Blocked, Miss and On Goal Shot Attempts

I saw a Twitter post discussing how in Game 3 of the Panthers-Rangers series the Panthers dominated in terms of shot attempts and high danger shot attempts however they didn’t dominate near as much in terms of high danger shots on goal. In short, a lot of the high danger shot attempts the Panthers took were either blocked or missed the net altogether. I wanted to look more generally at shot attempts and what percentage of them get blocked, miss the net, or are on goal. This led to an interesting observation. The percentage of shot attempts that get blocked have risen dramatically the past couple seasons.

Here is a chart of the percentage of 5v5 shot attempts that were blocked, missed the net or were on goal since 2015-16.

From 2015-16 to 2021-22 the percentage of shots that were on net (save or a goal) slowly rose from 53.3% to 55.2% however over the past two seasons that dropped to 53.0% and then to 49.0%. While a small portion of this can be attributed to a rise in shots missing the net the majority comes from blocked shots. From 2015-16 to 2021-22 the percentage of shot attempts that were blocked fell from 25.8% to 24.4% but over the past two season they rose to 25.9% and then to 28.8%.

Interestingly, the increase in blocked and missed shots has not resulted in a decrease in 5v5 shots on goal rates.

The shots on goal per 60 rates have fallen slightly the past two years but are largely in line with where they have been sine 2015-16. Blocked Shots per 60 and Missed Shots per 60 have risen though. So, teams are taking more shot attempts but are not getting more shots on goal. Those extra shots teams have taken have been shots that were blocked or missed the net.

I am not sure what is behind this new trend, however, this is a fairly substantial change in the data. Substantial enough that may impact the effectiveness of shot attempt based analytics models.

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