The hockey analytics version of shooting fish in a barrel is predicting that extreme percentages will regress. These could be individual shooting percentages, on-ice shooting percentages, on-ice save percentages…it doesn’t matter. The vast majority of the time that you see a percentage that’s well above or well below the norm, it’s going to end up much closer to whatever the league average in the future.



Historically though, hockey’s not really an industry that thinks about what might have been. If it happened, it’s because you earned it and if it didn’t happen, it’s because you didn’t. One of the ways that this has historically burned teams is in paying for young players, without a lengthy track record and without the pedigree of being one of the absolutely elite players entering the league, who happened to go on a shooting percentage binge when they were due a contract.



Andreas Athanasiou, a fourth-round pick...