Hit or Miss: Where do the Avs shots go?

A little extra time over the weekend got me thinking about shooting and how the Avs seemed to be pretty successful on Friday when they actually did some. It also got me thinking about where their shot attempts go. Not in the net very much obviously, in the shinpads, up in the stands, 5 feet over the goalie’s head, who knows?

I decided to take individual 5v5 shot attempts and break them down into the four tracked outcomes: block, miss, save and goal. I took out everyone with fewer than 25 SA so no Cody, Greer, Big Sam, etc. Here are the individual standouts in each category:

Blocks

Defensemen get more shots blocked from shooting at greater distances and Tyson Barrie takes a lot of heat for his shinpad blasts but he’s not the worst. These are the percentages of individual shot attempts that are blocked, the team as a whole averages 25.1%

Highest - Zadorov (39.4%), Weircioch (37.5%), Tyutin (33.3%)
Lowest - Duchene (12.9%), MacKinnon (13.2%), Soderberg (15.2%)

Barrie rolls in at 32.1%, the lowest among defensemen is Eric Gelinas at 26.3%. Zadorov is an anomaly on the team in that he is the only player that gets more shots blocked than actually hit the net and only gets a SA to the net barely more than a third of the time. Highest block rate among forwards are Mikko (28.6%), Comeau (26.2%) and Martinsen (23.3%). Sort of a surprise about our young Finn there.

Misses

These are clear miss rates again out of all individual shot attempts, you’d think the Ds would be worse here too but they aren’t as a whole.

Highest - Martinsen (28.3%), Zadorov (25.8%), Bourque (25.6%)
Lowest - Soderberg (10.6%), Tyutin (12.1%), Weircioch (14.1%)

Most of the goal-scorers like Mack/Dutch/Mikko are slightly above 20% just for reference and the team misses at a 20.1% rate.

Goals

We like goals, we don’t see enough but we still like them. The Avs get a goal on 3.2% of their 5v5 shot attempts (or 1 for every 31.5 attempts) which I’d like to see get a little better as well as seeing a whole bunch more per game.

Highest - Duchene (9.4%), Bourque (6.1%), Grigo (6.1%)
Lowest - 4 guys with 0%

Shots on Goal (Saves + Goals)

All but a handful of guys get the puck to the net better than half the time when they do shoot and the Avs have a team rate of 54.7%. Definitely have a few outliers here.

Highest - Soderberg (74.2%), MacKinnon (65.3%), Duchene (64.1%)
Lowest - Zadorov (34.8%), Barrie (47.2%), Weircioch/Martinsen (48.4%)

Big Carl is a pretty damn efficient shooter, doesn’t have the goals to show for it but he gets it to the net when he does shoot. Like I said above, Zadorov does not get the puck to the net well at all. I don’t have any statistical evidence to back this up but I feel he’s been improving in that area lately. That’s nice but it means he was even worse earlier in the season. Another nice thing to see is that the 2 forwards with the highest per game shot rates (Mack/Dutch) are also 2 of the best at getting pucks on net.

Shot Attempts per game

Avs overall 5v5 - 39.1

Most - Mack (3.67), Barrie (3.39), Dutch (2.93), EJ (2.91), Gelly (2.71) Bourque (2.65), Beauch (2.55)

Fewest - Colborne (0.93), Toots (1.22), Grigo (1.58), Bad Andy (1.88), Landy (1.91), Iggy (1.94)

The rest fall between 2 to 2.25 per game

/ / / / / /

The first conclusion to be drawn is the obvious one, the Avs need to shoot more. Figure that out and lots of problems are solved. Aside from that it’s interesting to see things like Soderberg being so accurate, maybe he needs to bee a bit less choosy. Barrie doesn’t get every shot blocked, even tho’ it seems like it, in fact he’s pretty average for the D’s on the team. Gelinas has a knack for avoiding blocks but misses a lot. Rennie Bourque is a good guy for the tip drill but he’s not an accurate guy when it comes to actually shooting the puck. I have no idea why Landy’s not shooting anymore but he’s in some pretty rude company at less than 2 attempts per game. The fact that Colborne has nearly one less SA per game than his 4th line pal Andreas Martinsen is scary bad. Unless you’re an admitted shutdown D-man (like Toots) there’s no reason not to have 2 attempts per game. I’m looking at you Mr Grigorenko...

It should be interesting to revisit this down the road and see if any of the really bad numbers (like Landy, Grigo, Colby) improve if the Avs manage to play a little better and if Big Z starts getting more shots to the net as his TOI and confidence grow.