As of this writing, and as of one of the most thrilling comebacks in franchise history, the Vancouver Canucks are not yet eliminated from the 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs.
But they will be. One more point for the Minnesota Wild of any variety, or anything less than a win from the Canucks from here on out, and it’s over. It’s more a question of ‘when’ than ‘if’ at this stage, and that means, for many, the post-mortem of the 2024/25 season has already begun.
And guess who has decided to rear their ugly head in these discussions? That’s right, it’s our old enemy of 2023/24, the dreaded PDO.
For those unfamiliar, PDO doesn’t actually stand for anything. It’s not an initialism, and it’s definitely not an acronym. But it is a stat that combines a team’s on-ice, even-strength shooting percentage with their on-ice save percentage over the course of a season.
Some claim that PDO is among the more accurate measures of ‘puck luck.’ The thinking goes that sometimes teams do a lot better, or a lot worse, than they should based on their actual skill level, just due to getting a run of good or bad bounces. While such bounces are hard to track, they might show up in an abnormally high (or low) shooting percentage or save percentage. Meaning, teams with high PDOs are considered ‘lucky’ and teams with low PDOs are considered unlucky. In general, that is.
Part of the expectation is that, over a long enough period of time, teams should regress back toward that league mean of a 1.00 PDO. Once the puck-luck wears off. And that’s the story that some tried to tell about the 2023/24 Canucks.
That edition of the team spent much of the season atop the Pacific Division standings. But they spent the entire year on top of the PDO charts, finishing the year with a 1.028 PDO.
When the Canucks got off to one of the hottest starts in franchise history, some suggested it was just their high PDO at play, and that they’d come crashing down to earth eventually. That didn’t happen, but as the months wore on, the calls for the inevitability of the PDO coming back to bite them were loud and frequent.
Then the Canucks won the division, made the playoffs, and took the eventual Western Conference champs to Game 7 of the second round. And most people shut up about PDO, finally.
Until now.
See, some will say that the PDO bill always comes due, just not always on a seasonal basis. There were those who predicted that the Canucks’ PDO could come crashing back down for the 2024/25 season, and that the Canucks would tumble down the standings as a result.
So, with the Canucks having actually tumbled down the standings, it’s no surprise that there are plenty lining up to say ‘We told you so.’
But should they be?
It is true that the Canucks’ PDO has regressed to the mean for 2024/25. With the league average being a 1.00, the Canucks have dropped all the way down to a PDO of .996, good for 19th place in the NHL. And where are the Canucks currently in the standings? In 18th place, overall. That bodes decently well for the efficacy and predictability of PDO.
But if you’re sitting there thinking that this all sounds like a gross oversimplification, you’re right. The truth, as always, is more complicated.
First and foremost, the 2024/25 Canucks are not the same as the 2023/24 Canucks. The roster turnover has been immense, and players as significant as JT Miller, Nikita Zadorov, Elias Lindholm, and Ian Cole have departed along the way. Which means that none of this is happening in a vacuum, and thus none of this can be explained wholly through PDO.
Then, once we start digging a little more into the numbers, we find that the argument falls apart a little. Let’s start by splitting that PDO into its two components, team shooting percentage and team save percentage.
It is true that the 2023/24 Canucks had far and away the best shooting percentage in the league at 10.60%. Only one other team, the Detroit Red Wings, even cracked 10%. And, yes, 10.60% is pretty high, all things considered.
But, then, the Canucks are a gifted team when it comes to shooting the puck. What’s the evidence of that? Well, how about the fact that the Canucks still have a fairly high shooting percentage in 2024/25.
It’s not the highest in the league, to be sure, and it has come down a bit. But the Canucks are currently sitting on a team shooting percentage of 9.35%, in a league where some teams are down as low as 6.87%. It’s good enough for tenth place in the NHL, and while it is a drop from last season, it’s not quite as dramatic a drop.
The far bigger change has come on the save percentage side of PDO. In 2023/24, the Canucks had the sixth-highest team save percentage in the league at 92.22%. This year, they’ve got the ninth-worst, at 90.26%.
But that doesn’t mean that PDO explains the Canucks’ fall from grace, it means that goaltending does – at least, in part. The Canucks did receive Vezina-nominated work from Thatcher Demko in 2023/24, and they also received – until the stretch run – relatively good health from him, too.
That was not the case in 2024/25. While Kevin Lankinen did yeoman’s work in covering Demko’s lengthy absences this season, he was only statistically strong at certain points, and definitely saw a slow and steady deterioration of his counting stats as the season wore on. Demko, meanwhile, eventually returned to action, but not all the way back to form, save for specific performances.
It’s not that hard to figure out. Demko has been injured, and Lankinen has never been as good as Demko at his best.
Simply put, the Canucks have not received the same quality of goaltending this year as they did last season. In other words, PDO isn’t the reason why the Canucks are doing worse. Goaltending is at least part of the reason, and goaltending is also why the PDO is lower. Not the other way around.
So, to summarize, the Canucks’ puck-luck, when it comes to shooting, may be slightly down for 2024/25, and, sure, that has had an impact. But the far greater factor is goaltending, which means that blaming any of this on ‘PDO regression’ is not just oversimplifying, but missing the more important point.
A final nail in the coffin of PDO can be found in how it has impacted other teams. Another 2023/24 roster that was said to have a PDO in need of regression were the Winnipeg Jets, who ultimately lagged just a bit behind the Canucks with a 1.025 PDO last year. They have not only maintained that PDO for the 2024/25 season, they’ve rode it all the way to the top of the Western standings.
It is, in the end, just a combination of shooting percentage and save percentage. It’s not a magic stat. It didn’t predict anything, and it certainly didn’t predict things like a dressing room catastrophe and a popliteus injury and multiple concussions brought on by cheapshots and the like. It’s just a number.
And all it’s really saying about the Canucks is that they didn’t perform as well in 2024/25 as they did in 2023/24.
