Welcome to The Loser Point
How a dumb thought about losing in overtime became an unnecessarily elaborate website.
What's up! Thanks for checking out the site.
My name is Phil. I'm a Rangers fan and a hockey dad — which means I've sat my nine-year-old son down and explained to him that Sean Avery was, in fact, morally correct to wave his stick in Marty Brodeur's face, and scoring moments later was proof enough that the hockey gods approved of his innovative screening technique.
So, I used to write about hockey a long time ago for this little website called Barstool Sports... (big shout out to Almost w/ Walker!)
And even though all digital evidence of that long-ago tenure was infamously erased in a botched dev job, my legacy lives on through hockey's least cared about event — The All Star Game.
Or should we say All Star Tournament? For it was I — yes, me — who first proposed the switch to a 3-on-3 bracket-based event! (...though my original format was much cooler than what the NHL eventually opted for, but that's another blog post for another day.)
I was (still am) way too sensitive to live that kind of perpetually online lifestyle, so I hung up my blogging boots back in 2014 and haven't been seen since.
Well now I'm back, kind of. I mean, this site isn't really about writing in the way that my time at Barstool and my first blog, '94 Parade, were.
This site is more like statistical satire, a data-centric way for fans to closely analyze the very nuanced skill of losing efficiently in the National Hockey League.
The Loser Point started from one extremely basic question: how good would my favorite team be if they could just drag themselves into OT instead of losing so many goddamn games in regulation?
The season-long difference between "being bad" and "at least getting a point" was something I wanted to better understand, especially after watching last year's Rangers drop a lot of close games without forcing more of them into OT.
What is the real difference between a terrible hockey team and a potential playoff squad?
In today's NHL, it feels like that distinction is entirely defined by how efficiently your team can lose. So I built this site to help me look at overtime losses the way that Billy Beane looked at base runners.
Don't get me wrong — I'd love to see the league go to a 3-2-1-0 points system and save us all from this race towards mediocrity. But if we're bound to a points imbalance, we might as well give "Losing" the advanced analytics treatment and start studying how some teams do it successfully.
The Value of a Loss
A regulation loss earns you no points. Winning is cool, sure, but losing in overtime or the shootout still produces half the standings value.
Over an entire season, some teams become remarkably skilled at turning games they did not win into points they get to keep.
This stupid dynamic has unfortunately produced the need to ask a series of very dumb questions about success in the NHL, such as "how much of the difference between a truly bad hockey team and a respectable-looking one comes from winning more", or — "how much comes from losing less completely?"
And sometimes, when you're thinking through a series of dumb questions, a thought might pop into your head that somehow feels potentially smart. And if you're not careful, you might wind up making a whole website about that potentially smart idea even though the topic itself is, like we said, objectively dumb.
The Metrics That Matter
Expected Loser Points (xLP): projects how many standings points a team is on pace to receive at the end of the season from overtime and shootout losses.
xLP = (OTL ÷ GP) × 84
Loser Point Efficiency (LPE): measures how frequently a team’s losses still produce a point.
LPE = (OTL ÷ Total Losses) × 100
Together, this data helps explain not just how many points a team has, but how those points were constructed. And with that information, we can start to identify which teams are Elite Losers and which ones are Hot Garbage.
This Is Not A Serious Website
These are joke stats — you get that, right? Total stat-tire! No real attempt is being made here to determine which team played better in a particular game, or deserved to win, or dominated despite losing in regulation, or stumbled into overtime while being badly outplayed.
Our methodology does not properly account for expected goals, schedule strength, game state, or most other advanced analytics. Hell, it doesn’t even know which two goalies are in net!
It simply illustrates the standings value of points rescued in defeat and gives us a way to quantify which NHL teams are total OT merchants.
When The Puck Drops...
Throughout the season, we’ll use our blog here to follow the formation of this year's Mediocre Middle. We'll examine the difference between Average and Elite Losers, tracking which playoff races are being quietly reshaped through salvaged points.
I also want to explore the loser points that never happened: teams that repeatedly remain close late in regulation but fail to drag things into overtime, or games that end in 2-or-3 goal gaps due to empty netters.
That proximity to a loser point may tell us something interesting — or it may prove to be complete nonsense! Either way, we're going to have some fun with it.
Thanks again for checking out the site! Hopefully you'll explore the look-back tab and tap through each card to see how well the past five seasons supported our argument.
You can also click on teams to dive into their "profile" a bit more and understand how they've evolved over the past five years. And hit up the Thesis page to get a better breakdown of exactly how we calculate our key metrics — xLP and LPE.
The site will evolve as the season does. And the numbers will become more true as the sample size gets bigger. Team profiles will change, and somebody will inevitably make the playoffs after losing an infuriating number of games. What a league!