It’s time for the holy grail of hockey, and that’s actual goals.
The saying goes, “they who score more goals than their opponent, shall win the hockey game.” No, that’s not an actual saying, but it’s a reminder of what the point of hockey is. A lot can get lost in the analytics shuffle, with shot attempts, zone starts, quality of competition, and other factors being so prevalent.
I bring up real hockey analytics because I’ve talked about all the components of a fantasy hockey breakout star, and sometimes all the components can mask where the value comes from. Yes, they all have some importance for most players (except penalty minutes, really), but assists and goals are the foundation of value that any fantasy hockey owner should strive for.
A few numbers to ponder:
- The top-10 skater with the fewest goals scored last year was Claude Giroux with 28. Everyone else had at least 31.
- The two fewest goal totals for top-20 skaters were Nicklas Backstrom (18) and David Krejci (19).
- There were 21 players in the NHL who scored 30 goals last year; there were 101 players who scored 20. Back in 2011-2012, that number was 30 players with at least 30 goals, and 101 players with at least 20 goals. The season before that, the numbers were 29 and 106. In other words, the number of decent goal scorers has remained static while the number of elite goal scorers has declined by nearly 30-percent.
This should tell owners one thing: elite goal scorers like Alex Ovechkin, Corey Perry, Phil Kessel, Max Pacioretty, James Neal, and others should be coveted. These players are getting rarer by the season, it seems, and that drives up their value.
The Percentages
I wrote in the shots on goal section of this series on a fantasy breakout star that the percentages (namely, shooting percentage) are still king in deciding production. Here are a couple of examples why:
- Alex Ovechkin scored 32 goals in 2010-2011, the lowest total of his career. That season, he took 367 shots and shot 8.7-percent. The following season, he scored 38 goals, taking 303 shots. He scored six more goals on 64 fewer shots because he shot 12.5-percent.
- Tyler Seguin and Jaromir Jagr scored one goal between them in 44 combined games during the 2012-2013 playoffs, on a combined 128 shots (0.8-percent shooting). They were both let go by the organization the following summer, one by trade and one by free agency. Last year, the two of them scored 61 goals in 162 combined games, shooting 11.6-percent. It’s almost as if goals can be very random in small samples.
In fact, goals can be very random. There was a very interesting post over at the Winnipeg Jets blog Arctic Ice Hockey that discussed the nature of a sample of goals. In the post, they took a sample of five days, studied every goal, and determined what was luck, what was skill, and what didn’t fit either category. In summary: there’s about equal amounts of luck and skill in a randomly-selected goal. That should mesh with what people observe in hockey: sometimes a defenseman bats at a puck and clears the zone; sometimes he bats it to an opposing player. Deflections off skates and sticks, weird bounces off the boards, a funny hop from a bouncing puck, these are all things that are part of a goal-scoring play, and all are more or less random. That’s a big part of the reason why shooting percentages, and by extension goal totals, can have a wild expected outcome range.
The Shots
While the percentages will ultimately determine how often a player scores, said player still needs shots on goal to actually score. A few more numbers:
- Of the 21 players last year with 30 goals scored, none of them had fewer than 200 shots on goal, and only 5 of 21 players had fewer than 225 shots on goal. So in looking for a breakout star, 225 shots should be the least to look for. In that sense, names like Bryan Little, Ales Hemsky, and Paul Stastny can immediately be removed from “breakout potential” status. All of these guys have established NHL careers, none of them have ever broken 200 shots.
- The median shooting percentage for a team on a 5-on-4 last year was about 12.3-percent. At 5-on-5, that number drops to about 7.8-percent. Knowing this, targeting guys who are shooters and get loads of power play time is a pretty good strategy when trying to draft a potential breakout star. Joe Pavelski, last year’s “breakout” star, averaged 3:30 of power play ice time per game, and took exactly 225 shots.
With the idea that fantasy owners should target guys who will take at least 225 shots and play a lot on the power play, names like Patrick Marleau, Alex Semin, Jeff Skinner, and Max Pacioretty are all candidates that fit the criteria; they all take over three shots a game, and they all play at least three minutes on the power play per game.
Hopefully this series has been helpful for fantasy owners doing their draft preparation. To summarize everything:
- Don’t chase after elite plus/minus potential.
- Shots on goal are important to a breakout, but associated percentages still reign.
- Penalty minutes add some value, but they are far from a source of value.
- Power play points are repeatable, but it’s far from automatic.
- Some assists are predictable, some are volatile, but assists are still pretty important.
Thanks for reading!
*As always, thanks to Hockey Reference, Behind The Net, and Hockey Analysis for their resources
