SHOT SEQUENCING
SHOT SEQUENCING
adjusting for shot location, while important, doesn’t explain anything about how the shot was created. We don’t know which goalies are forced into making tougher saves by virtue of the pre-shot movement.
If teams score more often from passes, then the opposite side of that is they are more difficult to stop for goalies. Why? The more you make a goalie work to track the puck, the greater your advantage over him. It’s what I call “shot sequencing.”
how we track the games tells us the story of the shot attempt before the goalie is required to make a save.
Once you go through the permutations, you come away with twenty-six different sequences that can occur before the shot is attempted.
The issue with Save Percentage is that it does not take into account anything other than the shot – all shots are equal. Adjusted Save Percentage takes the next step in adjusting for location. Passing Save Percentage is another improvement on taking into account the speed from pass to shot, the build up play, location, and the movement of the puck prior to the shot.
Isolating which sequences are most dangerous for the goalie is step one. Step two would be to determine which players are on the ice for more or less of those events than their teammates. We’d then be able to point to that and quantify a player’s impact on save percentage simply by on-ice events. That would be a basic approach, but an incredibly useful and intuitive one at that.
MORE ON SHOT SEQUENCES
If you’re not including what happened prior to the shot taking place, you’re not talking about shot quality. You’re just talking about shots. Shot quality is not a singular event. It is the sequence before the shot that gives it quality.
Accounting for the sequence accounts for any and all work that the goalie must do before the shot is even attempted. If you aren’t accounting for both sides of the equation (goalie and shooter), you cannot possibly attempt to paint a clear picture of what is quality and what is not.
The problem with looking at just the shot is that you’re ignoring everything that came before it. How teams generate offense, the ability of players to find open ice, and, perhaps more importantly, the ability of defensive systems to limit these opportunities, should all be measured appropriately.
When we can attribute a quantifiable value to each sequence of possession, we can get a better idea of which players create better chances and defend against better chances.
Put another way, do we care if a player gets “shelled” in Corsi if most of the attempts he gives up are weak and from far away? Wouldn’t we be glad if that player then was able to create a few, high-quality chances going the other way?
This sums up the Devils, doesn’t it? Structured defense to soak up pressure and then only get a handful of shots going forward.
PASSING CLUSTERS
Quick breakouts – trying to move the puck out of your zone right after gaining possession – make up roughly 38% of possessions and account for 22% of all shots and 22.4% of Expected Goals
There is evidence that passes from the defensive half boards by wingers inside produce more offense than those straight up ice.
In order to compare the general effectiveness of these first passes, we need to separate pass clusters 4 and 5 into rim and direct passes, as there is quite a difference in being able to play the puck directly to a winger at the half boards and having to rim it along the boards.
The differences here are quite stark, Rims are a lot less efficient.
So the 1st pass can indeed have quite a large impact not just on the success rate of wing passes but also the type of wing pass that is attempted. Rims are much less frequently followed by a stretch pass than Ups. The overall efficiency of stretch passes following rims is a little surprising, but my guess would be that this is largely a function of the space afforded to the winger.
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