Victor Olofsson got off to a hot start this season with the Buffalo Sabres. He scored five goals in his first eight games of the season. The 25-year-old then missed eight games with an injury. In his 14 games since returning, Olofsson has yet to score.

He has been a streaky scorer throughout his career with the Sabres. However, when you look at his shooting splits before and after his injury this year you’ll notice some changes in his approach.

I’ve been watching his shooting data throughout the last few weeks, but I decided to dive a little deeper with his goalless drought continuing. I’m going to take you through a variety of shooting statistics and compare them between his post and pre-injury splits. We’ll look at shot attempts, shot distance, shot type, and individual shot quality.

Shot Attempts

We’ll start at the highest level by reviewing actual shot attempts and then we’ll work our way down.

You can see in the chart above from Evolving Hockey’s data that Olofsson is shooting less per 60 minutes as he’s down from 14.50 shot attempts to 12.48. That’s not much of a change, but where we see our biggest difference is unblocked shot attempts per 60 minutes. He’s down to 8.74 from 12.30 before the injury.

In the first month of the season, only 15% of his shot attempts were getting blocked. In the last 14 games that has jumped to 30% of his shots being blocked by the opponent. I have a theory on why this may be the case, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

One assumption that can be made is that Olofsson is shooting less because he’s still nursing the injury. Don Granato told the Buffalo media before he returned that shooting was the main issue he was dealing with. I was curious if he was getting away from using his slap shot, especially on the power play. Therefore, I went through the NHL play-by-play data on the twins’ site.

Turns out this isn’t the case.

You’ll see in the chart above, that his wrist and slap shot make up roughly the same percentage of his shot type in both scenarios. Now, just because he’s still able to take a slap shot with the same consistency, doesn’t mean it has the same power or accuracy behind it. It could be one reason that his shots are getting blocked more often.

Shot Quality

Where we see the most significant change in Olofsson’s shooting his individual shot quality (ixG/60). In Evolving Hockey’s model, his ixG/60 in all situations was 1.13. Since returning from the injury that number has dropped to 0.47 over the last 14 games.

I went back into the play-by-play data again to see if Olofsson is shooting from further away. This is only one aspect that makes up an expected goal model, but it had some significance to this analysis. Before his injury, his average shot distance on all unblocked shot attempts was 32.1 feet in all situations. Post-injury, his average shot distance is 36.7 feet. A difference of 4.6 feet may not feel significant, but it is.

Micah McCurdy breaks down the impact on shooting percentage based on distance in his isolated impact model.

Above are two snippets from his write-up that are relevant to Olofsson. He relies heavily on his wrist and slap shot as we saw from the play-by-play data above. As you can see, the further away you get from the net and outside the face off dots, your likelihood of scoring drops by a large amount. This is why that difference of four feet is significant. Especially when it comes to wrist shots, which make up over 50% of his shot type.

Also, don’t forget the drastic change in the percentage of his shots being blocked. It’s harder to get pucks through to the goaltender when you’re shooting from further away.

Another area that could be causing the dip in his individual shot quality is the lack of rush opportunities. According to Natural Stat Trick, his rush attempts per 60 minutes is down from 0.40 to 0.31. That’s not a significant change, but not having those opportunities will reduce the likelihood of him scoring goals.

All three of his 5 on 5 goals this season were rush plays. A rebound goal off the rush against the Tampa Bay Lightning, a transition opportunity against the Boston Bruins, and a blocked shot that led to a breakaway against the Los Angeles Kings.

Conclusion

There could be a variety of factors at play here as to why we’re seeing this change in Olofsson’s shooting. It’s possible he’s still nursing the injury and it’s forcing him to change up the way he’s playing.

Another impact could be his linemates. In the first eight games of the season, he played with Rasmus Asplund and Tage Thompson. When he returned, he was on a line with Thompson and Jeff Skinner. Losing Asplund, a player he acknowledged he had chemistry with, could be impacting his scoring output. That’s not a shot at Skinner, but Asplund is a different style of player. One that could be a better match with Olofsson.

The good news is that while he’s not scoring, he’s still making a positive impact offensively. He has continued to put up points with assists and is still on pace to lead the team at the end of the year. It’ll be interesting to see when he gets into a scoring groove again if the shooting data move back towards what we saw in the first eight games of the year.

Data via: Natural Stat Trick, Hockeyviz, and Evolving Hockey

Photo Credit: Sara Schmidle/NHLI via Getty Images