NHL's Hardest Shooters: How Shot Velocity Impacts Scoring

To determine the importance of shot speed in scoring, we’ll examine six metrics. The simplest two are goals and shooting percentage, which relate to total output and efficiency.

The other four are variations on the first two pertaining to shots from specific places in the offensive zone. The reason we’ve selected mid-range and long-range shots is that attempts from close to the net seem less likely to be affected by the velocity of the puck. 

Goals from near the crease are often scored on rebounds, deflections, and tap-ins, which don’t require a player to shoot the puck hard. Theoretically, a high shot speed would help more when shooting from further out because it would lessen an opposing goaltender’s reaction time on an attempt they generally have time to square up to. 

Here are definitions for the statistics featured below, primarily focused on individual production and sourced from NHL.com:

• Goals - A goal is awarded to the last player on the scoring team to touch the puck prior to the puck entering the net.
• Mid-Range Goals - Goals scored from the area between 29-43 feet of the center of the goal and bound on both sides by an imaginary line drawn from the faceoff dot to 2 feet outside the goalpost. In the charts below, the Mid-Range is shortened to ‘MR’
• Long-Range Goals - Goals scored from the area more than 43 feet of the center of the goal while still inside the offensive zone and bound on both sides by an imaginary line drawn from the faceoff dot to 2 feet outside the goalpost. In the charts below, the Mid-Range is shortened to ‘LR’
• Shooting Percentage - The percentage of shots on goal that result in goals.
• Mid-Range Shooting Percentage - Shooting percentage on shots from the Mid-Range area specified above.
• Long-Range Shooting Percentage - Shooting percentage on shots from the Long-Range area specified above.

Forwards

• Tage Thompson
• Patrik Laine
• Alex Ovechkin
• Mika Zibanejad
• David Pastrnak 
• Anthony Cirelli
• Kasperi Kapanen
• Morgan Geekie
• Jared McCann
• Parker Kelly

Defensemen

• Colton Parayko
• Radko Gudas
• Ryan Pulock
• Dmitry Orlov
• Michael Del Zotto
• Jake Walman
• Tyler Myers
• Zdeno Chara
• Rasmus Ristolainen
• Justin Faulk

Scoring

The first year of puck tracking data provides a strong indication that players capable of producing the hardest shots perform better than their peers at goal-scoring. 

Three of the 10 forwards who produced the hardest shots finished in the top 20 in goals among all forwards. The group averaged just over 25 goals, which only 75 of the 661 forwards who appeared in the NHL exceeded in 2021-22. 

Only two of the 10 forwards in the cohort produced a below-average goal total, and one of that pair (Parker Kelly) played just half of the season.

It’s clear that the slap shot, while in decline overall, remained important for these forwards. Three of the top five forwards by slap-shot goals (Ovechkin, Pastrnak, and Zibanejad) are in our top-10 shot-speed group.

The one area where that group’s scoring didn’t see a meaningful increase was from long-range, though that’s not surprising considering they took an average of just 27.4 long-range shots each on the season.

Defensemen are often better known for hard shots than forwards, and blueliners have failed to win the Hardest Shot competition just four times since 1990. That said, in 2021-22, having elite shot velocity had a relatively modest effect on them, even if the top 10 were collectively above average across the board.

Just two of the group (Faulk and Orlov) finished in the top 63 among defensemen scoring, and more than half scored three or fewer goals. The bar is quite low for offense contributions from the blue line, but even in that context, the group wasn’t particularly productive. Its best point producer (Faulk) ranked 23rd among all defensemen.

It is not surprising that players capable of propelling the puck the fastest are better at scoring on a per-shot basis, but these results are impressive. The forward group had a shooting percentage 38.9% better than the NHL average, while the defensive group topped it by 16.7%.

We see two different trends among forwards and defensemen in terms of how this strong efficiency is distributed. On the forward side, nine of the 10 had a shooting percentage above 10%, but the highest-ranked player by shooting percentage (Laine) was just 47th among all forwards with 100 or more shots taken.

In terms of defensemen, there weren’t consistently high shooting percentages in the group, but Orlov and Faulk ranked second and third in shooting percentage among defensemen with 100 or more shots.

One trend that we’ll see throughout this research is that long-range shots from defensemen with high shot speed are consistently better than the league average. In 2021-22, they were 59.3% more effective.

Forwards

• Tage Thompson
• Yegor Chinakov
• Patrik Laine
• Milan Lucic
• Mike Hoffman
• Dennis Gurianov
• Viktor Arvidsson
• Zack McEwan
• J.T. Miller
• Steven Stamkos

Defensemen

• Radko Gudas
• Jake Walman
• Ryan Pulock
• Dmitry Orlov
• Matt Dumba
• Michael Stone
• Joel Edmundson
• Victor Hedman
• Colin Miller
• Erik Karlsson

Scoring

This is a significant step down in forward quality from 2021-22. Thompson ranked sixth in the NHL in goals in 2022-23, but no other forward in the high shot-speed cohort finished higher than 39th (Stamkos).

