Frozen Tools Forensics: Goal Production, Shot Volume, and Draisaitl, Verhaeghe, Lizotte, Huberdeau, Protas, and More

Chris Kane

2025-01-17

Today on Frozen Tool Forensics we are taking a deep dive into scoring. Goals, shots, shooting percentages – that is the name of the game today. To get us started we have a helpful report on the Dobber Reports page entitled Shots. This report gives us all we might want to know about a player's shooting. We have overall shooting percentages, even strength, power play, short-handed, distance from the goal, shot attempts – you name it. Our focus today is going to be on goals and some of the top line numbers that can tell us more about that player's scoring.

In order to take a look at this data I exported the table and simplified it a bit so we can just be looking at a few columns at a time. I also added a Goal Pace column to give us an idea as to how many goals the player would be on pace to score over an 82-game season. Obviously with time missed etc. these won't necessarily be the total a player lands at the end of the season.

Our first table is just a quick look at our goal pace leaders. We start on the left with general player information and then move into goal pace, overall shooting percentage, power-play shooting percentage, and finally shots per game. This table also includes a 20-game threshold so unfortunately Patrik Laine doesn't make the list, but let's call him honorable mention here at 16 games. All data as of the afternoon of January 16th.

There aren't a ton of surprises on this list, most of them have been mentioned in various places over the course of the season for their production. Leon Draisaitl has been on a tear for a while now, Kirill Kaprizov started the season on fire before getting inured, Alex Ovechkin has apparently found the fountain of youth and is scoring like he is 25 again, while both Sam Reinhart and Brayden Point seem to be sustaining what looked like unsustainable production from previous seasons.

Some other observations from this list are very high overall shooting percentages, a huge variety of power-play shooting numbers, and generally high-volume shooting. It isn't surprising that players on pace for 50-plus-goal seasons have high shooting percentages, but the power-play numbers are a little more interesting. I see a pretty clear line between players who shot a lot overall (Draisaitl, Ovechkin, and Kaprizov all over 3.2 per game) vs Point and Reinhart who are not really volume shooters and seem to be on the list because of astronomical power-play shooting percentages. This isn't the first time for either of them either and seems to indicate two potential strategies for high goal totals – elite shooting and high volume, and power-play specialists.

An extreme overall shooting percentage is typically not a great sign of sustainability for scoring so next I wanted to take a look at players who have the highest shooting percentages.

Outside of Point there isn't really anyone on this list who has put up consistent scoring before this. Adam Gaudette and Blake Lizotte are clearly suspicious here. Sky-high shooting percentages and only shooting about once per game. Ivan Barbashev and Jakub Vrana at least have some pedigree and have had flashes of success in the past. The low shot volume is still a huge red flag, but what we really need to evaluate this is a comparison to a player's past shooting percentage. Point, for example, has a history of a high shooting percentage, particularly on the power play.

Our next table is looking at the same data points but it is actually a comparison between the current season (2024-25) and the player's three-year average.

If we take Blake Lizotte for example the shooting percentage in grey indicates that his current shooting percentage is 15.4 percent higher than his recent career average. Part of that is clearly the fact that his power-play shooting percentage is 45 points higher than his career average. Given he only has one power-play goal and is shooting less than average it is pretty clear that none of this 22-goal pace is real. The same can be said for Jakub Vrana with huge deviations from career averages, and low shooting is not a good combination. Aliaksei Protas and Jake Evans are interesting notes here. They are both shooting at about 23% overall which is higher than their typical 10ish percent shooting, but they are both getting some additional deployment opportunities that they did not have in the past. Protas has added over two minutes of ice time and has spent a lot of the season with Dylan Strome and Alex Ovechkin. Evans' situation is certainly less illustrious, but he was getting time with Cole Caufield and Alex Newhook for a time. The moral of the story here is that while they are shooting a bit higher than we might expect them to continue there is a lot more interesting there under the hood than there is with guys like Lizotte.

Jonathan Huberdeau probably deserves his own deep dive at some point: His meteoric rise and highs in Florida followed by a precipitous crash landing in Calgary. His 60-point pace is fine, but about half of what he had in his final season in Florida. He has seemed to rebound slightly in 2024-25, but he is not shooting any more (still less than two per game), and while has added some time on ice to his resume a lot of it is actually short-handed. Overall, the high shooting percentage is not outweighed for me and of the group Protas still looks the most interesting.

On the flip side we have a number of players who are shooting a bit less than their recent history suggests we should be expecting.

This is a list of players that might be a reasonably interesting group to consider a buy low, but unfortunately some of them just aren't that exciting under the hood either.

Mika Zibanejad's 51-point pace and eight total goals sure could be a little higher but add in a few more goals to his total and he gets up to maybe a 60-point pace? Sure, it is better than his current pace, but not really 75-85 points of a few seasons ago. It is a similar story with Nick Schmaltz as things could be going a little bit better, but a big change just doesn't look like it is in the cards.

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It is a little hard to be mad with Sebastion Aho though. As of January 15th, he was on an 82-point pace, which is slightly down from 2023-24 but is still pretty consistent with his recent career history. He is down a little across the board, so I do think he deserves slightly better, but unlike with Zibanejad he does seem to be actually contributing effectively even so.

Lastly, Carter Verhaeghe's 56-point pace is a pretty sizable drop from his recent 75-ish point paces. A big part of that has been his scoring. His 7.5 percent is the largest drop from any player on our list. If he was scoring closer to his usual pace, he would be closer to 19 goals than his current 10, and would likely be closer to a 67-point pace overall. There are no guarantees in this game, but based on the numbers Verhaeghe seems like the best shot at some kind of rebound in the second half.

That is all for this week.

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