Only a couple games in the NHL last night as the schedule stills tries to find its balance. It does give a bit of chance for some research and looking at where we can help fantasy owners. Today I want to look at changing shot rates throughout the year.

Shot rates are important for a number of reasons in the fantasy game but in my opinion, its best use is as short-hand for offensive involvement. Things like zone entries and exits, shot assists, high-danger passes etc. are all good metrics for gauging offensive involvement as well but they're not ubiquitous. Few people track them and only one person really has it in one spot, and it's a lot to ask of one person (@Shutdownline on Twitter). Individual team blogs do track this stuff, but not all, and it's time-consuming to wrangle the data. In other words, there aren't a lot of ways to show that a player is getting involved offensively that is easily accessible to most people beyond "this guy has a lot of points lately," which isn't good analysis.

For that reason, I want to look at market share. This is a term I'm borrowing from fantasy football, which in turn is borrowing from the corporate world. In fantasy hockey terms, it's what percentage of shots taken by a team are being taken by an individual player. Low shot rates are one thing, but low shot rates on low shot-rate teams and low shot rates on high-shot rate teams are two different things. Looking at which player takes the most shots for his team can help us look for undervalued assets in less-than-ideal situations.

Most teams are around 30 games played by this point, with the league sitting between 28-35 contests each. That gives us a good opportunity to break up the seasons into two parts: the first ~20 games, and every game since. The reason is to see what was established in the first quarter, see what changes there have been since, and if anything useful can be gleaned from it. We will be using data from Natural Stat Trick, and we will be looking at all strengths per 60 minutes. Remember, these are just shot averages based on games played from each player thus far, nothing more.  

To begin, here are the players who took most of their team's shots in the first quarter. As a cut-off, we're using November 28^th, which brings every team in the league between 17 and 23 games. These are the players who took most of their team's shot attempts in that span:

Now, those are just the top-20 but it's to give people an idea. Those are the guys taking the largest share of their team's shots and most of those names make a lot of sense. The top-3 are three of the top offensive performers of the first quarter, which is why this is a stat we look towards.

The fourth- and fifth-place names on the list are interesting. Jakob Chychrun had an awful start to the season and got injured. Patrick Kane, on the other hand, is just short of a point-per-game, which doesn't portend an awful start. He is, however, shooting a career-worst 6.5% as of Wednesday, averaging 11.4% over the previous three seasons. Realistically, he could have double his goals mark and we wouldn't blink. It kind of shows the upside that he has to give if that shooting percentage does turn around, but again, this was for the first quarter of the season.

I think that also goes to show how inept the Arizona offence was to start the year. I like Chychrun as a defenceman, in fantasy and in real life, and have since he was a prospect, but he's not Roman Josi or Cale Makar, a couple defencemen further down the list. It does speak to the turnaround he could have if he comes back to the lineup healthy, but also speaks to just how bad Arizona was through the first two months.

Seeing Tage Thompson on here really warms the heart. I have written about him earlier this week so most of my thoughts about him are contained there. I really do think he has turned a corner, and on a team with players who like to shoot like Victor Olofsson and Jeff Skinner, a guy who was considered a non-prospect a year ago now looks like a significant piece for the future. I think how good of a playmaker he is is a good question, and that means his assist totals are up for debate. I do think he can be a 30-goal centre with league-average defence, and that's worth a lot, both in real terms and in fantasy.

Speaking of low shooting percentages, Viktor Arvidsson, hey? He had a pair of goals in his last game, which has helped, but he's still at 8.5% in 26 games, against 12.5% over the previous 165. He could have 20 goals in him over the balance of the season. Acquiring him in fantasy might be tough to do after his recent four-point outing, and we do have to see if this holds up in our next sample, but nice to see from him.

When we talk about elite centre teammates, one pair is on this list, and it's Leon Draisaitl and Connor McDavid. When we talk about elite winger teammates, Pastrnak/Marchand, Gaudreau/Tkachuk, Pacioretty/Stone, among others, come to mind. However, it's the duo of Kyle Connor and Nikolaj Ehlers we see here. Ehlers has long been one of my favourite players in the league and I may have written about him more than any other player over the last five years, so it warms the heart to see. Connor's shot rate continued its multi-year ascent and that would make him a perennial 40-goal threat, even without shooting 17% or something.

