Power-play time is a ticket, not a prize

Ask which skater to draft and the answer comes back as a power-play depth chart, because power-play time is the one thing everybody can look up. It is worth looking up: across five seasons, 44 of the 50 top-ten finishes belonged to a skater with three minutes of it a night. It is also worth knowing what it does not buy. 430 skater-seasons cleared that bar and 242 of them missed the top 50 anyway.

1. There is no way around it

Start with the bad news for anyone hoping to find a scorer outside the power play: he does not exist. Sort every qualifying skater-season of the last five years by power-play time and the top of the pool empties out below two minutes a game. That bucket is not small — it is 71% of the league — and it produced two top-50 seasons out of 2,523.

Read down the "past 300th" column instead and the same fact appears from the other side: 84% of the skaters with under a minute of power play finished outside 300th, against 5% of those with three to four. This is the half of the argument the depth chart gets right, and it is why power-play time is worth checking before a draft at all.

2. And it settles almost nothing

Now the half the depth chart gets wrong. 430 skater-seasons cleared three minutes a game. 188 finished top-50 and 242 did not — worse than a coin flip, on the credential the whole argument rests on. Their power-play points ran from 14 at the tenth percentile to 35 at the ninetieth, a spread wide enough to contain both a fourth-rounder and a waiver-wire drop.

None of these were mistakes by the coach. They played the minutes. The minutes did not play for them — and once both players in a draft-day argument are on a first unit, "he is on PP1" has stopped carrying any information at all.

3. Hold the power play still, and the shots decide

So take the group where the argument actually happens — the 398 seasons between three and four minutes a game, all of them first-unit regulars — and split it four ways by shots on goal. Every row below has the same power-play job.

The top-ten rate goes from 0% to 29% and the median finish from 131st to 22nd. The column that barely moves is power-play points: 20 against 26.5. The heavy shooters are not better on the power play. They are better everywhere else, and the power play was never what was separating them.

Why this is not circular

There is an obvious objection, and it is correct as far as it goes: the scoring behind that finish column pays 0.4 a shot, so a table showing that shooters finish better is partly a table showing that shots are worth points. So here is the same split ranked by goals and assists alone, with shots worth nothing.

It survives, and the reason it survives is in the shooting-percentage column above: 12.5% and 13.1% at the two ends, essentially flat. The volume shooters are not converting better. They are converting the same and shooting far more, which is why their median goal total is 33 against 15.5 while their assists are 45 against 37. Shots are not the reward here. They are the mechanism.

4. Two skaters, five seasons

Nick Suzuki and Kyle Connor are the argument in miniature. Over the seasons both played, Suzuki scored 138 power-play points to Connor's 123. He also finished behind him in four of the five.

Look at 2025-26. Suzuki outscored Connor on the power play 43 to 19 — more than double — and still finished behind him, 15th to 12th. The difference is the shot column, 2.23 against 3.34, every night, in every situation. A power-play comparison would have called that one wrong, and confidently.

Which is the whole point, and the limit of this site stated plainly: a power play is one situation, it is the situation this site measures, and it is not the same question as who wins your pool. Use it to find out whether a skater has the ticket. Do not use it to decide which ticket-holder to take.

Window: 2021-22 through 2025-26, regular season, skaters with at least 20 games played — 3,553 skater-seasons. "Finish" is a skater's rank among that season's qualifying skaters under a common category scoring: goals 3.0, assists 2.0, shots 0.4, blockedShots 0.4, hits 0.2. Your league is not that league, and the ranks would move under different weights — which is exactly why section 3 re-runs its split under a scoring that pays nothing for a shot, and why the build fails if the finding does not survive both. Power-play time here is the league's own published season total, not this engine's shift-chart derivation, because the published totals reach back five seasons and the derivations reach back two. Every row is a season that has already been played. Nothing here is projected onto anyone's next year, and a bucket's history is not a promise about the next skater who walks into it. See how this site measures.

All research · This season’s power-play leaders · The anatomy of a riser