Does Shot Volume Drive the Penguins’ Success?

I’ve had an idea banging around in the back of my noggin for a while now. One that flies in the face of conventional wisdom when it comes to puck possession and metrics such as Corsi.

Namely, our Penguins success isn’t necessarily driven by shot volume. That more isn’t necessarily better.

Don’t get me wrong. As a rule it’s better to have the puck on your stick than not, especially in the offensive zone. But going strictly by memory, it seems to me we lost a fair amount of games going back to last season that we dominated in terms of shot activity. A notion further reinforced by the fact that we’ve endured three of those games only recently.

Against the Blues on Saturday night we piled up a ridiculous 83-45 edge in shot attempts, yet lost 4-2. Same thing with the previous contest against the Red Wings. We held an equally massive 71-47 advantage in shot attempts and lost 6-3.

Tuesday night against the Stars? We were up by a 74-62 count in shot attempts, yet lost 4-1.

Curiosity piqued, I decided to do some digging…and put my memory to the test.

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