Shot quality is a term used in the statistical analysis of
ice hockey
Ice hockey (or simply hockey in North America) is a team sport played on ice skates, usually on an Ice rink, ice skating rink with Ice hockey rink, lines and markings specific to the sport. It belongs to a family of sports called hockey. Tw ...
to indicate the probability that a given shot will result in a goal, based on factors such as the distance of the shot taken, the type of shot (
wrist shot
A wrist shot is a type of hockey shot that involves using arm muscles (especially those in the wrist and forearm) to propel a puck forward from the concave side of the blade of a hockey stick. Generally, when the puck is shot in a similar manner ...
,
slapshot
A slapshot (also spelled as slap shot) is a powerful shot in ice hockey. Its advantage is a high-speed shot that can be taken from a long distance; the disadvantage is the long time to set it up as well as its low accuracy.
It has four stage ...
, backhand, etc.) and other factors such as the number of players on the ice for each team. It is used to isolate the impact of goaltending performance. By comparing the number of goals allowed to the total of the shot quality figures for each shot against, a goaltender can be rated relative to average performance across the league.
As a theoretical example, if a wrist shot from 15 feet at even strength resulted in a goal 15% of the time, it would be assigned a shot quality of 0.15. If a goaltender faced ten such shots in a game, then they would be expected to yield 1.5 goals (10 * 0.15). Comparing actual results against the expected goals figure of 1.5 yields a measure of goaltending performance that is somewhat isolated from the effects of the other players on the ice.
The concept was first publicly presented in
paperby Alan Ryder o
Hockey Analytics and has since been utilized in slightly varying fashion by a number of blog-based hockey analysts such as the Forechecker a
On The Forecheck and JavaGeek a
Hockey Numbers
References
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Ice hockey statistics