I had some time on my hands so I decided to take a look at the top six compared to everyone else. In this comparison, I'm looking at each players career averages versus what they've done this year.
I initially only looked at goals, shots and shooting percentage, but then I was also curious if playing style or usage might affect how often someone is shooting, so I decided to take a look at shots/60 as well.
Note: For players who have been in the league a while, Natural Stat Trick didn't have all their data but only the past 9-10 seasons. Especially for a player like Jagr that's probably a good thing since he's nowhere near the player he was 20 years ago.
All this data was taken from
NaturalStatTrick and is for 5v5 goals.
A couple things stick out to me.
1. The top line are all exceeding expectations in terms of both shooting percentage and shots/60. You could argue that Monahan is shooting at roughly his career average but he's taking more shots which is great. Gaudreau and Ferland are both shooting more frequently and better than their career averages. I would assume Ferland will come back down to earth as far as his shooting percentage?
2. Frolik isn't shooting nearly as well as he has historically and he's also averaging 2 fewer shots/60 than normal. I don't know if this is Gulutzan asking him to play more defensively? That would explain the shots/60, but his shooting percentage is just garbage right now.
3. Tkachuk only has 1 season that I was able to use for his "career" average. As such, I don't know if there's much point in comparing this season to his average.
4. Jankowski is obviously a small sample size, but I like his 10.53% shooting percentage. I have no idea if that is indicative of what he will be as a shooter or if that will decrease. Only time will tell.
5. Bennett is shooting well below his career average in terms of shooting percentage. I'm not sure if that's because he is actively getting worse as a player of if he's just having terrible luck. While he might not be the 13% shooter he was his first year, I highly doubt he's going to be a career 4.35% shooter forever. He's bound to get some more goals eventually.
6. Aside from Brouwer and Jagr, just about everyone in the bottom six has been shooting at their career average (in terms of shots/60) but nothing is going in. Based on the number of shots the bottom six has taken, you would expect 11.425 goals from them. Instead they have 6. If they bottom six was sitting at 11 goals this season instead of 6, there's no way we would have having this conversation.
That's all I've got. Feel free to analyze this data as well and let me know if you see anything else interesting!