The NHL’s disciplinary system exists in the shadows, and the league seems to be ultimately okay with that.
In an effort to shine a little light when it comes to Department of Player Safety (DoPS) action, I decided to look into all post-game discipline handed down since the start of the 2017-18 season. I’ll admit I went into this with a hypothesis – that the amount of perceived outrage about an incident played a large role in whether or not there was DoPS response. Since I couldn’t quantify public response to hits, particularly for some of the older incidents, I used tiered “team popularity” as a stand-in.