Metapuck: Hockey's slap shot dead is dead. Now what?

Will it see a revival?

I used to write for Bloody Elbow, where I covered the UFC. Our resident grappling expert, T.P. Grant, had a column called “So Meta” where he’d explore the evolving trends in the sport, documenting the pendulum of fight strategies and tactics that would rise or fall. I mention it not just for context, but to give credit to those that inspire me. ‘So Meta’ was an awesome column, unique by any standard, and if you end up enjoying this series, then you should know who inspired it.  

Since I’m not done with my analogies, in competitive Magic: The Gathering (MtG), there are three predominant strategies at any given tournament: aggro, control, and combo. In terms of intent, they’re all completely different. One strategy attacks the board for the early victory, another controls the board for the late-game win, and the other looks for the perfect arrangement of cards to generate a deterministic advantage. However, an effective strategy is not enough. You have to effectively anticipate other, competing strategies. Think of it this way: if you’re a rock anticipating a bunch of scissors, but you end up against nothing but paper, well then it’s not gonna matter how heavy and strong you are.

Hockey is similar, as players forecast which strategies should be adopted based on trends, or conversely, which strategies can succeed in spite of those competing strategies that exist to beat them. We’ve seen this with Fast and Skill (Colorado), Big and Strong (Vegas), Top-Down Hockey, as in the teams that initiate with their biggest weapons (Washington), and what you might call Bottom-Up hockey, or the teams that succeed by hiding their weaknesses (Florida). This is all a gross oversimplification of course (as is my MtG analogy: midrange Boomer Jund represent!), but that, in a nutshell, is the metagame — the game beyond the game.  

Just as hockey’s metagame is no different, so it goes for the players. It feels like just yesterday that defensemen who could skate, and could shoot like diet versions of Bobby Orr were unicorns. Now they’re a dime a dozen, just as their stay-at-home predecessors were. It used to be that power play formations needed three forwards and two defensemen. Now it’s standard to have a four-forward setup (the five-forward setup has yet to catch on I guess). However, strategies evolve, and as they do, so do the players. For every team that effectively leverages the presence of a mobile blueline (like Colorado), there may be a team that effectively leverages ways to counteract a mobile blueline, like Vegas. For every team that effectively leverages an effective rush attack, like Edmonton, there may be a team that effectively leverages ways to defend it.    

And that brings us to the slap shot. It used to be a great way to attack from distance. It used to be a great way to fish for rebounds. It used to be a stone cold weapon. Al MacInnis. Shea Weber. PK Subban. Steven Stamkos. Alek Ovechkin. Zdeno Chara. Ryan Pulock. Mark Stone. Denis Gurianov. Phillipe Boucher. From great players to role players, some players just have that power slap talent. (The good kind, not Dana White’s obnoxious league he claims is the biggest sport on earth.)

We know the slapshot is dead, but how dead? Is the pendulum swinging back? Are teams like the Dallas Stars trying to bring it back, or are they among the group of teams who have either abandoned it completely, or simply don’t have the roster to leverage it effectively?

That’s what we’re here to find out.

Endangered or extinct?

In 2009, there were 25 teams with more than 500 slapshots. In 2018, there was only two. This year, not a single team crossed the 500-mark threshold. The team that came closest was the LA Kings with 354.

Fluto Shinzawa’s piece in The Athletic from 2022 is probably the most extensive coverage on the topic, obviously a big part of what inspired today’s piece, and the full read is absolutely worth more than just a quick gander. Nothing quite puts the death of the slapshot into perspective like the following graph.

Visual courtesy of Fluto Shinzawa.

The reasons for why are endless.

• Increased pressure on the puck (a lot is said about how skill has increased scoring, but not, as Ray Ferraro highlights, how it helped defense too)

• Revolution in stick technology, with players now able to bend their sticks for that whipping motion that allows for greater accuracy at farther range

• Inability of the slap shot to change angle, making it easier for goalies to read

• Use of skills coaches (speaking of, next week I’ll have a book review on Belfry Offense by skills coach Darryl Belfry)

• The 2005 crackdown on obstruction (maybe one of the biggest drivers IMO, as this is the rule that more or less phased out big slow defenders who could otherwise shortcut lameduck positioning with ‘illegal’ stickwork)

There’s also no question about the slap shot’s effectiveness, or lackthereof. While the data was regarding point shots, the classic bomb from the point still overlaps with the general data: from 2007 to 2017, point shots had a shooting percentage under five percent. Without traffic, that number dropped to one percent. And despite whatever you hear, point shots don’t actually create rebounds. Even when they do, the shot-taking team recovers the puck less than half the time.

Because this is a Stars blog, it’s probably worth discussing what makes this Stars-relevant. The Dallas Stars ranked 31st in slap shots taken this year, 29th in slapshot goals, and 26th in slapshot shooting percentage. So it would appear that Dallas is on the cutting edge of this growing trend.

But a shot’s a shot. And it’s worth asking if an old tool can still make new noise.

Can the slapshot be revived?

