One of the things we’ve learned during hockey’s analytics revolution is that shooting percentage can be deceiving. When a player has a season in which the shots are going in at a higher rate than his established career number, we should be suspicious that the year will turn out to be a fluke, or at least an outlier, and not a new long-term norm. In other words, just because somebody gets lucky one year doesn’t mean we should expect them to repeat that in the future.
This is my way of managing expectations for this year’s oddly specific predictions.