Shooting Percentages and How They Play Folks For Fools

First off, I largely agree with what you’re saying here about luck. There are, however, a bunch of other explanations for something like a playoff series. One thing that’s different about the playoffs is the small sample of goalies. It does seem at least possible to me that Savard might be better suited to scoring on some goalies (in this case Price and Ward) than others (everybody else). The other thing is that it’s also possible he’s averaging more scoring chances per shot in this sample of games than he does over the course of his career because the defenders he’s playing against are generally of poorer quality. This seems less likely to me since one would expect most playoff teams to be at least average defensively but it does also seem possible. The most likely explanation is luck of course… but there are many less variables in the playoffs when compiling statistics than there are in the regular season.

I look at it is this way: every shot is a lottery ticket, with the prize being a “goal” and the chances of winning a prize roughly stable for each player depending on where the shot is taken. Let’s say, the average across locations and players is 10%. One in ten lottery tickets will be a winner. Some players, like Ovechkin, “buy” lots and lots of lottery tickets, resulting in more prizes. And some guys just happen get more winning tickets than losers over brief periods and it probably has nothing to do with personally attributable qualities like “wanting it more” or “being clutch”. The chances of getting heads with every flip of the coin is 50%, but sometimes you’ll just happen to hit 5 heads in a row. It doesn’t mean the coin is loaded and it doesn’t mean you’re a great heads-flipper: it’s just chance and sample size.

Which isn’t necessarily to deride the performances of guys like Kane or Staal – these are obviously good players who are getting into positions to score. But, at other times or in an alternate universe, some of the very same shots they are scoring on now would hit legs, go off the post, miss the net by 6 inches or be stopped by the goalie. Similarly, that wouldn’t necessarily make them “play-off chokers” either.

Kent’s done a good job of arguing the point I’m making here, so I’ll only add a couple of things.

1) All of these guys are good players, so this isn’t to take away from their performance; just to point out that right now they’re performing well above their established level of ability for goal scoring – in some cases (Crosby) at 135% while in others (Savard) it’s closer to 300%. That isn’t to say these guys aren’t good players (they are) just that it would be foolish to expect this to happen year in and year out – or even from one series to the next.

2) On the goaltending side of things, let’s use the Crosby jump (since it’s the least dramatic). He went from a 14.1% avg. to a 19.2 avg. in the post season. Flipping that, it means the goalies facing him went from a .859 SV% to a .808 SV% – a drop that seems to great to be consistently true. Varlamov and Biron aren’t that far below the league average. It gets worse with each progressive example – culminating in Savard, where goaltenders went from a .891 SV% to .687 SV%. I don’t care what you think of Price and Ward – they aren’t that bad.

Aw c’mon JW. Clearly Fedotenko’s 28% SP in 03-04 was just a measure of how good he is.

Over pretty much any 10-12 game stretch of the regular season, you’ll see some stars on a torrid scoring pace, while others go ice-cold.

But this is the very nature of the playoffs; you trim down the contestants, have them play a select number of games and determine a champion. Total regular season results are irrelevant, other than determining home ice for one extra game during a series.