Last Year's Top Twenty Scorers - How Will They Fare?

We have spoken here about Expected Goals before - a quick and dirty way of predicting how much a player will score next season. Mostly for fun, we conjured up this list, to see how far right or wrong Expected Goals will be.

This chart is fairly self-explanatory - the Exp Shooting % is the player's averaged shooting percentage over the last 4 seasons. Expected Shots/Game are his Shots/Game averaged over the last four seasons. Coefficient is an unscientific way of indicating that most of these players should expect to increase their shots/game next year versus the average of their last four seasons. We should have done this by averaging their previous two seasons, then adding half the difference + some arbitrary coefficient by age, but we did not do that. Anyway, it shall be interesting to see how the season shakes out for these twenty players:


Alex Ovechkin is 7 goals ahead of everyone else, and we didn't even think that his SOG increase from last season is sustainable.