The miserable 2015-16 season saw the Montreal Canadiens miss out on the playoffs for just the third time in ten seasons. Expectations were much higher going into the season, but for various reasons that have been explored, the team fell far short.
This article is not intended to dissect, nor point the finger, but rather tackle the question of whether this past season was indeed a "historical collapse" in quantifiable terms by looking at the team record since the 1917-1918 season to present day.
In order to be able to compare almost 100 seasons worth of data with a varying number of games played and the introduction of the "loser point" in 2004 into a single dataset, I had to do the following to streamline the data:
- Season performance was converted into Points Percentage Earned (Pts%), which is the total amount of points earned divided by the total number of points available.