If you were to ask Stars Norris candidate, Miro Heiskanen, about whether or not the slapshot is dead, he’d probably laugh. While the league has been trending down, Heiskanen has been trending up. In the 2021-2022 season, Heiskanen took 23 slap shots (ranking #110 among defensemen), scoring on two. The following year, he took 28 slap shots, scoring on one of them. That brought his rank up to 62nd among defenders. This year that rank shot up to 16th, as he took more slapshots than ever, tallying 49 of them, and scoring on one.

For Stars fans, we know why that is. A big deal was made about Heiskanen improving his slapshot because he himself worked on it in the offseason, and he leveraged it a lot. We can argue — as I would — over whether this is a positive or negative development; an adjustment Heiskanen has had to make while being pigeonholed on his weakside. And it shouldn’t be lost on anyone that Heiskanen took a step back offensively this past season.

All the same, Heiskanen has routinely been one of hockey’s better rebound creators, ranking 9th this year, and 1st last year in generating rebounds among defenders per MoneyPuck. How much of that is due to slapshots, wrist shots, or what is anyone’s guess, but Heiskanen has made a concerted effort to threaten from the point.

Data and visual courtesy of Hockeyviz.

Heiskanen seems to be proof — along with others like Evan Bouchard — that a lost art is not necessarily a dead art.

This is something NHL skills coach Tim Turk, who has worked with defenders like Victor Hedman and P.K. Subban, believes in. While he agrees that positioning is better than ever, effectively neutering the shot itself, it’s still important for players to be educated on shooting mechanics, which the slap shot helps preserve. As he told Sonny Sachdeva at Sportsnet in 2019.

There’s one main reason that I still teach slapshots — the most effective thing that a slapshot does to your other shots is it gets your body into what I call a ‘stride formation’. If you take any type of loaded-position slapshot, as you’re releasing the puck, your right leg goes back like you’re taking a skating stride. So when that leg goes back, it sets your hip into a certain athletic position — when your hips follow your leg, they go back as well, and that means your shoulders and chest go forward. So, if I’m finding it challenging to fine-tune [a player] getting that stride formation back to help lower their posture, then I introduce the slapshot. Because when they take the slapshot they get low automatically, they don’t even realize what they’re doing. And then I just try to transition that slapshot formation, or their body formation, and instil it into their quick release.

Michael Coldham from Think Less Play Faster, while not necessarily talking about the slap shot (it’s important to distinguish point shots from slap shots), believes a low-to-high attack is critical in the playoffs when space in front of the net is less available. Because of that, it’s easy to see how an evolution of the slap shot could pay dividends.

The other missing piece here is special teams. Unfortunately the NHL doesn’t have shot type separated by even strength and special teams. But Arik Parnass once did his own tracking before he was smartly picked up by the Colorado Avalanche. The big finding? Slap shots have decreased over the years in favor of more wrist shots. It’s to easy to see why too. Among all shot types, slap shots have the lowest shooting percentage of all.

Data and visual courtesy of Arik Parnass.

Part of this is by design. As teams adopted a four-forward, one-defender setup, power plays became more about strict formations, and cleaner execution in close rather than old traditions about how best to create rebounds. But it’s worth noting that rebounds from slap shots on the power play did have a fairly positive connection to goals scored off rebounds. (Although they had a weak connection with creating loose pucks and rebound attempts.)

Data and visual courtesy of Arik Parnass.

This was a long time ago, however. And as Parnass highlights, his sample size was incredibly small.

For Stars purposes, some of this is moot. Dallas doesn’t have any big shooters. Tyler Seguin used to be, but no longer. The only one who has a bazooka is Nils Lundkvist, and he’s one healthy scratch away from being banished from victory green forever. Heiskanen, try as he might, is certainly developing a quality slap release, but to what end? Not only does the data make clear that it’s a bad idea to begin with, but nothing about Heiskanen’s slap shot itself makes me think it’s anything other than a reaction to needing to create more options off the limits of being stuck on his weakside. Even if that weren’t the case, he’s never been a big shooter in general.

I would never discourage a player from trying to develop more tools, however. Whatever the future holds for Heiskanen’s offense, at least he’s committed to improving it.

Some shoddy naval gazing

Reading Range by David Epstein, I can’t help but think of the cool story not about the Game Boy. In 1965, Nintendo had to compete with bowling to capture a nation’s attention (yes, bowling). To kickstart this war for Japan’s entertainment soul, Nintendo brought in a young electronics graduate named Gunpei Yokoi. Yokoi hadn’t yet invented the Game Boy, but he invented a lot of innovative things before then; just lots of cool shit using old things— he basically built Tinder in 1969 out of nothing more than a transistor and a galvanometer. He described his thought process as ‘lateral thinking with withered technology.’ His TED Talk Big Idea was that sometimes broader thinking about old technologies could be better than deeper thinking about newer ones.

Can the slapshot become that withered technology with a modern makeover? I don’t know. Is there a scenario where players are less likely to pressure lanes? Is it possible for players to have more time at the point? Is there a world where goalies will suddenly struggle with something inherently predictable?

Or is the slap shot simply the claw of Archimedes in a satellite world?