Diana in the Autumn Wind: End of an Era, this Season’s Shot/Chance Rates

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18 games in and the Oilers are once again in a lamentable position.

In the analytics era, we have a lot of tools at our disposal to gauge just how well or poorly a team is doing. As others have noticed (see here, here, here and here), the Oilers (despite their results in the standings) are showing important indicators of improvement.

In this article, I want to focus on two things.

1. I want to place this year’s Oilers (small sample size and all) into the context of the Tambellini-MacTavish era (2008-present).

2. I want to focus on shot/scoring chance generation and suppression rates year-over-year. While percentages (say, Corsi For %) are very useful indicators, here I want to channel our attention to each side of the shot coin (offense and defense).

Notes: “Rank” = NHL Rank; “#” = rate/60; Corsi = all shot attempts and roughly acts as a proxy for possession; Fenwick = all unblocked shot attempts and roughly acts as a proxy for scoring chances; all stats via stats.hockeyanalysis.com

Shot/Chance Generation

One of Dallas Eakins’ persistent themes has been that the Oilers of recent vintage have been publicly miscast as an offensive powerhouse. That is, the youth and skill of the Oilers’ forwards has led to a misperception of the team as offensively robust.

Eakins is absolutely correct to attack this misperception. The Oilers of the Tambellini-MacTavish era have been a pitiful shot/chance generation team.

Here’s a chart outlining the Oilers’ Corsi and Fenwick For per 60 rank and rates over the era.

We can see quite clearly here that the 2014-15 season, early goings though it may be, stands out.

This team is starting to generate a respectable number of even strength shot/chance attempts.

As a side bar, it is worth nothing that in MacTavish’s final year as Oilers’ coach, the team (relative to its recent history) was a pretty decent even strength offensive team.

Shot/Chance Suppression

Here’s a chart outlining the Oilers’ Corsi and Fenwick Against per 60 rank and rates over the era.

What a calamity.

A man with a penchant for listing each and every cruel twist to a romance might come up with a list of names each with his own depressing saga: Lubo, Souray, Gilbert, Whitney, Barker, Nick Schultz…

Simply put: the Oilers over the Tambellini-MacTavish era have bled out shot/chance attempts like an abattoir bleeds lamb’s blood on the eve of Greek Easter. With the exception of the Renney years (which look quaintly “terrible” next to this tirefire of catastrophe), there’s not much to look at here.

All of which makes the results the Oilers have managed through 18 games this season worth taking note of. This is a historically Gord-Awful team in the midst of a welcome adjustment to mediocre.

At even strength, the Oilers are turning north through 18 games. They are much better at generating and suppressing shot/chance attempts. And, while it is possible these results will crater (through injury, roster changes, larger sample size, or from facing more Western Conference opponents), it seems unlikely the chasm the 2014-15 Oilers have put between themselves and the rest of the Tambellini-MacTavish era is entirely illusory.

Special Teams, What About them?

Looking at special teams, we have to take a slightly different approach. On the power play, for example, we aren’t interested in shot suppression. The whole point of the exercise is to generate shots/chances. So, we’ll focus on each discipline’s logic (power play = generation; penalty kill = suppression). Moreover, as we’ve discussed before, Fenwick For rates (as opposed to Corsi) provide a stronger picture of the true talent of a special team, so we’ll only be looking at Fenwick numbers.

5×4 Shot/Chance Generation

Here’s a chart outlining the Oilers’ Fenwick For per 60 rank and rates over the era on the power play.

This is basically night and day.

The Oilers in 2014-15 are generating more than 20 more unblocked shot attempts per 60 minutes on the power play than they did just two years ago under Ralph Krueger, reputed wizard of the power play.

They’ve gone from perennial bottom-feeder (with a caveat of marginal improvement achieved under Renney’s second year) to very good.

Producing over 70 unblocked shot attempts per 60 is an excellent indicator of a strong power play and means that goals will be much easier to generate this season with the man advantage (and, perhaps Craig Ramsay is a magician?).

4×5 Shot/Chance Suppression

Here’s a chart outlining the Oilers’ Fenwick Against per 60 rank and rates over the era on the penalty kill.

And, the trend continues.

Once again we see the 2014-15 Oilers in stark contrast to their own recent past. Opposing teams are finding it much harder to generate unblocked shot attempts with the man advantage against the Oilers this season. That means goals are much harder to generate against the Oilers.

I think Renney deserves another nod here of acknowledgement. In a lot of areas it really does appear that he had the Oilers headed in the right direction. Krueger also doesn’t appear quite as horrid in this light.

Take Aways

I’ve been interested for some time in the possibility that emergent coaches experience a sharp learning curve as they enter their sophomore year.

If we add the evidence painted above to the excellent work Lowetide has done recently in cataloging Eakins’ deployment (see, for example, here), I think we can make a strong case that Eakins is progressing as an NHL coach.

Without elaborating on the disjunction between the above and the Oilers’ record in the standings (psst… look at their PDO), I think it is important that we recognize what the above actually is telling us: The 2014-15 Oilers are showing every indication of having vastly improved in all disciplines relative to their recent history.

While they ultimately remain a flawed team with lingering roster construction issues (they currently sit in 21st in the NHL in Fenwick For Close % at 49.4%), they appear to be genuinely heading north.

Finally, Tom Renney should never have been fired. Let his name become one more shibboleth used by the faithful to mark their robust culture of grievance for the Tambellini era.

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