Are the Rangers for real? New York’s hot start to the season is impressive, but it remains to be seen if the team has the tools to survive an inevitable decline in shooting percentage, Travis Yost writes

Just six months ago, we were preparing for one of the most one-sided playoff matchups the first round had to offer. All expectations were that the Pittsburgh Penguins would roll over a New York Rangers team that was beaten up all season long, exclusively relying on their superstar goaltender to bail them out of trouble time and time again.

Things have changed.

It’s hard to think of a team (maybe the Canadiens?) generating more positive buzz around the league right now than the Blueshirts. Alain Vigneault’s team has won 11 of the first 15 games and owns a ridiculous +27 goal differential, which is more than a handful of goals clear of their nearest competition. They’re ridiculously fast at the forward position, their defence has held up far better than it did a year ago, and they have a goaltending advantage against any team in the league except Montreal. At a bare minimum, that seems to be good enough to make the playoffs and actually offer something in the round of 16 – a far cry from where things were last April.

Any time a team gets out to this kind of start, the talk begins about their Stanley Cup chances. Are the Rangers a championship-calibre team? Finding the answer starts with two simple questions: (1) Do you have an elite goaltender? (2) How exactly are you driving such massive goal differentials?

The first answer is a clear-cut, no-doubt-about-it yes. And this has been the case in New York for a decade.

The second answer is, I think, much more grey. The Rangers are not what we would consider to be a dominant even-strength team as it pertains to controlling the run of play – even when you score-adjust for the frequent leads they’ve had they are still pulling only about 49 per cent of shots at 5-on-5. That’s up from last year’s 47 per cent or so, but not really in the area of modern era Stanley Cup winners (for the record, this area is usually north of 52 per cent).

So no, supremacy on shot volume isn’t what’s driving the Rangers lofty goal differentials, which means that they must be converting on an extremely high percentage of their shots. And season-to-date, that’s true in a big way: the Rangers have a shooting percentage of 12.7 per cent in a league that consistently floats around 7.8 per cent.

Also of note: the Rangers are doing significantly better from a scoring chance perspective than a shot attempt perspective, which means that we must consider the possibility the Rangers are generating a much higher volume of difficult shots against opposing goaltenders than league average.

This isn’t exactly uncharted territory for a team over the first month (or any month) of the season. We consistently have seen a couple of teams explode in conversion rates for semi-extended periods of time. But, as the games keep piling up, shooting percentages will continue to move towards league norms.

To illustrate this a bit better, I pulled the three best shooting teams from the first month of every season since 2009 (excluding lockout) and graphed their cumulative shooting percentage through season’s end. Dark grey for each block indicates the early part of the season, and here, you see each team is converting at an electric rate. Light grey for each block indicates the end part of the season, or where shooting percentages ended up by April.

I think this shows the importance of winning the shot battle over winning the shot quality battle. Most of these teams had a first-month shooting percentage north of 10 per cent, and by season end, most every one of these teams had finished at or just above the league average – even with a 15-game window where their stats were incredibly padded.

Put another way, here’s an aggregated visualization of these 18 great shooting teams:

If you believe there isn’t anything different from this Rangers team than many other teams before them (of ranging quality, I might add), then you should expect a pretty emphatic slowdown in their shooting percentage over the next four months of the season. And that’s fine. Like I said earlier, this team’s improved year-over-year and still has the best or second-best goaltender in the league. That, in and of itself, makes them a much more scary team than the product we saw a season ago.

But when you talk about Stanley Cup contenders, you really want to see teams just bludgeoning their opponents on the shot card. We know shooting percentage is fleeting and regression is going to bite and bite hard in the coming weeks. Great teams can offset unlucky shooting stretches by forcing their opponents to play significant stretches of the game in the defensive zone. The Rangers aren’t there yet, but there’s still time to improve.