Congrats to Dino Ciccarelli on making it into the Hall of Fame.  In honor of that, I'd like to take a look at his performance in 1987-88, in which he put up one of the oddest stat lines I've ever seen:

67GP 41G 45A 86P -29 2GWG

Yes, that's right, in a year in which Dino scored 41 goals and 86 points in only 67 games (.61G/GP, 1.28 P/GP), he somehow managed to put up a minus-29!  Lest anyone suspect that he scored all his points on special teams, he had 27 goals at even strength and only 13 on the power play (plus 1 short handed).  More broadly, he was on ice for 107 GF, only 48 of which were with the man-advantage.  So roughly 2/3 of his scoring was accomplished at even strength.

Not only that, but despite scoring 41 goals, he only managed 2 game winners, one of the lowest totals of his career!  Now granted, only playing in 67 games reduced his opportunities to score game winners, but even so you would expect somewhat more than that.  Of course, by the same token only playing in 67 games also reduced his ability to get minuses, in theory.

How unique was this season?  A quick search on Hockey Reference reveals that Dino in 1987-88 had the 5th worst +/- ever among players with at least 40 goals and 80 points.  But when you take the GP into account, it's even more striking:  Dino had by far the worst +/- of any player with 40+ goals in 70 or fewer games (the next-worse season by +/- was Mario Lemieux's -18 in 1989-90, although he somehow managed that in only 59 games), and he was one of only 3 players in history to put up worse than -8 (the third was John Ogrodnick's -16 in 1983-84).  Only 7 player seasons have even been negative when scoring 40 goals in 70 games or less.  Not only that, but you have to go up to 73GP to find anyone with 40+ goals and a worse +/-.

So what the heck happened?  Well, as you might have guessed, the North Stars were terrible that year.  They went 19-48-13 for only 51 standings points while coached by Olympic hero Herb Brooks during his one year with the team.  They scored 242 goals and allowed a whopping 349, second worst in the league, for a differential of -107 goals.  By way of comparison, the Capitals lead the league this year and all teams since the lockout with 318 goals for.  The worst goals-against since the lockout was 316 by Pittsburgh in 2005-06.  Minnesota's Simple Rating System score in 1987-88 was -1.42 (roughly speaking, SRS means goals above or below average per game adjusted for schedule).  The worst SRS score since the lockout was -1.16 by Philly in 2006-07.  So yeah.  They were bad.  Dino's -29 was 3rd worst on the team and one of 6 players below -20.  Dino was on ice for 107 GF (44% of the team total), but he was also on the ice for 109 GA (only 31% of the team total, but still a higher number), and while the majority of the GF were at even strength, an even larger proportion of the GA were at even strength since Dino (presumably) wasn't getting much PK time or (less likely) because he was more effective defensively on the PK than at even strength (I can't say without seeing the icetime breakdown).

And that is how you rate -29 while scoring 40 goals in 67 games.  I hope you enjoyed my little history lesson.