Why simply shooting more won’t reignite Maple Leafs’ offence
The Maple Leafs do need more shots, but that doesn’t mean they need to be quicker on the trigger. Rather, they need to be quicker on their feet.
When their teams are faced with on-ice difficulties, hockey coaches can draw from two places for potential solutions. One is by evaluating what’s happening in real time, drawing on their wealth of experience playing and watching the game, and looking for a creative answer. The other is simply parroting the same things they used to hear from their own coaches to their current team.
As someone who played exclusively in the minors, I was exposed to a lot of the latter, which doesn’t exactly factor in the evolution of the game.
And so, I used to have to fight with dogged determination not to roll my eyes clean from their sockets when I’d hear “shoot from everywhere” or “there’s no such thing as a bad shot” or “just put it on net.”
If you have solid possession of the puck, and you take a low-angle, unscreened shot, you’ve all but done the work of the defence for them. It’s a turnover. It’s not 1975 , where goalies strapped on their living room ottomans as pads and viewed going down as a moral failing.
That brings me to not just the Toronto Maple Leafs, but the NHL in general this season, and how fans are perturbed by the lack of shots taken. Using the Leafs as our proxy for this story, let’s look at their shots per game over the past four seasons:
Season |
Shots |
2021-22 |
34.6 |
2022-23 |
32.6 |
2023-24 |
32.0 |
2024-25 |
28.2 |
So, that’s a pretty substantial drop, but it is worth noting that a decline in shots per game has been happening league-wide over this time:
Season |
Shots |
2021-22 |
31.7 |
2022-23 |
31.3 |
2023-24 |
30.3 |
2024-25 |
28.3 |
The Leafs have gone from well above average to a breath below, so there is some real team effect there beyond the overall league shift, but at least there’s a case to be made it’s a team shift that’s happened in concert with an overall trend.
The solution according to many fans, is they just need to pull the trigger more. But more distressing than that, is how often you hear that sort of sentiment from the teams themselves. Craig Berube has suggested that Max Domi needs to shoot more. Their power play has struggled, so we hear they just need to simplify and put pucks on net. It’s now being said William Nylander needs to shoot more on that power play, specifically. Mitch Marner has scored in three Leafs games going back to the end of November, so it’s only a matter of time before we get the annual “Why Mitch should shoot more” talk, too.
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The problem is that “shooting more” by being quicker on the trigger isn’t a good answer. “More shots” is an outcome that’s earned by better processes all over the ice, the shots are just the end reflection. I rarely see the Leafs pass up shots. The issue is that they don’t get in enough spots with time and space where shooting is even a viable option.
The other problem is that nobody actually wants more shots, they want their teams to shoot more; so they can score more; so they can win more. They’re asking for something else entirely, really.
This goes back to how we got into this piece, with noting that goaltending today is different. According to my count, the league has 34 goaltenders that are six-foot-four or taller, and reminder, that’s with 32 teams. There’s enough to go around. Seventy-two goalies are six-foot-two or taller, with the NHL listing one of 90 keepers at below six feet (that being Juuse Saros). These are trained goaltending freaks, who now more than ever, don’t give away free goals from distance.
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This season, goaltenders are giving up goals on perimeter shots at a rate of 3.2 per cent, the lowest frequency since SportLogiq started tracking the stat. Meanwhile, shots from the slot cash in 16.6 per cent of the time, and shots from the inner slot go in at a rate of 21.2 per cent.
Knowing this — or at least feeling it, without the help of stats — players don’t even bother shooting unless it could go in or create a dangerous rebound.
What you’d like to hear from these coaches, is that skating more is the answer to the question “How do we get more shots?”
You have to create more separation from defenders to get off a clean, hard shot. You have to skate more to find a soft, undefended pocket of ice while your team cycles the puck in the O-zone. You have to skate more through the neutral zone to stay ahead of the backcheckers.
You have to earn the opportunities to decide “should I shoot here?” or not.
You can see that players (and presumably many coaches) have recognized that shooting more from wherever is without merit, which shows up in the numbers. Here’s the percentage of shots taken from the slot the past four years, again from Sportlogiq:
Season |
% of shots from slot |
2021-22 |
37.3% |
2022-23 |
38.8% |
2023-24 |
39.1% |
2024-25 |
39.6% |
We know that total shots per game are down (as shown above), and also that the percentage of shots coming from the slot is up, so let’s check in on player shooting percentages:
Season |
Player shooting percentage |
2021-22 |
9.8% |
2022-23 |
10.1% |
2023-24 |
10.2% |
2024-25 |
10.6% |
That category is particularly interesting, as league-average shooting percentage steadily works its way back down over the years, all the way to 8.9 per cent just 10 years ago.
It’s tough to find data that tells a much clearer story than this, showing that the value of shots from the outside has diminished (save for those intending to be tipped), and that teams are pursuing better looks.
That all comes back to what I was talking about with skating to find space. Offensively in hockey, such a big part of getting shots and in turn, goals, is how you pull defenders to you and find open teammates, how you find those soft spots with space, and in sum, how you pursue the type of shots that are worth taking.
Defensive structures are tight, and are now built to rely heavily on the great goaltending I’ve referred to in this article. They’ll let you have the puck around the outside, and they’ll even let you fire it on net. They trust that those pucks aren’t going in.
If league-wide save percentages are down — and they are, having been equal or worse every season since 2015 — it’s not because goalies got worse. It’s because they’ve gotten better, they’re trusted more, and teams have made offensive adjustments.
NHL teams don’t benefit from lobbing in muffins. If a team needs more shots, and the Maple Leafs are one of them, they have to stop viewing “shots” as the answer, but as what will result from better play everywhere else — from breakouts, to zone entries, and to the many ways in which skating helps a team take the game to its opponent.
The Leafs do need more shots, but that doesn’t mean they need to be quicker on the trigger. They need to be quicker on their feet.
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