Strategy shift has created more offence, more entertainment

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/03/2019 (2121 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you’ve been paying close attention to the NHL for the last several years, one thing you have probably noticed is that goal scoring is rising and save percentage is dropping.

Save percentage peaked in 2015-16 at .915, with the average NHL game consisting of just 5.42 goals spread between two teams.

Since that season, scoring has risen to 6.06 goals per game, and save percentage has dropped to .909, which may not seem like a lot, but it’s the lowest league average save percentage in 10 years, and the highest scoring we’ve seen since the 2005-06 season.

A lot of the credit for this has gone to the young players entering the NHL over this time. And the talent level of the league has never been higher, despite recent expansion, but I think it’s more than just good players entering the league; it’s a notable shift in strategy.

Luckily for us, the Sportlogiq database goes back to 2015-16, so we can examine the last four seasons of shots from the peak of post-lockout defensive hockey, to this new peak of goal scoring that has made the game so much more entertaining.

Over the last few seasons, we have seen a linear trend for teams to move their shots closer to the net, with inner-slot shots and high-slot shots increasing at nearly identical rates, and the overall impact being a 9.4 percentage-point drop in shots on net from the perimeter over time.

 

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That isn’t to say shots from the perimeter no longer happen, there were about 2,000 more perimeter shots last season than there were in 2015-16, but there were about 4,500 more shots from the inner slot or high-danger area on top of that.

Offences aren’t just creating more shots; they’re creating better-quality shots. So how is that happening? We know that power-play opportunities have not increased dramatically over that time and, in fact, near the end of the season, the average of 5.96 power-play opportunities per game in 2018-19 is fewer than the 6.22 from 2015-16.

One hypothesis that I have floated before is that defencemen aren’t shooting as often, with more of the pucks coming off of the sticks of forwards who are statistically better shooters, on average. Fortunately, we can test that easily.

Unfortunately, that idea is pretty much busted. Forwards have accounted for between 70.5 and 71 per cent of shots on net each of the last four seasons, there’s barely even a hint of variation, and the fluctuation is random, not a trend in any way.

 

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That means it has to come down to more than just deferring to players who are more adept at shooting; there has to have been a push around the league to focus more on shot location than before.

Looking at this another way, how much of this change has come from forwards alone?

We know that forwards do most of the shooting and more of the scoring in hockey, so how big has the change been for shots only from forwards?

The decline in perimeter shots is even steeper when you look at forwards alone, with scoring chances on net accounting for 11.6 percentage points more of the total shots forwards have taken in 2018-19, compared to 2015-16.

What’s also interesting is that shots from the inner slot have grown more than shots from the high slot, which means goaltenders are dealing with more traffic than they were.

 

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Part of the change is going to be due to dynamic young forwards who are scoring at higher shooting percentages than we’re used to seeing, but you don’t get this much change in a sport without changes in tactics, and it appears that coaching staffs are focusing more on creating offence than stifling it, compared to most of the last 25 years or so.

While forwards are doing most of the work in changing where shots are coming from, we can’t ignore the fact that defencemen are pinching more aggressively, as well.

In 2015-16, just 13.1 per cent of all shots on net by defencemen were from the slot, which is up to 16.9 per cent this season. That might not seem like a very significant increase — it’s just 3.8 percentage points — but in raw totals, defencemen in 2018-19 have already produced more than 800 additional scoring chances than defencemen in the entire 2015-16 season, and there’s still about 11 per cent of the season left to play out.

Forwards are more talented and moving the puck closer to the net. Defencemen are more aggressive and pinching deeper into the offensive zone for their shots. This behaviour not only directly increases goal scoring, but also indirectly increases it by taking more risks and leaving teams more vulnerable to counter-attacks.

Traditionally, the job of coaches in hockey has been to squeeze offence out of the game, and goaltenders have continued to get better at a rapid pace for the last 30 years, so this increase in scoring may not last, as better defensive strategies begin to be adopted to stifle the newfound offensive aggression. But for now, teams see the advantage of shooting from dangerous areas, and there’s a lot of focus on creating those chances.

This change couldn’t have come at a better time, with 2015-16 representing the lowest scoring NHL season since 2003-04, the last year of the "dead-puck era." The game is shifting towards offence, and it’s more entertaining for it.