In hockey, the success of a team on both the power play and penalty kill can often be the difference between winning and losing. These special teams situations require a unique set of skills, strategy, and execution that can impact the outcome of a game in a big way.

It is widely accepted that a team with a special team index (combined power play percentage and penalty killing percentage) of 107 to 110 likely will win more games than it loses.

Here, we calculated this index for NHL teams while they are on their All Star break week to see if we find out anything interesting about this metric:

As you can see in the table, STI also suggests that Boston Bruins team has been the best team in terms of both defending and offending while its most needed and they truly deserve to be on top of the table.

An interesting takeaway from this table is that only 4 teams have STIs over 107 including Boston Bruins, Dallas Stars, Tampa Bay Lightnings. and Edmonton Oilers. This clearly shows that these teams have a special plan for the time that they go on a power play or when they are shorthanded.

On the other hand, the only two teams in the table with STIs less than 100 are Seattle Krakens and Los Angles Kings, the top two teams in the Pacific division. This clearly suggests that these two teams do not take advantage of their power plays as the other teams do and are pretty vulnerable when their opponent has the man advantage.

A recent example of was seen in the game between LAK and CAR in which the Kings lost the 4-1 lead in the 3rd period after CAR scored two power play goals and won the game in OT.

In conclusion, it seems that most good teams work a lot on these special team situations and that explains them to have over 100 STIs. For teams with less practice in that end, they might lose big games like what happened to LAK last week.