from Travis Yost of TSN,
A couple of weeks ago, we tried to determine the NHL’s best individual shooting talent. The exercise was reasonably straightforward: observe the actual shooting percentages of forwards and measure it against the expected shooting percentages for those forwards based on shot distance, angles, type, game state, and so on. The forwards at the top of the list – names like Patrick Kane, Vladimir Tarasenko, and Nikita Kucherov – consistently beat expectations and added a bunch of wins for their team in the standings.
I had a series of follow-up questions from that post and one particularly stood out to me. A reader noted that while the above analysis measured an individual’s ability to consistently drive his own shooting percentage, it didn’t show whether a player had the ability to drive up the shooting percentages of those around him.
It’s a fascinating question – one that is really a measure of playmaking ability more than anything else. The tricky part here is that I think there are a lot of ways for a player to enhance the shooting percentage of his teammates. The obvious one is being a star distributor or passer. But what about the guys who are truly lethal 5-on-5 goal scorers? Surely defences shade their structure to suppress their open looks from time to time, but the offset is that the player’s teammates have more ice and room to work. These are two completely different skills, but both could lead to the same end result.
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