Written by Wayne Chu

So I’m at the bar the other day and someone says to me that Montreal’s problem is that they can only defend against extremely offensive teams such as Washington and Pittsburgh.  Faced with the burly mass that is Philly, they couldn’t compete.  Is this true?

One of the ways is to look at this is by looking at where on the ice shots have been taken.  We’ve been playing around with the NHL game logs recently for some future analysis, and this provides us with some interesting details about all kinds of recordable events in hockey, such as hits, shots, giveaways, takeaways…etc.  (Our friends at Behind the Net and Puck Prospectus have been doing some fascinating work on this).  Using these data, we can figure out whether or not a) the shots Montreal was taking during the playoffs were quality shots, and b) whether the shots they gave up were quality.

But let’s set this analysis up by showing that where shots are taken matters:

(More after the jump)

This graph shows two things.  First, the blue line shows that the vast amount of shots over the course of the 2009/2010 regular season were taken between 8 and 16 feet, right in the slot (20% of all shots taken).  Around 3% of shots were taken right in front of the goalie, while 10% of shots came from the point.    What we would expect, right?

The graph also shows that the conversion rate (% of shots at each distance level that are goals) decreases at quite severely the further away you get from the net.  20% of all shots taken within 8 feet are goals.  At the point, you’re looking at a small percentage of shots that actually get converted.  So what’s the point?  It’s an obvious one: The closer you are to the net, the more likely you are to score.

So what was Montreal’s performance in the 2010 NHL playoffs like?

There are three things here reported in this graph.  The green line shows the percentage of total shots by distance for the first two rounds of Montreal’s playoff run.  The dotted purple line shows the percentage of shots in the third round.  And the red line shows the overall conversion-rate, playoff-wide.  This last line is there simply to show you that the regular season shot-to-goal conversion relationship is roughly the same in the playoffs.

So what can we see?  In the first two rounds, Montreal took very few shots right in front of the net, but did take the plurality of their shots (almost 20%) in that second-best ‘money zone’, the slot.  Overall, the distribution of the shots Montreal took were concentrated, somewhat, in the front-half of the attacking zone.

In the third round, however, the shots Montreal took were more evenly distributed.  Indeed, they took 10% of their shots right in front, but they also took 15% of their shots just beyond the half-boards.

Overall, what’s the conclusion?  Well from one perspective, you could argue that in the third round, Montreal did a good job of shooting the puck when they could get a shot off, rather than selectively picking when to shoot.  But from another perspective, you could say that this was an inefficient use of their shots.  Because the quality of the shot decreases exponentially the farther away you are from the net, it pays to concentrate your shots up front.

Of course, the differences are not that huge and there are loads of other factors that play into a whether you score and win games.  But the evidence here is that Montreal simply stopped producing the quality chances they needed in the third round to beat the Flyers.

In the next part of this 2-part series (probably in the next couple of days, depending on how much I continue procrastinating), I am going to analyze the shots that the Canadiens gave up against their opponents.  Those data are even more striking and will show that Montreal did have a problem defending against the more physical Flyers.