Into The Weeds: Has Dallas figured out the rush attack?

That's what today is here to find out.

“Why is the offense so bad?”

For years, this was the question under former coach Rick Bowness. Under Bowness (slash Jim Montgomery), each roster during his tenure was bottom third in shooting percentage since 2007. That roster that went to the Cup Finals shot 6.71 percent at even strength, which ranked #484 out of 520 rosters in the analytics era.

We tend to think of save and shooting percentages as things that ‘regress to the mean.’ Teams may have the hot hand or the hot glove for awhile, but they always come back down to earth in some form. Except some teams are equipped with enough shooters to overperform, just as some teams have elite goalies who can do likewise. In the same way, a team’s shooting percentage may have some explanation. For Bowness, that reason — I maintain — was the lack of rush offense.

As we know, rush offense is kind of a big deal. Jennifer Lute Costella really led the way many years back, undertaking a massive study on goals. Her original finding was that 57 percent of goals were scored within the first seven seconds of entering the zone. Further research revealed how much higher shooting percentage is on the rush. But rush offense also has knock-on effects for other things, like how teams better leverage it in leading gamestates, as discovered by Meghan Chayka, versus trailing situations, which rush offense struggles in.

But things change, as Corey Sznajder wrote about this year. As teams have become better at defending the rush, generating rush offense is harder than ever. Have the Dallas Stars figured out how to generate more on the rush, where they’ve previously struggled with this season? As always, major thanks to Corey for his superhuman work.