Letter to the Editor: One Fan's Shot Volume Concerns

I suspect others of you may have thought about this a tad

Scheduling note: Today (in ten minutes, actually) I’m hopping on a plane to see some family over the next couple of days. I’ll still be around and watching the games, and we’ll still be writing, but some of the timing and finer details might be a tad sporadic over the rest of this week.

The upshot of the travel is that I’ll be covering the Stars’ road games at Los Angeles and Anaheim next week, so hey, we all have that to look forward to. It’s important to have hope in These Turbulent Times.

Today, I’m sharing a guest post from Stars Thoughts reader (and long time DBD commenter) Kling Kong regarding the Stars’ shot volume numbers. Obviously you should take this as K.K.’s opinion and not mine, but I do think his opinion is germane to the larger discussion right now, given the Stars’ current slide, and I wanted to give y’all a chance to read and discuss it. I am sure a six-game losing streak will make for calm, rational, and nuanced debate.

Anyway, thanks to Kling Kong for sharing this. I had the chance to chat with him at the DBD meetup back in 2019, and it remains a delight to continue to discuss this team with both neophytes and long-timers (as so many of y’all are) alike. Enjoy, discuss, or complain as you desire.

Have a great day, and maybe drink an extra cup of coffee.

-Robert

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Shooting Stars: Will it be Shoots or Chutes?
by Kling Kong

• HUGE caveat here. This was put together Wednesday of last week so the stats are going to be a little bit off. But the overall picture is right around the same it was a week ago before the Stars losing became an actual streak.

• The other caveat is this is waaayyyy TL;DR. Forewarned is forearmed.

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Robert, I love that you brought up the Stars shooting situation with Glen Gulutzan...

There are many ways you can slice a shooting percentage/quality/volume pie. I suppose you could even slice it with Occam’s razor, if you chose. As Robert’s piece on Monday pointed out, Gulutzan surely cuts his pie the way he sees fit and it has mostly worked out very well for the Stars this season. But no matter how sound the reasoning behind the system or process, some regression still seems likely for the Stars shooting numbers. It may even be inevitable, like death, taxes, and Maple Leafs fans having their hearts stomped on during the playoffs.