Four forwards (Chinakov, Lucic, Gurianov, and MacEwan) scored fewer than 10 goals. Gurianov is curious, as he also showed up in RG’s research on the NHL’s fastest skaters. Despite his elite speed and hard shot, he never topped 31 points in a season. He serves as a reminder that high-quality tools don’t always translate into tangible results.

On the defense side, the high-shot group is bolstered by the addition of Karlsson and Hedman. The two Swedish blueliners both debuted in 2009-10, and from that season to the end of 2022-23, they ranked first (Karlsson, 761) and third (Hedman, 652) in points among defensemen. The pair account for 45.3% of the high shot-speed group’s goals in 2022-23.

Besides Hedman and Karlsson, the group averaged 5.3 goals, the same as the 2021-22 total.

Once again, we see strong efficiency across the board, with only the forwards’ long-range shooting coming in below average. That comes from a sample of just 204 shots and should be interpreted with caution.

The forwards were 25% more efficient than the league average, while the defensemen were 25.4% better. Karlsson’s 12.0% shooting percentage topped defensemen with 100 or more shots, putting upward pressure on the second number, though no other blueliner stood out.

On the forward side, Tage Thompson’s 15.9% was 36th best among forwards, showing once again that a hard shot seems to lead forwards toward strong shooting percentages as opposed to elite ones. One possible reason is that the forwards with the best shooting percentages spend the most time around the net, whereas those with harder shots put that skill to use from further out.

Forwards

• Tage Thompson 
• Kasperi Kapanen
• Kyle Palmieri
• T.J. Oshie
• Owen Tippet
• Kevin Fiala
• Martin Necas
• Morgan Geekie
• Filip Forsberg
• Ivan Barbashev

Defensemen

• Colin Miller
• Darren Raddysh 
• Arber Xhekaj
• Colton Parayko
• Jeremy Lauzon
• Radko Gudas
• Jake Walman 
• Erik Karlsson
• Travis Sanheim
• Victor Hedman

Scoring

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This output looks like a combination of 2021-22’s forwards and 2022-23’s defensemen. That makes sense when it comes to the defense, as five of the players are the same, including the productive duo of Karlsson and Hedman. 

For the forwards, Thompson is a constant, but we have a mostly new cast of characters. The other returning players, Kapanen and Geekie, are among the least productive in the group. The new group of forwards only has one player near the top of the goal leaderboards (Forsberg, 48, sixth), but consistent production throughout. 

Five of the 10 shot-speed leaders scored between 24 and 30 goals. There is an uptick in long-range goals from the forwards as they scored more in 2023-24 than 2021-22 and 2022-23 combined, but that is likely more of a fluctuation than a trend.

This group of defensemen scored more than either of the other years despite Karlsson’s goal total dropping from 25 in 2022-23 to 11 in 2023-24. Just 35 of the 315 defensemen who appeared in the NHL that season scored 10 or more goals, and five are in our group (Karlsson, Hedman, Sanheim, Walman, and Parayko). 

This group of forwards distinguished itself least from its peers on total shooting percentage, landing just 14.9% above the league average. Meanwhile, the defensemen were an impressive 35.8% better, driven largely by mid-range shooting.

Defensemen also scored twice as often from long range as the NHL average, continuing the trend of excelling in that category. When we imagine the practical application of high-speed shots, slap shots from the point immediately jump to mind, and it’s clear defensemen with elite velocity on their shots score more — and more efficiently — from there.

While these results are not as strong across the board for the forwards, the consistency was there once again. Only one forward in the group produced a shooting percentage under 10% (Kapanen, 6.1%).

• Forwards with high shot speed are reliably above-average scorers: The top 10 forwards by maximum shot speed between 2021-22 and 2023-24 scored at least 20 goals 53.3% of the time. For reference, only 22.2% of all forwards who appeared in 2023-24 scored that many goals.
• But there are exceptions: Kapanen and Geekie stand out as notable outliers as both produced a top-10 hardest shot reading in two different seasons, but neither produced at an impressive rate. In their four seasons combined on the shot-speed leaderboards, the pair only scored 41 total goals.
• Defensemen with hard shots tend to score more: In 2023-24, just 16.2% of NHL defensemen scored eight or more goals, but that’s what the elite shot-speed cohort averaged, with five hitting a double-digit total.
• But there are notable exceptions, too: On the defense side, Gudas is the obvious outlier. The burly defenseman made the top-10 shot speed chart in three straight seasons (topping it among all players in 2022-23 at 101.71 mph) and only scored 11 times in total. No one fired a shot harder than Colin Miller in 2023-24 (102.59 mph), and he scored four times.
• Shot speed helps defenders score on long-range shots: In each of the three seasons, the hard-shooting group of defensemen had a long-range shooting percentage that was at least 59% better than the NHL average. For many defencemen, the greatest value of a long-range shot is its ability to generate rebounds or create deflection opportunities, but for those with the hardest shots, these attempts are genuine threats to score outright.
• Shot speed matters to slap-shot scoring: Five of the top seven slap-shot goal scorers between 2021-22 and 2023-24 among forwards and defensemen had the hardest shot ranked in the top 10 at their position at least once in those three years. The shot type may be dead for many players, but it’s still useful to some.

References

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