Quote:
Originally Posted by bigehn
What this means for the Calgary Flames is the team shooting percentage should regress to the collection of historic shooting percentages of all its players and not the league mean.
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Apologies in advance for encyclopaedia—
It's also worth considering that several of these players are rookies or sophomores, so that they really haven't established a very firm baseline (or any at all, in some cases) for their historical shooting percentages. Johnny Gaudreau, for instance, was basically an unknown quantity coming into this season, since a previous career total of 1 G and 1 SOG really doesn't give any useful information. Several of the team's best shooters are also among the youngest and least experienced players. So when people expect a regression (say) to the form the Flames showed in past years, they are overlooking a very large infusion of new talent.
Is Gaudreau the kind of player who can keep up a shooting percentage of 12.7? Quite likely. He's got superior offensive skills, and (what matters just as much) the habit of looking for a pass rather than taking a low-percentage shot. As his teammates adjust by learning to pass the puck to
him and let him quarterback the play more often, I expect his offensive numbers to improve.
I'd like to see stats for ‘disposals’, as they call them in Aussie rules football (thanks, Imported_Aussie). A team that blasts the puck at the net from anywhere and everywhere, and generally loses possession as a result, will have better Fenwick and Corsi numbers than a team that frequently passes the puck looking for a better shot, even though both teams may have possession of the puck for identical lengths of time.
We know that shots vary widely in quality. According to one summary I've read (link not handy, sorry), a shot on which the goalie is square to the shooter has an expected save percentage of about .950, whereas if the shooter receives the puck and shoots before the goalie can change position, the expected save percentage can be as low as .650. And that is not even taking into account the differences in skill between different shooters!
Logically, a team with sufficient offensive skill and creativity should be able to compensate for taking fewer shots, up to a point, by moving the puck rapidly, finding skilled shooters in good scoring positions, and taking higher-quality shots. And in fact (I have read) the numbers show a slight
negative correlation between SOG and winning percentage, even after accounting for score effects, so one suspects that this is not just logical, but actually the case.
One thing that ought to be obvious is that the more offensively skilled players a team has on the ice together, the better their average quality of shots should be. It's simple geometry: it's harder to defend against five angles of attack than three.
Usually a team's wingers are the weakest defensive players on the ice; but that doesn't matter so much, because the other team's defencemen are the weakest offensive players. When all five skaters are offensively dangerous, there will be opportunities to capitalize on any weakness shown by the opposing forwards – as the Flames have often done.
With that in mind, it should be no surprise that the Flames have good offensive production when their top four defencemen are playing, and look pretty awful when the bottom pairing is on. Those top four are all in the top 60 of scoring among NHL defencemen (as of Friday afternoon), and three of them are in the top 20.
If the stats folk started making a serious effort to measure ‘disposals’, which I suppose would include passes, recovered shoot-ins, and shots on goal where the attacking team regains possession of the puck, I imagine that would be a better proxy for possession than either Corsi or Fenwick.
In one respect, it might actually be better than a direct measure of time of possession, because it would measure
velocity of possession – the number of discrete plays that a team makes while keeping control of the puck. Time spent carrying the puck doesn't do much good if you just hang onto it and never make a play.
At any rate, such a stat ought to be worth looking into.
I remember that Dave King, when he coached the Flames, kept track of the number of passes made by the team, and set a hard target of so many passes per period; and the offence improved significantly when the players made an effort to meet those expectations. A pass never shows up on either Corsi or Fenwick, except by accident; but it can certainly show up on the scoreboard, where it counts.