Taylor Hall has found himself in an unusual place of late: included in trade rumours.
Just halfway through his fifth NHL season, it’s being suggested that the 2010 first-overall pick is no longer an untouchable piece of the Edmonton rebuild. If those reports are true, it’s a damning indictment of a management group that so far hasn’t been able to get its team moving in the right direction because Hall is the least of the Edmonton’s problems.
The whispers are coming as Hall struggles through what is certainly the most challenging season of his NHL career. It’s not just that the Oilers are struggling, or that another head coach has been fired; in Edmonton, bad play by the team and resultant firings have become nearly as much of an annual tradition as cold weather in December. It’s that Hall himself seems stubbornly unable to break out of a scoring slump that has some questioning his value to the franchise.
Hall has just 29 points in 41 games, and the 0.71 points-per-game that works out to is the worst he’s posted since his rookie year, when he had 42 points in 65 contests (0.65). Hall told the Edmonton Journal’s Jim Matheson that a knee injury suffered earlier in the year was part of the problem but nowhere near the whole answer. “I came back too early. For the first two or three weeks, I wasn’t able to play the way I wanted, but I can’t use the knee as an excuse for the last month or so,” he said. “I am healthy enough to play well. There’s guys battling through a lot more than I am.”
Hall isn’t having a good year, and he certainly needs to shoulder a portion of the blame for that. But the issues with his game are go beyond him and, in a lot of cases, should not be expected to last, which is why it’s insanity to make big decisions based on them.
One key item is the Oilers’ power play, which has been a disaster all season. Only two teams have scored fewer than the 5.0 goals per hour that Edmonton has managed on the man advantage, and that’s the kind of thing that kills the offensive numbers of a team’s star players. It’s not a coincidence that Ryan Nugent-Hopkins is scoring at by far the lowest power-play rate of his career (his points-per-hour is less than half what it was last season) or that Jordan Eberle is just a hair above his career-worst power-play scoring rate.
Hall too has been affected. He’s shooting more than ever (he’s averaging more than 19 shots per hour, by far the best total of his career) but his shooting percentage has plummeted, from a career power-play rate of 20.1 percent all the way down to 7.9. Setting a career-high in shots per hour doesn’t help when those shots turn to goals at one-third of the rate they normally do. Further, Hall is also one assist per hour (1.53) lower this season than his career average (2.55).
So the question for the Oilers is whether Hall’s scoring slump on the power play is indicative of problems in his game, or rather merely a symptom of a generally dysfunctional man advantage. Given that Hall’s shooting more than ever and that Nugent-Hopkins and Eberle are fighting through similar problems, the answer to that seems blindingly obvious.
What about at even-strength? Hall’s numbers are down at five-on-five, but he’s picking up assists at pretty much the same rate he always has. From 2010 to ’14, Hall collected 1.5 assists per hour of even-strength play; this year he’s at 1.3, which is a difference of exactly two assists over 41 games. If there’s a problem, it’s a goal-scoring problem.
It’s obvious that there are two different factors that influence goal-scoring. The first is shot volume; all else being equal, more shots mean more goals. The second is shooting efficiency; if a player can find a way to take higher-quality shots he’s going to score more goals, even if his shot volume doesn’t change.
The problem with shooting percentage is that it tends to bounce around, even for the best players in the game; that’s one of the reasons why it’s exceedingly common to hear of goal-scorers being described as streaky. Take Claude Giroux, who finished third in Hart Trophy voting last year, but didn’t score a goal in his first 15 games despite taking 31 shots. These things happen and over time they tend to even out.
Hall’s been shooting at a 3.8 percent clip since coming back from his knee injury; that’s 30 games in which less than one shot in 25 beat the goalie. We don’t know what’s driving that, but we do know it won’t last; players can perform well or poorly for short stretches but over time tend to gravitate to their established level of ability, which in Hall’s case is a lot higher.
That’s not to say Hall’s blameless here. He might be doing something differently, or may have some nagging injury that’s affecting him—but even if he doesn’t, he’s been shooting with less frequency than he once did. Over his career he’s fired an average of nearly one shot for every six minutes he plays; this year it’s more like one shot for every 10 minutes. It’s hard to interpret that as anything other than a slip in the player’s performance.
But the unifying item here is that none of this can be expected to last. Hall’s shooting percentage will rebound; it’s likely that his shot rate will, too. The problems on the power play are almost certainly not of his creation. If the Edmonton Oilers look at his performance this year and decide he’s expendable because of it, they’re making a bad decision based on a temporary slump, the kind of decision that’s almost certainly going to make them look foolish for at least the next decade.