Who's Hot? Who's Not?

When discussing the hottest shooters in the NHL, your initial reaction is to check the shooting percentage rankings, and rattle off your favorites near the top of that list. Some favor the hard shooters with 100-mph slappers, or those with wickedly quick wrist shots, but invariably, the shooting percentage stat provides the jumping off point for any such conversation.

What we miss, however, in this kind of review is the difference between a defenseman who typically takes long-distance slapshots, and power forwards who tend to get more tip-ins, and other close-range scoring opportunities. The tool we use to take this into consideration is Shot Quality, which assigns a value to each shot based on its distance and shot type (wrist, slap, tip-in, etc.). Last season, for example, 9.88% of shots scored, but if you looked only at wrist shots from 11-20 feet, those scored at a 18% clip, and slapshots from 41-50 feet scored 5.3% of the time. Therefore, if you had a player who took nothing but close-in shots, you'd naturally expect them to have a higher shooting percentage than a defenseman winding up from the point. By definition, a perfectly average NHL shooter would expect to have a Shooting Percentage equal to their average Shot Quality.

The tables below list the hottest and coldest shooters in the NHL so far this year, by breaking down their actual performance, and comparing that to the average Shot Quality. The result is a "Shooting Factor", which states the relationship between those two values. A Shooting Factor of 2.00, for example, reflects a player whose Shooting Percentage is twice that of their average Shot Quality. A factor of 0.50 shows a player only scoring half as often as Shot Quality would predict. So who's lighting up the lamp, and who's just plunking pucks off the goalie? Let's take a look...

Top 10 Hot-Shooting Forwards

Player	Team	Shots	Goals	Sht %	Avg SQ	Shooting Factor
Alexander Radulov	NSH	40	11	.275	.102	2.71
Tuomo Ruutu	CHI	45	10	.222	.100	2.23
Petr Sykora	EDM	95	15	.158	.075	2.12
Jarret Stoll	EDM	78	11	.141	.067	2.10
Jeff Hamilton	CHI	58	10	.172	.087	1.99
Matt Pettinger	WSH	54	10	.185	.098	1.89
Curtis Brown	SJS	37	6	.162	.086	1.88
Kristian Huselius	CGY	57	12	.211	.116	1.82
Maxim Afinogenov	BUF	91	18	.198	.109	1.81
Jason Spezza	OTT	86	19	.221	.125	1.77

Nashville's rookie on the rise, Alexander Radulov, is far ahead of the pack here, trailed by two players each from Edmonton and Chicago. Radulov began the season in the AHL and only recently earned a full-time job with the Predators, so expect his shot totals to accumulate quickly in the weeks ahead. Whether he can keep up the torrid scoring pace is another question, however.

Top 10 Hot-Shooting Defensemen

Player	Team	Shots	Goals	Sht %	Avg SQ	Shooting Factor
Philippe Boucher	DAL	106	12	.113	.044	2.55
Sheldon Souray	MTL	109	12	.110	.044	2.48
Brad Stuart	BOS	44	6	.136	.056	2.45
Hal Gill	TOR	39	3	.077	.032	2.37
Lubomir Visnovsky	LAK	95	11	.116	.056	2.07
Brian Campbell	BUF	43	5	.116	.058	2.01
Nicklas Lidstrom	DET	87	9	.103	.053	1.95
Sergei Zubov	DAL	82	7	.085	.045	1.88
Sami Salo	VAN	68	6	.088	.048	1.85
Filip Kuba	TAM	57	6	.105	.058	1.83

You may ask why, given our wonderful Shot Quality tool, I'd keep the forwards and defensemen in different tables. Basically, the goal scoring is so low among blueliners that a lucky bounce or two at this stage (not quite halfway through the season) can still wildly skew the numbers. For instance, I'd hesitate to call Hal Gill a super-hot shooter when he only has 3 goals. If just one of those was due to such a lucky bounce and not Gill's ability, his Shooting Factor would drop to around 1.6 and he wouldn't be on this list. But in the interim, we do see a number of recognizable snipers like Nick Lidstrom and Sergei Zubov represented, along with Philippe Boucher, who is enjoying a career season here in his 14th year.

Now that we've looked at who's lighting the lamp, how about those shooters who are hitting nothing but goaltenders? Let's dig our way down to the bottom of the barrell...

Bottom 5 Cold-Shooting Forwards

Player	Team	Shots	Goals	Sht %	Avg SQ	Shooting Factor
Alex Burrows	VAN	40	0	.000	.105	0.00
Mike Richards	PHI	69	1	.014	.118	0.12
Ian Laperriere	COL	62	1	.016	.128	0.13
Josh Green	VAN	52	1	.019	.122	0.16
Dallas Drake	STL	43	1	.023	.113	0.21

No wonder Vancouver has had such struggles offensively, with 2 forwards on the leader board here.

Bottom 7 Cold-Shooting Defensemen

Player	Team	Shots	Goals	Sht %	Avg SQ	Shooting Factor
Martin Skoula	MIN	40	0	.000	.034	0.00
Paul Martin	NJD	36	0	.000	.039	0.00
Stephane Robidas	DAL	52	0	.000	.042	0.00
Duncan Keith	CHI	54	0	.000	.050	0.00
Scott Hannan	SJS	41	0	.000	.053	0.00
Kevin Dallman	LAK	40	0	.000	.068	0.00
Joni Pitkanen	PHI	67	0	.000	.074	0.00

Seven defenseman are included above, as they are tied with perfect shutouts so far this year. That Dallas blue line seems like a real hit-or-miss bunch, with Zubov and Boucher among the leaders, and Robidas shooting blanks. If you had to pick a particularly cold shooter here, it has to be Joni Pitkanen, who not only has the most shots among our goal-less wonders, but has the highest average Shot Quality as well, meaning he's taking, on average, the most dangerous shots amongst them.

Note: The numbers here reflect non-empty net shots, taken from the top 400 NHL players ranked by shots taken.