The Puck Stops Here

As Tom Benjamin pointed out yesterday, the east and west conferences have not played against each other. In fact the only east vs. west game so far this year was a Washington vs. Columbus game on opening day. Since then west teams and east teams have not played against each other at all.

We can look at the NHL as two separate leagues. The east league and the west league. The east league is higher scoring by close to 0.7 goals per game. this shows up in the top scorers in the NHL. Most of them play in the east league. Whenever I have gushed about a player scoring well (such as Simon Gagne, Bryan McCabe and Eric Staal) they have all been east players.

What about the west players? Why are they not top scorers? Its not as though the West Conference lacks scoring ability. Maybe its because there are better defendences in the west. If both divisions were equivalent, one would expect equal numbers of west and east players scrambled throughout the scoring leaders. I submit that the main differences in the number of points the top scorers in each division has are due mainly to the differences within their division.

Here are the top ten scorers so far in the western conference.

Name	Team	Games Played	Goals	Assists	Points	Standing in NHL
Pavol Demitra	LA	22	11	22	33	6
Alexander Frolov	LA	22	12	16	28	14
Markus Naslund	Van	22	13	14	27	15
Craig Conroy	LA	22	11	14	25	18
Lubomir Visnovsky	LA	22	8	16	24	25
Pavel Datsyuk	Det	22	9	14	23	26
Alex Tanguay	Col	21	8	15	23	27
Shawn Horcoff	Edm	21	4	19	23	29
Jarome Iginla	Cgy	23	11	11	22	32
Pierre Turgeon	Col	20	8	14	22	33

So there are only ten western players in the top 33 scorers in the league. I believe this group of players are playing roughly as good as the top ten eastern scorers so far this year. They are just playing in a different league where scoring is not as easy.