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Who have been the unluckiest shooters in the NHL? (Trending Topics)

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Getty Images

A quarter of the way through the NHL season we’re starting to see the league goalscoring race take shape. And right now things are a little weird.

Sidney Crosby sits atop the leaderboard, which should be a bit of a surprise because while he scored 51 a few years ago, he’s far more often in the mid-30s range. Right now he’s on pace for close to 60. Quite unexpected.

And here’s how weird it’s been so far this year: two guys from the Jets — the WINNIPEG Jets! — are tied for second. With a guy from the Bruins. And they’re all ahead of Alex Ovechkin, who’s tied with… Michael Grabner? And Marian Hossa is one back of that?

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With so many unexpected people in the top 10, and very little overlap between last year’s 10 top, it’s not hard to wonder why this is happening. Sure Crosby is a guy who can just do anything in the sport he sets his mind to, but are the rest of these new leaders just coming into their own or getting a little bit lucky?

Thanks to Corsica’s expected goals stat, it’s easy enough to at least ballpark which guys are getting the puck to go in for them more so than they probably “deserve.” A minor caveat here, as always, is that expected goals are based on league-average shooting talent, which many of these guys are not going to have. Crosby, as I say, can do whatever he pleases. Patrik Laine likewise has a talent to outpace his expected number. But the rest of these guys? That’s a little iffy.

The top-10 looks like this, with their difference between actual and expected goals:

Yahoo
Yahoo

So no surprise here, but these are some of the biggest differences between actual and expected goals in the entire league on this list. That includes overlap for the entire top three of Crosby, Laine, and Pastrnak. And all of this makes sense: Grabner isn’t a guy who’s going to keep up his 45-goal pace for the entire year, nor are Scheifele and Pastrnak. And these numbers certainly suggest that Crosby is going to slow down as well, almost because he has to, and no matter how good he is.

Not really a surprise that Ovechkin is in the same neighborhood as his overall and expected goals for. Guys like him are always going to surpass their expected numbers at least a little bit, but if you told me Ovechkin was the league leader in expected goals at any given point in the NHL season, I’d believe you 100 percent.

He’s not right now, though, and that leads to the discussion of which guys are likely to “break out” and start scoring more goals than they have to this point. There are plenty of guys who get the bad luck that leads to apparent scoring struggles, but what’s interesting is that so far this year the three league leaders in expected goals are guys who are suffering from those tough bounces, and in one case, it’s to hilarious extents.

Ryan Kesler actually leads the league in expected goals this year at about 10.5. He has eight goals, which means he’s not significantly out of step with where he should be. An extra bounce here and there and you’re all set. But teammate Corey Perry is really struggling. Mathematically his shooting locations and shot types in his first 23 games should have resulted in 10.4 goals. Instead, he’s at just four goals. If he goes on a scoring tear in the next few months, that’ll probably be a big reason why: He’s getting to dangerous locations but not actually putting the puck in the net, and given that we know what kind of quality he generally brings — he scored 34 last season — a 10-day period in which he walks away with a pair of hat tricks seems in the cards.

After the two Ducks is Auston Matthews, whose goal struggles after his first few games are well-documented. And as proof that hockey in general is getting smarter, it was only the absolute dumbest people in the sport who watched him playing-but-not-scoring and said, “He’s really having problems.” His recent run of positive play resulted in four goals in his last four games, and now he’s very marginally underwater, making up a lot of ground in a short period of time.

Here, then, are the league leaders in expected goals, along with how well they’re keeping up with that number:

Yahoo
Yahoo

Some interesting names here, too. Jeff Skinner isn’t a guy you’d think would be having as good a season as he is, just because he’s not getting talked about a lot, but this is starting to look like his second straight season of being very good after everyone gave up on him when he went 18-13-31 a few years ago. He scored 28 last season, and he’s on pace for 35 or so this year.

Joe Pavelski being “up there” in expected goals is something you can set your watch to, and Blake Wheeler has been a great and under-appreciated forward for a while now.

The two guys who are most interesting here are Wayne Simmonds, a top-10 goalscorer with a top-5 expected goal total, and James van Riemsdyk, who has a very respectable total in both regards. These are guys who have plenty of talent but aren’t always recognized as such.

In van Riemsdyk’s case, it’s because he wasn’t healthy last season. But even still, he’s scored 81 goals in his last 225 games, a pace for about 30 per 82 games. Just a good ol’ fashioned reliably strong scorer. Same with Simmonds: He’s averaging 30 goals per 82 since he came to Philadelphia. Right now he’s on pace for 40ish, which is probably a bit optimistic, but as you can see above: not by a lot.

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Finally, here are the league’s unluckiest shooters, and it should come as no surprise that all but one of them are in the low single digits for goal totals:

Yahoo
Yahoo

You’d expect more from Forsberg and Nugent-Hopkins in particular, because they tend to rack up goals at pretty good clips, so it’s nice to have the confirmation that they’re not getting things to go their way. Also true of Jonathan Toews and Brayden Schenn, the latter of whom sneakily had one of the better seasons in the league last year.

This is why I like the expected goals stat so much. It can really confirm for you that what you’re seeing on the ice — guys playing well but not scoring, or guys getting some good fortune with their shots. Over the long haul these things tend to even out, and having a place where the eye test and the numbers meet really helps to inform future viewing as well.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

(All statistics via Corsica unless otherwise noted.)

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