Don’t cry because the Taylor Hall era is over; smile because we can finally dig into what on this third planet from the sun just happened?

I’ve looked into the well documented struggles with finishing that Hall has had in 2021, so I’ll only touch on where that finished off in Buffalo. In only 46 of 10,000 simulations did his shot profile result in only 2 goals. Horrible personal luck, for sure, as the simulation peaked with 8 goals being the result in 1440 of the 10,000 simulations. With a 37 game sample, there’s still a luck aspect that can’t be written off yet. But, with nearly half the conventional season encompassed in that sample, shooting talent has to be at least somewhat evaluated.

Moneypuck currently estimates Hall being between 4% and 5% below average shooting talent through their Bayesian shooting talent calculation method.

While this true shooting talent is just an estimate, we can accommodate this estimate into their expected goal calculations for Hall’s shots and anticipate a number of expected goals for his Sabres tenure that is closer to the 2 he actually scored.

So even with the adjustment, we can estimate that Hall’s shot profile would’ve resulted in only 2 goals less than 1% of the time, and we still would’ve expected between 8 and 9 goals as an average expected goal value. The near 5% diminished shooting talent did not cause a substantial decrease in expectation. Long story short, we wouldn’t attribute Hall’s lack of goals to Hall being bad at shooting.

And yes, it’s definitely still shocking that Hall left Buffalo with such an underwhelming stat line. But like I said, it’s a case where now that it’s over, there’s no waiting around and choosing to either (a) keep the hope that the fortune will turn around or (b) give up and write Hall off as a Sabre. He’s gone, we’re allowed to play the hindsight game. So let’s keep going. We looked at goals, now let’s look at the bigger picture. 

The Sabres powerplay has been its own enigma this year, with and without Hall, so 5v5 will be a focus for comparing Hall’s Sabres tenure with his past seasons. Starting with ice time, Hall’s ice time at even strength was about 30-45 seconds less than he received for most of his time with the Devils and late seasons with the Oilers. (Per Natural Stat Trick)

Since the ice time from season to season is very substantial, the time on ice won’t be a major factor in a change in counting statistics.

In the assists column, Hall still got to a respectable 17 assists. Only a 37 assist pace for an 82 game season, but certainly not as much of a drought in that column as in the goal column. Looking further, however, the combination of his lowest Primary Assists per 60 since his rookie year and an uptick in Secondary Assists at the same time could suggest that his production was padded by “hockey assists” at even strength. The eye test comp for that would be a surprise that he even reached 17 assists on the season.

Now moving from the results to the sample from which they came – shots and shot assists. From the shot perspective, even with the major lack of luck at 6 or so goals below expectation, 8 goals in 37 games is a 17-18 goal pace for an 82 game season, which, based on the contract he signed and the projections based on his previous seasons, still would’ve left much on the table.

The Kruger effect? Sure, but at three less shots attempts per 60 would be about an extra shot attempt per game considering his ice time regularly ranged between 15 and 20 minutes per game. Hall’s 6.12 expected goals at 5v5 (Natural Stat Trick) on 121 5v5 shot attempts as a Sabre is about a 5.1% shooting percentage. If Hall took one extra shot per game at 5v5 in each of his 37 games, Hall could’ve expected between 1 and 2 extra goals. Again, not a perspective changing difference, but this is another example of the countless downsides of Hall’s diminished shot attempts this season.

For shot assists, the results are more difficult to delve into because they are limited to Corey Sznajder’s tracking data, but it’s still good to get a quick glimpse with a sample of 172 minutes of 5v5 ice time. A near 4.5% of 5v5 primary shot assists to result in a goal is a tad below average while about 9.5% of 5v5 secondary shot assists to result in a goal is a tad above average, considering that the shooting percentage league wide usually falls between 6% and 7%.

	Primary	Secondary
Actual Assists	6	5
Shot Assists in 172.77 minutes of tracked 5v5 total ice time	43	17
Actual Assists per 60	0.67	0.56
Approximate Shot Assists per 60	14.93	5.90
Percent of Shot Assists per 60 to result in a goal	4.49%	9.5%

Final Thoughts

We can’t go look too deeply into the shot assist data from years past and compare them to each other because of the limited samples from each season that Corey can provide, so this appears to be the end of the journey. Not surprisingly, there’s several “what ifs” that could’ve changed Hall’s fortunes:

• Hall probably would’ve started to see the puck go in the net more at some point (Thanks Boston for making that probably closer to a reality)
• A more offensive-centric offensive system would’ve probably seen Hall get some extra shots and shot assists in every game which would’ve given him more chances for points at 5v5. 
• If Jack Eichel wasn’t battling injuries throughout his limited season, he and Hall would’ve put up more points from assisting on each other’s likely extra handful of goals. Plus, in breaking news, many of his other linemates this season had their own issues on offense
• The powerplay had its own issues, most of which were systematic after Eichel went out, so that is its own deterrent to the cause

All in all, a lot of this showed what the collective fanbase already knew about the Hall era in Buffalo: It was bad. I went into this hoping that there would be a more clear reason the points didn’t show up this season, but that’s hockey for ya. I’m not in the camp of people that think Hall is a bad NHL player, but man his results are weird for the attempts attached to his shots and passes. Oh well; we move on.

Photo Credit: Bill Wippert/NHLI via Getty Images