[eklunds source]

Originally Posted by source

Uh, no.

Kuba's play improved by leaps and bounds, and Karlsson also happened.

You say his play improved by leaps and bounds, but what is that based on, other than his +/- and point totals?

As I stated in that post... The Senators took 520 shots for and allowed 505 shots against with Kuba on the ice, in 2009-2010. They took 50.7% of the shots.

The next season, in 2010-2011, they took 653 shots and allowed 630. That's a percentage of 50.9%.

If Kuba's play improved leaps and bounds, why did the Senators control the puck at about the same rate? Where are these improvements, other than in the form of shooting percentages, which have been proven for years to be highly variable and not something a player can control?

Originally Posted by overpass

Can you present evidence for your assumptions that 1) goalies are 100% responsible for save percentages and 2) skaters are 0% responsible for quality of shots taken and allowed? Both assumptions ring false to anyone who has played hockey. They may be useful simplifying assumptions for the majority of NHL players but are surely not universal hockey truths.

And can you explain to me why Bobby Orr's career +597 in the regular season, including league-leading totals in six of seven seasons, is meaningless?

I'm not saying that shot quality doesn't matter... but it's been proven that if there are any effects a player can have on the quality of shots taken (both for and against), they're so small that it's completely safe to ignore them. Here's a better explanation:

Shot quality matters, but how much?

Some players have a higher on-ice shooting percentage than others. (On-ice shooting percentage is the team's shooting percentage with that player on the ice.) Even including the player's own shooting percentage, four years of data only identifies 10% of players as having unambiguously high or low on-ice shooting percentages (see comments section). We already said that some players have higher shooting percentages than others, so remove the players' own shots and the spread shrinks. Remove the tendency of good shooters to play together, and it looks like over multiple seasons we see only a few top playmakers improving their teammates' shooting.

There are basically a handful of players who have demonstrated any sort of ability to affect the shooting percentage of their teammates - seeing Do playmakers drive shooting percentage shows the list includes Henrik Sedin, Joe Thornton, and Pavel Datsyuk as having the 3 largest effects, which are minimal at best. Even quality playmakers like Giroux and Crosby haven't shown enough ability to drive teammates' shooting percentage - at least, enough that it is notable through the statistical noise/randomness.

As for goalies, well, look at goaltenders who have changed teams:

	EV shots against	Goals Allowed	EV sv%
Luongo in Florida	7337	517	0.9295
Luongo in Vancouver	8430	592	0.9298
Lehtonen in Atlanta	4693	3520	0.9250
Lehtonen in Dallas	3263	239	0.9268
Vokoun in Florida	6334	445	0.9297
Vokoun in Nashville*	5299	368	0.9306

*Vokoun notably exploded in 2002-2003, being consistently below average before then and consistently above average since, so that's when I started tabulating. I don't claim to know why, but at age 26 he took a huge leap towards being the goaltender he is today. It may seem like I'm intentionally manipulating the numbers, but we're trying to compare team effects, not goaltender development.



I don't have statistics from the 1970s so I can't comment on Bobby Orr at all... But I would suspect that because he was a fantastic player, his team strongly out shot their opponents when he was on the ice, and as such, were much more likely to create goals than allow them. Just like any other player - the correlation between goals for/against and shots for/against (at even strength, where a vast majority of goals that affect +/- happen) is strong over a large enough sample size. The problem is that 82 games isn't a large enough sample size; hence results like Marek Malik/Tom Preissing leading the league or being fantastic in +/-, Kuba's monsterous jump, etc.