On Shooting Percentage Regression, Battles, and the Dallas Stars' Playoff Preparation

Glen Gulutzan has plans

Dallas scored three 5-on-5 goals on Sunday against Chicago in an overtime loss, which devotees of this site will surely remember. This Stars team is 4th in the NHL in 5v5 goal-scoring despite the low shot-volume issues we’ve discussed at length.

That is a high number, as is their 4th-place save percentage. The second-place team in the NHL is, I believe we can say with some certainty, pretty good. And in talking to Glen Gulutzan earlier this week, it’s clear that he’s seeing the same things we are.

But what’s also clear is that he’s looking at some things we can’t see. At Gulutzan’s media availability after practice in Euless on Sunday, he was asked if some of the Stars’ decreased shot volume is, in part, a consequence of how they’re tightening things up defensively (which they have done quite effectively).

We asked Gulutzan point-blank: Does being more defensively conscious tend to reduce the amount of shots a team can generate?

“It does,” Gulutzan said. “This team doesn’t play open. You guys know that. We don’t play open. When you play open, you can trade chances, in my opinion. You see some teams that play open, they trade chances, so they get looks—but they’re giving up looks.”

Don’t mistake that acknowledgment for complacency, though.

“Always the DNA of this group, even before I got here, was not to give up much,” Gulutzan said. “But do we want to create more? Yeah. And we’re finding ways. You know, I look at certain things. The shot metrics are one thing. I’d like to create more shots. But I look at zone time, and I look at what we’re giving up, and for me, I ran the numbers here. And since November 15th on, I think we’re 8th and 6th in zone time, and possession time. In 5 on 5 scoring, we’re high. So I can run down the rabbit hole of attempts, but I’m trying to look at a macro [level].”

Gulutzan then went on to describe a couple of those “macro” things he’s looking at.

“Shots off the rush is something that I think we can do a little bit better,” Gulutzan said. “We tend not to shoot off the rush, and [shooting] can cause some confusion in the D zone and lead to actually higher-grade chances. Not that a shot from outside the dots is gonna go in, but sometimes it’s the reciprocal of what happens after that. I think we can create a little bit more chaos off those things.”

With that said, Gulutzan reiterated that he doesn’t mean he just wants the team to crank up the knob that says ‘Shooting’ while turning down the corresponding one that reads ‘Playmaking.’ It’s not as simple as all that, because it never is.