Quote:
Originally Posted by Quincy Egg
I'm curious to see some people's reasoning as to why these type of percentages are sustainable.
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Reasoning:
Using a generalized "reversion to the mean" theory (which I'm assuming you're alluding to re: shooting %) doesn't work if the mean is persistently high. And the mean should be defined as that player's mean, not the league mean. I don't believe that every player in the league will revert to the league average in shooting percentage. Some guys take a lot of low quality shots and barely score (think of Bollig's snap shots from the blue line
), some guys take fewer high quality shots and score a lot.
Much more useful (as poster looks at above) to compare a player's shooting percentage to his career/previous seasons shooting percentage. If Hudler was scoring on 25% of his shots, I'd agree that he's scoring on more shots than he has in the past and in all likelihood it wouldn't be sustainable.
Though it's really easy to say "look at those unsustainable percentages wow!"
For example, take Alex Ovechkin's career shooting percentages since 2009:
2009: 13.6
League: 9.1
2010: 8.7
League: 9.0
2011: 12.5
League: 8.9
2012: 14.6
League: 9.1
2013: 13.2
League: 8.9
2014: 13.6
League: 9.0
Another example is Ryan Getzlaf's 11/12 season. Too lazy to type it out but very similar to above.
Good players consistently have better shooting percentages than the league average. Would you say that Ovie or Getzlaf;s percentages are unsustainable? The one outlier is in 2010 when his average was considerably lower than his career averages. To me
that is unsustainable.
Now I'm not comparing our guys to those super stars. I'm just using them as an example of guys with persistently high shooting percentages.
Also, position should be a factor. The league average is dragged WAY down by defensemen, who have far lower shooting percentages. Maybe take a look at the average for forwards?
http://www.sportingcharts.com/articl...n-the-nhl.aspx