Analyzing current shooting percentages and finding players to buy low for your fantasy hockey team.
As imperfect as they may be, advanced stats can be useful.
It’d be silly to ignore them despite Brian Burke’s famous proclamation: “Analytics are like a lamppost to a drunk. They're good for support, but not for illumination.”
Even those who hate numbers and math do it when it comes to managing their fantasy team. Goals plus assists equals points. Saves divided by shots against equals save percentage. It’s simple for everyone to understand.
Advanced stats are just a higher level of counting, and it can be useful within the right proper context. There are outliers, underperformers and outperformers from game-to-game, month-to-month and season-to-season. While goals and points tell us who’s performing well at the current moment, it tends to have poor future predictability compared to shooting percentage or expected goals.
A month into the 2023-24 season and with a rare mid-week break, let’s dive in and see what we can glean and perhaps unearth some buy-low candidates.
All advanced stats courtesy naturalstattrick.com. All player positions courtesy Yahoo Fantasy.
Here is the list of forwards with the lowest shooting percentages who have registered at least 40 shots on goal, excluding a few names (eg. Warren Foegele) who are unlikely to have any fantasy value.
They are ordered by the difference between their current shooting percentage and career shooting percentage heading into the current season.
As you can see, and as we know already, Rickard Rakell is having a tough season. He’s yet to score a goal in 17 games even though he scored 28 goals last season and spends the vast majority of the time playing with Evgeni Malkin. His career 11.2 shooting percentage coming into the season basically says he scores a goal once every 9 shots (8.9, to be exact). Rakell should have four or five goals already based on his career average.
We can also see that even though Evan Rodrigues’ current 6.7 shooting percentage is very low compared to the league average of 10.2 percent, per hockey-reference.com, and it is actually in line with his career 7.8 shooting percentage. For a player who provides good shooting volume at 2.5 shots per game and so far played the majority of the season in the top six, Rodrigues was, is, and will likely continue to be, a very poor finisher.
Nathan MacKinnon’s difference of three percent doesn’t seem like a lot, but it is early in the season and extrapolated over his next 65 games, it becomes a significant difference. Shooting at 7.3 percent versus 10.3 percent would be a difference between scoring 28 goals versus 40 goals over the course of a full season. Keep in mind that to finish with 40 goals, MacKinnon will have to make up for the poorer efficiency earlier in the season and score 34 goals in the remaining 65 games. At 4.82 shots per game, he’ll need to shoot roughly 10.8 percent the rest of the way to accomplish this.
Rakell screams buy low (though note he’s currently injured), while what you see is what you get with Rodrigues.
It's worth noting that low shooting percentages (and vice versa) can be a season-long symptom and may not correct until the following season. In 2018-19, for example, Kevin Fiala had a rough season and converted 7.5 percent of his shots, and it wasn't until the following season when he bounced back to 13.1 percent.
Shooting percentages can also change drastically over time. Dylan Larkin was not a good goal scorer early in his career, but during his back-to-back 30-goal seasons, his shooting percentage was above average. At 8.9 percent, he's not far off from his career average, but it's a significant gap down from his past two seasons. Depending on your outlook for Larkin, he's another buy-low candidate or perhaps simply coming back down to earth a little, though he remains a point-per-game player due to his higher assists rate.
Select buy-low candidates for goals based on shooting percentages:
Rickard Rakell, RW, Penguins* (injured)
Matthew Tkachuk, LW/RW, Panthers
Mika Zibanejad, C, Rangers
Kirill Kaprizov, LW, Wild
Cole Caufield, LW/RW, Canadiens
Jordan Kyrou, C/RW, Blues
Alex Ovechkin, LW, Capitals
