Devils go 4-18-4. That alone should make enough of a statment.

Stray Observations

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• The Fake Devils get shut out eight times. While it’s not uncommon for elite players to score most of the team’s points in any game, all of the points in eight games is pretty substantial. Check out the 1/4 loss to Dallas, which goes from a 3-4 loss to a 0-4 shutout once Hall is scrubbed,
• All three of the Real Devils’ shootout appearances become Fake Devils regulations losses. They don’t even come close to overtime without Hall. That’s three points down the drain.
• That 1/18 game against the Capitals features a double whammy against the Devils – Hall had an assist on the Real Devils’ second goal of the game and scored the OT winner. Without that second goal, though, the Fake Devils don’t even make it to overtime.

Keep this in mind next time someone points to the New Jersey Devils’ admittedly lackluster record during Hall’s streak – they would have been chasing Arizona for last overall without him.

All game stats via Hockey-Reference.