I came across the Royal Road concept last summer and spent most of the Flames games I watched looking for this. I didn’t sit with a pen and paper tracking it, but the eye test suggested there was very little lateral puck movement across the Royal Road and a lot of shots at squared up goalies.
All season long the narrative was how the system was driving scoring chances (even those “high danger” ones) and how the Flames were outshooting teams. It was only a matter of time until the Flames broke out and started to pile up goals and win games. When that never happened, the usual explanations were 1) a shortage of high end finish (if these guys could just hit the net, they’d score like crazy) and; 2) pure bad luck (low sh% isn’t sustainable... do nothing and it’ll revert back to the mean and the goals will pile up).
1) If you’re always shooting at a goalie that’s square, you’re going to shoot a lot of pucks wide. You don’t have much to shoot at and unless you want to hit him in the chest, you shoot for what little open space you have, and there wasn’t a lot.
2) The dismissal of low sh% as luck and something that will “return to the mean” because luck can’t stay bad. There are no hockey Gods. The shots that didn’t miss the net hit the goalie. Not luck. Once again, because there was very little lateral puck movement and the goalie was square to the shots.
The biggest concern I have with Peters coming in is that his teams traditionally have a lower ranked PP and low sh%. Both areas to me are red flags for lack of lateral puck movement. I haven’t watched enough Hurricanes games to know if that’s a coincidence (maybe his teams really lacked skill and had bad luck
) or a function of system that (like GG’s system) seemed to prioritize shot quantity over shot quality.