NHL Eras 1917 to Today, as A-Squad Sees Them

Our buckets are franchise, decade, identity. The Boston Bruins have one bucket per decade from the 1920s to the 2020s; a franchise that moved gets a fresh identity from the season it arrived, so Quebec Nordiques 1990s and Colorado Avalanche 1990s are separate buckets even though the NHL counts them as one club. Decades are blunt, but every fan already thinks in them.

Two rules tidy the edges. The 1917-18, 1918-19 and 1919-20 seasons fold into the 1920s, so the earliest Canadiens bucket runs thirteen seasons, and a segment that would be a single season is folded into a neighbouring bucket of the same identity. The regular spin pool starts with the 1950s; everything earlier is fully modelled but sits in a separate founders pool the default spin does not reach. As of this writing there are 213 buckets, 185 regular and 28 founders, with a median of about 104 draftable players each.

The NHL opened on 19 December 1917 with four clubs: the Montreal Canadiens, the Montreal Wanderers, the Ottawa Senators and the Toronto Arenas. The Wanderers disbanded within a month after the Westmount Arena burned, and the league finished its 22-game schedule with three teams. Scoring was enormous, close to five goals per team per game, and Joe Malone scored 44 times in 20 games.

Then it collapsed. Forward passing was illegal in the attacking zone, and by 1928-29 the league averaged under a goal and a half per team per game. The 1929-30 rules allowed forward passes in all three zones and scoring roughly doubled in one season. The league had also reached ten teams and 44 games by 1926-27, but these founders buckets stay small: Toronto St. Patricks 1920s, which covers the Arenas, the St. Patricks and the early Maple Leafs from 1917 to 1930, holds fewer than seventy players.

The Depression and then the war did to the NHL what they did to everything else. Schedules settled at 48 games from 1931-32 and rose to 50 in 1942-43. The Philadelphia Quakers, formerly the Pittsburgh Pirates, folded after one dreadful season; Ottawa moved to St. Louis as the Eagles for 1934-35 and folded too; the Montreal Maroons suspended operations in 1938; the New York Americans played a final season as the Brooklyn Americans in 1941-42. From 1942-43 the league was six teams, and it stayed so for a quarter century.

Every 1930s and 1940s bucket belongs to the founders pool. Howie Morenz, Eddie Shore and Maurice Richard’s fifty goals in fifty games in 1944-45 are all there, but a default spin will not land on them. Wartime rosters were hollowed out by military service, and the thin record of those years is one reason we keep them out of the regular pool.

Six teams and 70 games a season from 1949-50: this is where our regular pool begins. The Detroit Red Wings finished first in seven straight seasons through 1954-55, then the Canadiens won five Stanley Cups in a row from 1956 to 1960. Scoring sagged to about two and a half goals per team per game in the mid-1950s, roughly what the dead-puck era would produce forty years later.

This decade also explains a mark on some cards. The league did not record shots against goaltenders until the mid-1950s, and plus-minus was not an official statistic until 1967-68. When an input is missing, the card carries an estimate flagged est. in the roster, built from the same public box-score record as everything else and simply working with less. Six-team buckets are compact, typically 60 to 100 players, and a 1950s Canadiens spin can put Jean Béliveau, Doug Harvey and Jacques Plante in front of you at once.

In 1967-68 the league doubled to twelve teams in one stroke, adding the Philadelphia Flyers, the Pittsburgh Penguins, the St. Louis Blues, the Minnesota North Stars, the Los Angeles Kings and the Oakland Seals. The schedule grew to 74 games, then 76, then 78 when Buffalo and Vancouver arrived in 1970-71, and 80 from 1974-75, by which time there were eighteen clubs and a rival league bidding for the same players.

The 1976-77 Canadiens are our benchmark for a great season: 60 wins, 8 losses and 12 ties for 132 points, with 387 goals for and 171 against. No team has matched that points percentage since. Expansion also produced the first small modern buckets: Oakland Seals 1960s covers three seasons and about forty players, Kansas City Scouts 1970s just two, and both are in the regular pool.

When the World Hockey Association folded in 1979, the Edmonton Oilers, the Quebec Nordiques, the Hartford Whalers and the Winnipeg Jets joined the NHL for 1979-80, taking the league from seventeen teams to twenty-one. Because 1979-80 is a lone 1970s season for each of them, our folding rule tucks it into their 1980s bucket, so Hartford Whalers 1980s runs eleven seasons.

What followed was the highest-scoring decade since the 1920s: about four goals per team per game in 1981-82, and near that mark through mid-decade. Wayne Gretzky’s 92 goals and 215 points, the Oilers topping 400 goals in five separate seasons, the Islanders’ four straight Cups, all in a league where an ordinary second-liner could score 30. This is why raw 1980s totals mislead. Once you account for how much everyone was scoring, a 100-point season in 1985-86 was worth roughly what a 65-point season was worth in 2003-04, and if we compared players on raw points every roster would fill with Oilers.

The league reached 26 teams by 1993-94, briefly played 84 games in 1992-93 and 1993-94, then saw a lockout cut 1994-95 to 48 games before settling at 82. Scoring went the other way. The neutral-zone trap, larger goaltending equipment and a generation raised on the butterfly pushed the league to about two and a half goals per team per game by 1998-99, and 2003-04 was the lowest-scoring season in almost half a century.

Two changes here shape how A-Squad displays a record. From 1999-2000 a team that lost in overtime kept a point, so standings became wins, losses, ties and overtime losses, and the 2004-05 season was never played, which is why our data holds 108 seasons rather than 109. For drafting, this era rewards forwards who kept producing when nobody else could: Jaromír Jágr’s 127 points in 1998-99 came in a league where only two other players reached 100, and the model credits that context.

The league that returned in 2005-06 had a salary cap, a crackdown on obstruction and, for the first time, no ties: a game still level after overtime went to a shootout. Scoring jumped to about three goals per team per game and has hovered between roughly two and a half and three since. From 2015-16 overtime became three-on-three. Two more short seasons sit in our data: 48 games in 2012-13 and 56 in 2020-21.

Modern buckets are the largest in the game, often well over 100 players, because rosters churn far more than when six teams kept the same twenty men for a decade. And the next change is already scheduled: under the collective agreement ratified in 2025, the NHL moves to an 84-game regular season from 2026-27, the first time the schedule has been that long since 1993-94. That is the season length A-Squad projects your squad over, so a perfect run reads 84-0-0.

When we say players are compared across eras, we mean something simple. Every player’s season is read against how the whole league scored in that same season. Forty goals in 1955-56, when a team scored about two and a half a game, is a different achievement from forty in 1981-82, when a team scored four, and the same idea applies to goaltenders facing the shooting galleries of the 1980s versus the traps of the late 1990s.

From those era-adjusted seasons the record is projected by a statistical model built from public box-score statistics only, the goals, assists, games, shots and saves on the back of a hockey card, and checked against more than 1,750 real NHL team seasons to see whether it would have predicted their records. It is not perfect, and we say so on the result screen. The payoff is a single fair roster: a 1955 Red Wing, a 1985 Oiler and a 2015 Blackhawk can sit in the same six slots and each be valued against the league they actually played in.