October 30, 2024, 2:45 PM
There has never been a coaching strategy so thoroughly defeated as “shoot from everywhere.” My playing career wrapped up in about 2009, and to the very end I came across coaches who still preached some variation of it. “Let’s just get as many pucks to the net as we can” probably made sense to them, as most of my coaches played their hockey in the late-1980s and early-1990s, before goalies started to look like transformers.
In 1997 the NHL’s league-wide save percentage rose above .900 for the first time since 1972 and it wouldn’t look back, climbing steadily until 2016 when it topped out at a high of .915.
Below is a look at what the league-wide save percentage has done in the decade since.