Now that he’s scoring at even strength, we’re seeing what Patrik Laine is truly capable of as a goal scorer. This week, we drill into how he’s evolving the use of his shot, and why it’s not out of the question he could eventually score 70 in a season. Plus, we look into Duncan Keith’s decline and his value to the Blackhawks, and other performances around the NHL.
SPOTLIGHT PERFORMANCE
Patrik Laine started this season with a weird streak, scoring basically at will on the power play but failing to get on the board at 5-on-5 for 18 straight games. His only goal that wasn’t on the power play was an empty-netter that completed a hat trick against the Florida Panthers in Finland.
He had eight goals in those 18 games and the crazy thing is, despite not having any at 5-on-5, that’s a 36-goal pace. Pretty good for most players, but maybe a little disappointing for Laine.
Since then, Laine has scored 13 goals in six games and is the NHL’s leading goal scorer with 21 on the season and he’s played fewer games than Jeff Skinner and David Pastrnak, the two players right behind him.
Laine’s shot rates and scoring chance numbers have stayed very steady through his hot and cold streaks, so there’s not a whole lot that has changed outside of him really feeling it and not being snake bitten anymore. The question I have about Laine isn’t how this hot streak came about, because it’s just a mix of his shooting percentage normalizing and great offensive work he’s put in all season — but what level can he get to?
To get the answer, we have to look at his whole career.
When Laine was a rookie, he was primarily a perimeter shooter. In fact, just 42.8 per cent of his shot attempts came from the slot, which was a big reason why a lot of stats savvy people around the NHL weren’t buying his sky high shooting percentage. Even if he was a generational shooter, you were taking a leap of faith to believe he’d be able to score at a rate of 17.6 per cent when he wasn’t creating scoring chances.
Of course, since then Laine has shot at an even higher rate, and has actually increased his shooting percentage each season. That includes this one so far, where he’s scoring on 20.2 per cent of his shots.
Laine has done this while increasing his shot rate at 5-on-5 from 4.71 shot attempts per 20 minutes as a rookie, to 5.81 last season, to 6.3 this season, and he hasn’t done so by just spamming shots from low percentage areas.
In fact, in terms of raw numbers, Laine is getting fewer shots from the perimeter than ever before and has increased his scoring chances each year.
Laine’s average shot is drifting inward from the boards and closer to the middle, meaning that while he’s moving closer to the net, he’s also shooting from areas that give him a better angle.
Laine is by no means a net-front guy, and he shouldn’t be, but dominating the high slot instead of the perimeter makes his generational shot even more dangerous, and that’s been on full display lately.
With a shot like his and the way he’s developing how he uses it, it’s not out of the question Laine will score 70 in a season.
His passing game is also evolving. Laine is completing more passes to the slot than ever before, and while he hasn’t been rewarded for that addition to his game yet with only three assists this season, don’t be surprised when those start rolling in, too. And with this element in his game also improving, defences are having to second guess what he’s going to do with the puck a bit, which also improves his shooting.
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THE QUESTION
This week Steve Dangle had the Blackhawks on his mind, and he wanted to know specifically about Duncan Keith:
Is Duncan Keith washed up, or have the Blackhawks just gotten much worse around him? Maybe both?
This is an interesting one to me, because there was a lot of talk last year of Keith being terrible. But while he was clearly nowhere near his usual level of play and the publicly available data suggested he had a pretty objectively bad season, when incorporating SPORTLOGiQ data for my summer ranking project for Sportsnet, his past three seasons still ranked 15th among all defencemen. Just last season Keith ranked 34th, in between Darnell Nurse and Justin Faulk.
Even with those more favourable rankings though, the decline in his game is obvious, as he ranked fourth in 2016-17, and 14th in 2017-18. The drop in his play is fairly precipitous over the past two seasons, but even so he remained a strong No. 2 defenceman, even a fringe No. 1. So the question is whether or not he’s dropped further this season.
Keith is currently on a 29-point pace if he plays every game in 2018-19, and his goal scoring troubles have continued with zero so far. But looking at how the Blackhawks perform with Keith on the ice compared to when he’s not could tell us a different story.
The season is young, but so far it looks like Keith’s play has taken a big move in a positive direction, with his presence influencing the Blackhawks’ play for the better.
Keith’s offensive ability has absolutely dried up. He’s seen a fairly linear decline in his involvement in creating scoring chances at 5-on-5 over the past three years, from more than three per 20 minutes, to less than two this year.
The thing is, Keith was never primarily an offensive defenceman. He isn’t Brent Burns or Erik Karlsson — Keith was a defensive and transition beast who was an excellent support player in the offensive zone, and a lot of those traits from his prime years remain at age 35.
Keith is still excellent at blocking passes in the defensive zone. Among Blackhawks players, he allows the fewest odd-man rushes, with the second-highest zone entry denial rate on the team after Erik Gustafsson.
It’s more than fair to say that Keith is no longer an elite player, few 35-year-olds are in the NHL nowadays, but he’s better than his offensive production would lead you to believe.
BUY OR SELL
• Sidney Crosby has 14 points in his past eight games, and this recent hot streak has him leading the entire league in scoring chances created per 20 minutes at 5-on-5 with 10.7, even more than Connor McDavid’s 9.95. At 31 years old, Sid is far from done.
• There was a debate recently about who you’d rather have between Patrik Laine and Mitch Marner. That it was even a question must have made some Jets fans very angry. I guess it comes down to whether you want a great playmaker or a generational scorer on the wing. I’ll go with the guy I believe has a realistic shot at 70 goals in a season, sorry Mitch.
• Everyone knows the RFA market is crazy this summer, a lot of players are going to cash in big. Marner, Mikko Rantanen, Auston Matthews, Patrik Laine, Sebastian Aho, Brayden Point, Matthew Tkachuk. A lot of money is going to change hands soon. Some under the radar names to watch on this front: Timo Meier and Alex Kerfoot are having great seasons at perfect times.
• The Dallas Stars are having trouble manufacturing scoring chances at 5-on-5 this season, and it hasn’t gotten better since John Klingberg has gone down to injury. Since November 8, they Stars are 27th in scoring chances — only the Oilers, Rangers, Coyotes, and Ducks are worse.
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