Before the Western Conference Final kicked off on Wednesday, the Buffalo Sabres announced a two-year extension for head coach Lindy Ruff. The Sabres are coming off their most successful season in over a decade so it makes sense that the coach be rewarded for that effort.

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The Washington Capitals have signed defenceman Timothy Liljegren to a two-year contract extension. He was traded to Washington from San Jose back in March and due to Rasmus Sandin undergoing surgery for a torn ACL, with a timeframe for return sometime between late-October and January, Liljegren has a chance to prove himself as a mainstay with his new club.  

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Turning to the Western Final, Cale Makar was out with his injury and while the team calls him day-to-day, we have no idea what that really means come playoff time. Maybe he's back for Game 2, or maybe his body was sucked into an inter-dimensional wormhole that has transported him 25 000 light years away. We just won't know until the team confirms he's healthy, or we see him in warm-ups.

Vegas earned a 4-2 win in Game 1 over Colorado largely thanks to jumping out to a 3-0 lead. Colorado got within a goal but Nic Dowd salted the game away with an empty-netter.

Pavel Dorofeyev scored his 10^th goal of the postseason while Brett Howden scored his ninth to lead the way for Vegas. Dylan Coghlan had the other tally.

Shea Theodore had a monster multi-cat game on the blue line for Vegas with five shots, seven blocks, and a pair of penalty minutes. Goalie Carter Hart stopped 36 of 38 shots to help the Golden Knights take a 1-0 series lead.

Valeri Nichushkin and Gabriel Landeskog scored the goals for Colorado.

Game 2 is on Friday night.

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The season review rolls on. Here is what we've covered over the last few weeks, starting with forwards:

• Forwards with improvements including Dmitri Voronkov, Anton Lundell, and more.
• Forward power-play contributions including Connor Bedard, Adam Fantilli, Elias Pettersson, and more.
• Forward shot volume increases including Shane Pinto, Leo Carlsson, Cole Perfetti, and more.
• Forward shot volume declines including Matias Maccelli, Brady Tkachuk, Peyton Krebs, and more.
• Forwards whose projections I missed on including Jonathan Marchessault, Dylan Larkin, Mason McTavish, and more.

And then moving to defencemen:

• Defencemen with improvements including Braden Schneider, Kaiden Guhle, Ryker Evans, and more
• Defencemen power-play contributions including Adam Fox, Rasmus Dahlin, Brandt Clarke, and more
• Defencemen shot volume increases including Mattias Samuelsson, Darren Raddysh, Luke Hughes, and more
• Defencemen shot volume declines including Quinn Hughes, Noah Dobson, Nils Lundkvist, and more
• Defencemen whose projections I missed on including Dougie Hamilton, Vince Dunn, MacKenzie Weegar, and more

We are going to stay with the theme of separating forwards and defencemen, and today the focus will be on peripherals, and specifically how the peripheral rates have changed at each position. We know that shots on goal have been declining over the last couple of seasons – how the NHL counts a shot on goal is a big culprit – but what does that mean for shot totals, and how does that affect a player's peripheral profile? What about hits, blocks, and penalty minutes? Let's look at all that.

Data is from Evolving Hockey. 

To start with, let's look at the changes at all strengths. As mentioned, shots on goal have been declining for the last few seasons, but how does that impact the importance of other peripherals? Here are the 60-minute rates for shots, blocks, hits, and penalty minutes (excluding 10-minute misconducts) among forwards for each of the last five campaigns:

Since 2021-22, forwards have gone from 7.54 shots per 60 minutes to 6.66. For a player skating 1000 minutes across 82 games, that would mean going from about 126 shots in a full season to 111 shots. That is a sizeable drop and tells us we need to keep re-adjusting our expectations for shot totals; a forward putting up 200 shots (48 occasions in 2025-26) just doesn't happen nearly as much as it did four years ago (68) or even two years ago (71). It makes high shot totals more valuable.

This becomes more obvious when we look at the average peripheral profile of an NHL forward. Four years ago, nearly 48% of a player's peripheral profile – shots, blocks, hits, and PIMs – was comprised of shots on goal. This past season, it fell to nearly 44%:

When we talk about a "share" of the peripherals, this is what is meant: if we add all their peripheral totals, what is the percentage of each individual stat compared to that total? So, if Alex DeBrincat has 400 combined PIMs, shots, blocks, and hits, and 300 of those are shots on goal alone, then his share of shots compared to all the peripherals he accumulated is 75%, or 300/400.

