from James Mirtle of the Globe and Mail,

The NHL’s standings are hard to believe some days.

Late last week, for example, there was a six-way tie with 91 points atop the standings. A handful of others were within a handful of points.

Parity gets talked about a lot in hockey, and that’s with good reason. The NHL remains in one of its lowest scoring eras ever, with an average of 5.35 goals per game – nearly identical to the league’s Dead Puck Era prior to 2004-05.

Minus empty-netters, which are scored every four or five games, that drops to 5.12.

So it’s a 3-2 league most nights, with nearly 50 per cent of games decided by one goal. That rises to more than 60 per cent when you factor in the two-goal losses that involved an empty-netter.

Almost 30 per cent of those one-goal games are shootouts.

Often the teams with the best records are simply getting one extra bounce on any given night, with good-but-not-great clubs like Anaheim and Nashville competing for the Presidents’ Trophy in large part because they’ve won so many toss-up games.

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