Shouts out to Zach Werenski and Vladimir Tarasenko, for various but similar reasons. I think there were expectations the former would need to pick up a lot of slack with his defence partner traded, and he has, while the latter has quelled any injury issues. They both had question marks coming into the season, and early on, did well to answer them.

Now, we look to the rest of the season. For that, we're starting with November 29^th and until Wednesday morning. Not that we really need a reminder, but rosters and games played were a mess across the league in that span, so there are more or fewer games played depending on the team than there should have been. However, every team has at least 10 games in this sample except for Toronto, and I don't think we need a lot of guesses for the top shooters on that team.

With all that said, here are the leaders in that span:

I put the cut-off at three games played because I wanted to highlight one specific player, and it's the guy at #2 on that list. Patrik Laine has 10 shots in three games since returning to the lineup, but it is just three games. We have seen how good he can be and though it seems like he's been in the league forever, he's 23 years old. There is more than enough time for him to regain his 40-goal form.

Some guys fell but most of the usuals are still in the top-20. We see guys that we might have had questions over like Zach Werenski, Viktor Arvidsson, or Jakob Chychrun repeating the same thing, in varying sample sizes. I do want to give a shout out to Clayton Keller for cracking the top-20 here. As bad as the Coyotes were through the first two months, I think the team has been better than some may realize of late because they were so bad, we just stopped paying attention. Hey, they're 1-1-1 in their last three. It's a start.

The last surprise here is that both Draisaitl and McDavid fell out of the top-20 while Darnell Nurse rocketed up the charts. Connor McDavid was ruled out for Wednesday night's game, but we should note he's still averaging roughly 3.6 shots per game in this sample.

That brings us to the point of this exercise: looking for player who've made jumps over the last month or so. It is a small sample, but hopefully that helps us catch players on their upswing, enabling us to grab some waiver gems or trade for cheap. That is the trade-off for waiting for the sample to develop.

Here are the biggest changes in market share of team shots over the last five and a half weeks. Players must have played at least three games in each sample, because I want to include Laine, specifically:

There are some guys there we may need to know for fantasy. Clayton Keller, Jared McCann, Adrian Kempe, and Ryan O'Reilly are all, let's say, distressed assets this year. Keller had six goals in 27 games to start the year, putting him on pace for fewer than 20 goals, McCann's points/game are down from last season, and Ryan O'Reilly is on pace for his worst fantasy campaign in a decade. Kempe is faring well, but that might be due to expectations. Regardless, all are guys that are starting to chew up a lot more of their team's shots, and could be of interest for the balance of the year.

It does make me laugh that Alex Ovechkin had 18 goals and 36 points in 21 games through the first quarter of the season, and then he started taking more of his team's shots. Quite honestly, through 34 games, this is an obscene performance from him considering he's 36 years old. If he ages like this for five more years, Gretzky's record will fall.

Just want to point out Pavel Buchnevich here. He had 16 points in 19 games to start the year, with eight goals, and now he's taking even more of the team's shots. Just a wonderful performance from him.

Makar has seen his shot rate fall significantly; he had one of the largest negative changes on our list in the two samples. Gurianov, Rantanen, Pettersson, Draisaitl, and Pacioretty were also among the biggest declines in market share.

Some guys inside the top-50 players for positive change that we might want to keep an eye on: Joe Pavelski, Valeri Nichushkin, Rasmus Dahlin, Darnell Nurse, Jake Bean, Alex Formenton, Patric Hornqvist, Nathan MacKinnon, and Brady Tkachuk. These are all players starting to take more and more of their team's shots, and some of these guys have had a slow start to the season, or none at all.

*

The Leafs took a 4-2 win from the Connor McDavid-less Oilers on Wednesday night. Ilya Mikheyev scored his third goal of the season, the game-winning goal at that, on the power play in the third to lift his team on the evening. He had a good game, landing six shots on goal in 14 minutes of ice time. Alex Kerfoot had a goal and an assist to give him back-to-back multi-point games.

Not much to speak of from the Oilers side. As expected, Leon Draisaitl played nearly 25 minutes and scored a goal in the meantime. Evan Bouchard had four shots and a pair of penalty minutes.