TEAM SHOT QUALITY
COACHES, SYSTEMS, AND SHOT QUALITY
coaches might be quite significant in terms of a team’s defensive system.
for most of the population it doesn’t appear to be a significant variable
There are something like 6-8 teams with shot quality effects that are big enough to worry about, either positive or negative.
TEAM SH% AND SHOT QUALITY
If "shot quality" is a true talent possessed by teams, then we should expect to see two things:
The observed "shot quality" in one year or one half of the year is a very poor predictor of performance in the other half of the sample.
The league-wide spread due to "shot quality" talent is on the order of six goals, or one win.
While "shot quality" may sometimes explain the role of luck in past performance, it has very little predictive value at the team level.
SHOT DISTANCE ALLOWED AS A TEAM TALENT
shot distance – and by extension, long-run shot quality allowed – accounts for 5% of save percentage. Worst-case, I suppose it could be 10%, but it’s very small.
A big chunk of our 5-10% of save percentage due to shot distance is scorer bias – the true talent portion is not nothing, but it doesn’t appear to be a major driver of save percentage overall.
THE SHOT QUALITY PRIZE
· Point #1: There is a skill for having more offensive zone faceoffs as a team
· Point #2: Teams that get more offensive zone faceoffs also tend to get a larger percentage of their shots within 20 seconds of the faceoff.
· Point #3: Shots taken in the first 20 seconds after an offensive zone faceoff are of a lower quality than the average shot.
This would seem to suggest that teams with the talent for getting more OZ faceoffs will also tend to have a slightly lower average shot quality.
THE BEST NHL PLAYERS CREATE THEIR OWN LUCK
Team shot quality is a real characteristic of a team, and not just random noise which the hockey analytics consensus believes it to be.
You have to recognize that Brett Hull was a much better shooter than average.
Well, if that’s true for players, it’s true for teams, right? Teams are just collections of players. The only way out is to take the position that Hull just cherry-picked his team’s easiest shots, and he was really just stealing shooting percentage from his teammates.
Based on all this, I think it would be very, very difficult to continue arguing that team shooting percentage is just random. That still doesn’t mean it’s important. Because, even if it’s not just random, how is it that all these hockey sabermetric studies have found them so ineffective in projecting future performance?