We also see what the means for everything else. Over the last four seasons, an average forward's peripheral profile has seen block totals go from 11.2% of their total peripherals to 13.2%. It means the reverse for shots on goal: with blocks becoming more prevalent among forwards, they are worth less than they were four years ago. There was a slight decline from the 2024-25 season, but one season does not mean a reversal of the trend.

The interesting part here is that penalty minutes seem fairly divorced from the rest as PIMs have been between 10-10.6% of a forward's peripheral profile in each of the last five seasons. That separation of PIMs from the others make sense – if a player is shooting less, perhaps they (or their team) have the puck less, so the things they do without the puck (hit and block) rise. The same could be said about PIMs, to an extent, but there are also things like fights and matching penalties that can occur even if a team has the puck. At the least, it's not something we have to worry about seeking in fantasy drafts – PIMs are as prevalent as they've been at any point of the last half-decade.

To see what the changes have been to the game, though, we should review what happens at 5-on-5. Changes to how many penalties are called can affect things like blocks and shot totals for specific players, so what has happened during the general run of play? Well, here are the 60-minute averages among forwards across the last five seasons:

What stands out immediately is that massive shot decline. We saw that at all strengths, but the relative drop there was about 11.7%. Compare that to what happened at 5-on-5 as the average 60-minute shot rate among forwards fell from 7.12 to 6.19, or a decline of 13.1%. Again, if we use a forward who skated 1000 minutes at 5-on-5, that is a drop from 119 shots in a full season to 103, a decline of 16 shots. Earlier, we saw that at all strengths, a forward with 1000 minutes would lose 15 shots in a season. In other words, 5-on-5 play is largely responsible for the shot decline, which again makes sense when we consider that the vast majority of a player's ice time will be outside of special teams/4-on-4/3-on-3 situations.  

There are up-and-down rates for blocks here. We see 1.84 blocks per 60 minutes four seasons ago, three straight seasons of increases peaking at 2.24 in 2024-25, and then a downturn this past season. Again, a one-season drop doesn't make a trend, but it is something to note.

As we did with all strengths, we have to look at the share of peripherals at 5-on-5 – what are the percentages of each of the four categories relative to all peripherals produced by an average forward at 5-on-5? Well:

We see the same stability for penalty minutes that we did at all strengths where their share has been between 9.5-10.2% in each of the last five seasons, and between 10-10.2% in four of the last five years. It is always nice when we don't have to worry about radical one-year shifts in stats, and we don't have to worry about that for PIMs at 5-on-5. (Of course, now that I've said that, we are probably going to see a half-dozen Matthew Barnabys appear out of nowhere next season).

We don't have that kind of stability for hits. We see that the share of hits compared to all peripherals from a forward has increased each of the last three seasons going from 34.1% to 36.9%. The increased hit shares over the last two seasons means more hits available from forwards, so each individual hit is becoming slightly less valuable. We don't have to chase them as much as we did 3-4 years ago.

It is tough what to make of the blocked shot share. We had three straight years of increased rates before a decline in 2025-26. Have blocked shots among forwards at 5-on-5 peaked and now they're returning to where they were 3-4 years ago, or are they stabilizing in a new range and this past season is just part of that new range? My guess is the latter, but honestly, it's just a guess.

With the increase in shot and block shares over the last few years, we see a decline among the shot share, which makes sense. Forwards are getting less of their peripherals from shots than they used to, and that's just the reality of the new NHL, particularly because of how SOG are tracked.

There are a few things to take away from all this:

1. After sizeable shot drops across the previous few seasons, we may have seen that stabilize in 2025-26. We won't know for sure until April of next year, but it appears to be the case.
2. Hits among forwards are more prevalent than they've been in years, so we don't have to chase them as much as we used to.
3. A few seasons of rising block rates may have also finally stabilized, but like with the shot drop, we won't know until 10-11 months from now whether that is truly the case.
4. Penalty minutes are the most consistent across the four peripheral categories, so we don't need to pay any special attention to them.

Tomorrow, we'll stay with the forwards and see what this means at an individual level.