Flames Forwards Shot Rates – Part 1

 

 

Ryan Lambert recently noted Mike Cammalleri’s low shot volume in his Five Things feature. That mention got me curious about investigating the main guy’s shot rates last year in depth and to relate it to their possession rates and overall performance.

The best scorers in the league are high volume shooters. Usually, they combine some degree of accuracy as well (12-13% or better personal shooting percentage), but getting a lot of goals almost always comes down to getting a lot of shots. That’s one of the reason why it’s important for a team’s stars to be in the offensive zone and getting pucks on net.

I’m going to restrict this inquiry to even strength shot rates. PP ice time is restricted to a few guys and dependent on opportunity, so not as that indicative of ability. Let’s start with the basics (info via www.behindthnet.ca):

Nothing really unexpected here – Iginla and Jokinen played the most at 5on5 and also played the full 82-game season, so were bound to lead the pack. Now, let’s see how efficient each player was with his ice time by controlling for that variable:

As you can see, once we convert shots to a per hour rate, we get a very different ranking. The Flames big guns are all clustered together in the middle (6.50-7.20 shots per hour) whereas third liners like Backlund, Moss and Stempniak are leading the way. Jarome is still one of the leaders, although he falls behind Stempniak and Moss and is only marginally ahead of Backlund. Tanguay is the worst of the bunch, but he’s always been a pass first, pass second, "shoot only at the open net" kind of guy. Glencross being at the bottom surprised me, although he has also never been a high volume shooter and was very reliant on a sky high SH% last year to score 20+.

To put these rates in context, here’s an article from Cam Charron last March looking at the league leaders in ES shots/60. The top 20 or so players were in the 10+ shots/60 territory. The list includes high-end stars (Zetterberg, Kessel, Nash, Ovechkin) emerging snipers (Seguin, Kane, Landeskog) and a smattering of third liners who are good enough to outplay other third liners like Moss (Cleary, Clarkson, Larose, Kennedy).

In the next part of this series, I will show why the Flames stars shot rates are relatively lackluster by applying corsi/possession stats and showing how they moderate personal and on-ice scoring rates.