I thought that made the timing of the John Tavares signing even more interesting – doubling down on offense essentially a year after the league saw a huge uptick in overall scoring.
Generally speaking, the league works in highs and lows. This handy graph put together by Peter Hassett demonstrates how scoring has peaks and valleys:
And it makes sense. We know coaches can tighten things up defensively and love to put the clamps down on play instead of opening it up. On Sporting Charts, the numbers show that goals per game usually went down the season following a jump up.