Daily Faceoff Archetype Rankings: The NHL’s 20 purest shooters

Part IV in a series

It isn’t difficult to conjure up an image in your head of the NHL’s best snipers. You’ll think of Alex Ovechkin in his office on the power play, or Steven Stamkos one-timing top shelf and Auston Matthews scoring from all over the ice with an ease and confidence almost never before seen in the sport.

But what makes the NHL’s best shooters?

Typically, shooting and scoring go hand-in-hand, but not all the best shooters are the game’s best scorers. There is both an art and a science to scoring at the NHL level. It involves volume, velocity, precision and yes, a little bit of a luck on the other end. As we’ve learned in the analytics age, not all shots are created equally, even if they all count the same on the scoreboard.

Throw in the idea that we have separate types of player classification categories available for scorers in our Daily Faceoff Archetype Rankings and the exercise becomes a little bit more difficult. Ovechkin and Matthews, along with Leon Draisaitl and the other prodigious scorers, are in the Franchise category and therefore are not eligible to be listed as ‘Shooters.’

Not all the NHL’s top scorers are pure Shooters. Some gobble up rebounds as Net Front Scorers, others create opportunity off the cycle and the wall as effective and rare Power Forwards.

So, what constitutes a Shooter? This player’s first instinct with the puck is to, well, shoot it. Using their elite shot, whether it’s through volume or by virtue of a high shooting percentage, this player has the uncanny ability to find daylight behind a goaltender or has a knack of getting shots through traffic.

With that guiding light, and the help of five anonymous NHL front office executives, here are Daily Faceoff’s Top 20 projected Shooters for the 2022-23 season, with their league-wide rank from last season in these categories:

Rk	Player	Pos	Age	Team	Goals	Shoot%	SAT/G	Rush Shots	Slot Shots	1xer	xG
1	David Pastrnak	RW	26	BOS	40	14	1	9	29	2	5
2	Steven Stamkos	C	32	TBL	42	17	48	229	106	3	20
3	Kyle Connor	LW	25	WPG	47	15.3	15	23	18	10	11
4	Alex DeBrincat	RW	24	OTT	41	15.5	35	22	27	13	4
5	Patrik Laine	RW	24	CBJ	26	15.1	18	26	97	18	87
6	Jake Guentzel	LW	28	PIT	40	15.9	6	2	40	30	9
7	Elias Pettersson	C	23	VAN	32	17.3	71	170	62	31	82
8	Nikolaj Ehlers	LW	26	WPG	28	12.1	6	2	37	29	28
9	Andrei Svechnikov	LW	22	CAR	30	11.6	17	28	66	123	70
10	Timo Meier	RW	26	SJS	35	10	5	9	19	47	36
11	Jason Robertson	LW	23	DAL	41	16.5	30	155	46	116	45
12	Matt Duchene	RW	31	NSH	43	13.2	50	49	18	70	12
13	Vladimir Tarasenko	RW	30	STL	34	12.9	49	75	23	74	17
14	Jack Eichel	C	25	VGK	14	10.5	40	26	67	123	46
15	Brock Boeser	RW	25	VAN	23	13.2	31	160	27	28	14
16	Tage Thompson	C	24	BUF	38	10.9	24	24	37	41	59
17	Adrian Kempe	LW	26	LAK	35	11.5	29	8	79	33	61
18	Cole Caufield	RW	22	MTL	23	12.4	42	30	50	76	90
19	Josh Norris	C	23	OTT	35	18.8	55	186	31	5	27
20	Max Pacioretty	LW	33	CAR	19	11.3	9	39	59	12	30

LEGEND
Goals: Goals scored in 2021-22
Shoot%: Individual shooting percentage
SAT/G: NHL rank in shot attempts per game in 2021-22
Rush Shots: NHL rank in shot attempts produced off the rush per game in 2021-22
Slot Shots: NHL rank in shot attempts from the slot in 2021-22
1xer: NHL rank in one-timer attempts in 2021-22 (shots attempted immediately following a pass without shooter first establishing control of the puck)
xG: NHL rank in the number of goals a skater was expected to have scored in 2021-22 given the quantity and quality of their opportunities.

Under Consideration (in alphabetical order): Viktor Arvidsson, Sam Bennett, Filip Forsberg, Jordan Kyrou, Brad Marchand, Jonathan Marchessault, William Nylander, Mikko Rantanen, Jeff Skinner, Tyler Toffoli.

As you can see, the player with the best pure shot – perhaps Patrik Laine – didn’t find his way to the top of the list. Pastrnak led the entire league last season in shot attempts per game and was inside the Top 10 in three other categories, which is incredibly impressive considering 11 of the best forwards in the game are already in the separate Franchise bucket.

Among the most frequent questions discussed with hockey operations executives: Are both Matt Duchene and Filip Forsberg shooters? Is Jack Eichel a shooter or a power forward given his ability to enter the zone strongly with the puck? Is Viktor Arvidsson, one of the top volume shooters in the league, worthy of making the cut? You will find those answers above in the rankings.

There was no shortage of tough calls. Given Boeser’s emergence as a net-front power play specialist last season, he warranted significant consideration for the Net-Front Scorer classification. Using data from Stathletes to help separate Shooters from Net-Front Scorers, the shooters typically had a major drop-off in shots from the slot compared to shots from the inner-slot, the more exclusive area on the ice closer to the net. They also generally fared much worse in deflections compared to one-timers, where the shooter is always looking to show off his wares and bring butts out of the seats.

Daily Faceoff Archetype Rankings Series

Part I: Explainer / Franchise Players
Part II: Clutch
Part III: Distributor
Part IV: Shooter

Up Next: Power Forward

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