PASSING AND SHOT QUALITY
PASSING AND SHOT QUALITY DEBATE
Relying on location data alone is a mistake. We’re finding out from Chris Boyle and, more recently, Steve Valiquette, that screens, puck movement, and specific passes have as much, if not more, to do with shot quality and shooting percentage than simple puck location at the time of the shot.
How the puck gets to area where the shot is attempted is more important than where the shot is attempted from.
There’s a clear trend showing teams score more when they pass it more effectively. The next question is, why?
How teams generate offense and what precedes the shot (no pass, a single pass, multiple passes) matters significantly and has to be a part of any shot quality debate.
How teams generate offense and how efficient teams are in their passing matters
REDEFINING SHOT QUALITY ONE PASS AT A TIME
The results show that the rate at which a player assists on shots closely follows the rate at which they shoot the puck themselves.
Next, we’ll combine a player’s shots and shot assists into one metric called Primary Shot Contributions.
Now we will look at using a player’s Primary Shot Contributions and predicting their Primary Points over the course of a season.
The results tell us that a player’s primary shot contributions (again, their own shots and those they set up for others as the final passer) can more accurately predict their primary points over the remainder of a season and can do so far, far quicker.
In fact, you need only eleven games of data to find the strongest correlation between a player’s Primary Shot Contributions/60 (hereafter PSC/60), and how many Primary Points/60 (hereafter PrP/60) they’ll score over the rest of the season.
In short, if you want to know how many points a forward will score over the remainder of the season, you’re much better off using their Primary Shot Contributions than Primary Points. Points can be deceiving. Shot Contributions are more exact.
a player’s ability to set up others has a much stronger influence over the remaining number of primary points they will score than their own shooting does.
This work also showed that measuring shots and shot assists combined as shot contributions is a better predictor of future performance for both players and teams than shots alone.
WEIGHTED SHOT RATES BASED ON THE PASSING PROJECT
Based on the findings in that piece, PSCs where the primary shot assist was either a behind the net pass or a royal road pass are deemed dangerous PSCs (DPSCs) because the shooting percentage on those shots is much higher than for other types of shots.
Shooting Percentage For Each Shot Type:
Behind The Net – 6.73
Faceoff – 1.63
None OZ Faceoff – 1.97
Other – 4.00
Point – 0.91
Royal Road – 15.50
Stretch – 5.16
In every instance for forwards, the weighted PSC metric outperforms the scoring and unweighted PSC metric in predicting future performance. But for defenders, unweighted PSC is a better predictor of future scoring. This is likely due to defenders being less likely to make primary shot assists of the most dangerous types, which are behind the net and royal road.
The takeaway here is that for forwards, simply weighting each shot based on the danger relative to the passing sequence preceding the shot is an improvement on the actual measures in predicting future scoring at the player level.
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