It’s early in the 2023-24 NHL season, but that hasn’t stopped teams from either resisting or embracing media storylines regarding why teams are or are not scoring goals already. Yes, the San Jose Sharks are historically bad (more on that later), but trying to classify teams early with a small sample size can lead to wild changes as the season goes on.
That doesn’t stop us from looking at the trends though — and we’re going to looking into two statistics specifically. The first is an old standby that gets used every day — shooting percentage: what percentage of a player or team’s shots on goal were actually goals? The second is a bit more complicated and I’ve used Evolving Hockey’s expected goal models to examine average shot quality or shot probability — the total expected goals per unblocked shot attempt. Expected goals are measured the same way — how likely was an unblocked shot going to become a goal based on shot location, events, score and venue against similar shots in history?
Which struggling teams are putting in the hard work, but not seeing results? Which goal-happy squads are due to come crashing back down to Earth? And which teams are seeing drastic changes with new systems and new coaches?
Author’s note: All stats come from Evolving Hockey and the charts below can be found in my public Tableau repository. You can visit here to view the interactive versions of the charts.
How dangerous are the unblocked shot attempts of NHL teams?
Scoring a goal in hockey relies on several factors — the biggest being that the best shooters in the world can get shut out if a goaltender stands on their head (and vice-versa). The old adage that “doing things the right way means the results will follow” may or may not be accurate in every case, but that’s what we want to look at with shot quality: are teams taking high-danger shot attempts and are they giving themselves a better chance to convert them into goals?
We’ll focus only on the quality of the attempts first, and ignore the actual outcomes (i.e. shooting percentage) until later.
The chart (left) shows the rank of each NHL team for each season from 2019-20 to the current 2023-24 season in shot quality. And a few things jump out at first. First, teams like the Arizona Coyotes, Pittsburgh Penguins and Nashville Predators have turned around from being high-volume, low-quality shot takers and have put a focus on creating dangerous chances.
Under new head coach Andrew Brunette, Nashville in particular is seeing both ends of the shooting spectrum with two of it’s biggest star forwards — Filip Forsberg is putting in a lot of high-quality shot attempts (8% shot quality), but he’s shooting at a meager 4%. Conversely, newcomer Ryan O’Reilly, who leads the Predators with 7 goals and 11 points is shooting at 25%, but a stellar 18.4% shot quality means that regression won’t be too bad for the new Nashville associate captain. But Brunette’s new-look offense is exactly that — new: Nashville has gone from the bottom of the NHL in shot quality under Peter Laviolette in 2019-20 to second in the league in the current season.
Speaking of the new head coach of the New York Rangers, Laviolette inherited a ton of shooting talent with players like Chris Kreider and Artemi Panarin. And the blueshirts haven’t disappointed for the most part, averaging 3.3 goals per game and their 5v5 shooting percentage is in line with the NHL average. But the Rangers may be in for a scoring drought soon if they cannot improve the quality of the shots they’re taking — they’ve plummeted to 30th in the league after being a top 10 team in 2019-20 and 2020-21.
Other teams who have seen a sudden drop-off in shot quality are the Tampa Bay Lightning and Toronto Maple Leafs. The Bolts have gone from a top-10 shot quality team in the last 2 seasons to 21st this season behind the sheer volume of low-quality shot attempts they take. The Leafs have seen a sharp decline in quality too — they’ve been top-10 for three straight seasons (including top-3 twice), and have plummeted to 19th. If either team can start turning those dangerous chances into goals more consistently, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them regain their form as the season goes on.
Puck luck and shooting percentage — the fruits of their labors
Now that we’ve seen how some teams have changed significantly in their offensive quality, we can now examine the outcome of those attempts — shooting percentage. I’ve also included On-Target Rate – which is just a measure how often a shot attempt was on net or a goal — for the purposes of this analysis, this is additional context, but not vital to the subject at hand.
One of the biggest stories of the season has been the catastrophic start by the Edmonton Oilers. Despite having the best player in the world in Connor McDavid and scoring phenom Leon Draisaitl, the Oilers are 27th in the NHL in total goals scored (just 29 overall) — but why?
The answer might be a bit of a relief for their fans: they’re just not very lucky right now. Edmonton is third in the league this season in shot quality (one of just four above 7.0%), but they just aren’t turning into goals — yet. Edmonton isn’t new to being a highly-efficient shooting team — they’ve been in the top 11 all 4 of the previous seasons and we know that goal-scoring has almost always followed as the season winds by (unfortunately, they have yet to fix the goaltending issue, but that’s another story).
Teams like the Ottawa Senators (27th in shot quality, 4th in 5v5 shooting percentage) and the Minnesota Wild (22nd in shot quality, 2nd in shooting percentage) are prime candidates for regression early in the season. They’re not taking particularly dangerous shots — or at least, they are not a significant part of the total volume — and eventually the puck luck will run out — by the end of last season, both shot quality and shooting percentage were near league-average, and there’s nothing to say that it won’t happen again this year — but stranger things have happened.
So who are the biggest candidates to regress or improve this season? Let’s find out.
Will the hard work pay off?
We’ve mentioned a handful of teams already that I think could be prime candidates to regress or improve in their goal output, but let’s visualize this season a little more by looking at shot quality vs shooting percentage and break out the teams likely see a change in their fortunes.
Five teams that should improve
In no particular order:
- Edmonton Oilers
- Nashville Predators
- Washington Capitals
- New York Islanders
- San Jose Sharks
Let’s get the obvious one out of the way. Shot quality or not, the Sharks dismal 3% shooting percentage at 5 on 5 is the worst of any team in the last five years (again — this is early in the season) and you don’t need analytics to tell you that they’re pretty dang bad. But they’re taking pretty decent shots, and I can’t fathom that this team can really finish under 5%, no matter how hard they’re trying to win the draft lottery.
The Washington Capitals are doing a lot right under new head coach Spencer Carbury, and a team with one of the NHL’s most gifted scorers like Alex Ovechkin seems primed and ready to catch up to the lagging shooting percentage. The New York Islanders aren’t getting the kind of quality as the other teams on this list (minus San Jose), but they’ve managed to shoot around league average and I think it’s a matter of time before the goals start to pick back up.
Five teams likely to regress
- Vancouver Canucks
- Minnesota Wild
- Los Angeles Kings
- Ottawa Senators
- Tampa Bay Lightning
We’ve already covered the Sens and Bolts above, but the group of Vancouver, Minnesota and Los Angeles are easy to pick out as high-shooting percentage outliers that are due for regression. The three teams are at the top of the NHL in 5v5 shooting percentage, but all sit in the bottom half of the league in shot quality. They’re all scoring above expected — and by a pretty large amount — so they seem easy candidates for regression as the season moves forward.
What can we definitively predict from all of this? Probably nothing significant — we’re around 12% of the way through the NHL season, and statistics don’t usually stabilize until the 20-25 game mark, so it’s still incredibly early to tell.
Some of these teams are establishing brand new identities on offense (like the Nashville Predators), and the early results seem promising. Let’s hope the folks in Music City finally get to watch an offensive powerhouse at Bridgestone Arena sometime soon — because the new identity could be a great way to start the second 25 years of the franchise, the David Poile era giving way to Barry Trotz.
But all these teams mentioned are starting to develop an identity on offense and it’s up to the players and the head coaches to either improve, continue to stay hot, and focus on high-quality chances. The only thing we can do now is wait.
All data is from Evolving Hockey using 5v5 Team Statistics from the 2019-20 to 2023-24 seasons through 11/8/2023. Viz credits: Bryan Bastin