What do the 2024-25 shooting percentages say about the 2025-26 Canucks?

They say you can’t really account for luck. But sometimes, you can count it.

In the sport of hockey, ‘puck luck’ is measured in a handful of different ways, but most frequently through shooting percentage – especially on a year-by-year basis. One of the simplest forms of analysis is to look at a player’s shooting percentage in any one year and then compare it to their career average. If a player happens to be scoring on way more shots than they typically do, they’re probably receiving good puck luck. If the opposite is happening, they just might be snake-bitten.

This can then be used for predictive purposes. A player with an above-average shooting percentage can probably expect to see their goal totals regress the following year. The opposite is true for a player with a below-norm shooting percentage.

Which raises an obvious question about what the shooting percentages of the most recent 2024-25 season might have to say about the chances of the 2025-26 Vancouver Canucks?

Players with Notably High 2024-25 Shooting Percentages

Jake DeBrusk

2024-25 Goals	2024-25 Shooting %	Career Shooting %
28	16.4%	12.4%

Makes sense to start with the team’s leading goal-scorer, no?

Many predicted a career year for the Canucks’ most marquee free agent signing of 2024, and DeBrusk delivered, to an extent. His 28 goals were the most he’s scored in any one season – though not his highest per-game rate of scoring in any one season. Still, few would say that DeBrusk played his absolute best hockey in 2024-25, and DeBrusk himself has said as much.

So, what does it mean that DeBrusk’s shots were a full 4% more successful this past season than they have been for the entirety of his prior career?

Honestly, it’s a bit of a mixed bag, and can be looked at in a few different ways. Does this mean DeBrusk received some inordinate puck luck in 2024-25? Almost certainly. But he also received plenty of ill luck of the regular variety, as the team around him sort of imploded and the 1C he was supposed to line up with, Elias Pettersson, experienced the worst season of his career. It could be seen as DeBrusk scoring a career-high in goals despite neither he nor his teammates having their best years.

There could also be something to the fact that 14 of DeBrusk’s 28 goals came on the power play, where the shooting is easier and percentages should be higher.

In any case, there’s reason to hope that DeBrusk can hit similar totals in years to come if he can find more consistency in his own game, and especially the game of whichever centre he lines up with.

That shooting percentage will inevitably come down, but the goals don’t necessarily have to at the same time.

Aatu Räty

2024-25 Goals	2024-25 Shooting %	Career Shooting %
7	20.6%	12.5%

Welcome to our most extreme case of the year.

Räty played in just 33 games and notched seven goals, a pace of about 17 over a full season. That’s not a bad rate for someone who was still technically an NHL rookie. But it came with an outlandish shooting percentage of 20.6%.

In Räty’s 15 NHL games prior to this year, he shot at a 12.5% rate – which is still pretty good, on average, for anyone. There’s no doubt that Räty has a good shot and can remain a high-percentage shooter throughout his career, but 20.6% is not sustainable.

Still, like DeBrusk, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Räty is going to score less in 2025-26. He’s almost certainly going to play more games and receive more ice time. A high of seven goals isn’t that tough to beat through playing – and shooting more – so Räty doesn’t have to get quite so lucky next year to succeed.

Brock Boeser

2024-25 Goals	2024-25 Shooting %	Career Shooting %
25	17.2%	14.1%

It takes a real sniper to carry a shooting percentage in the mid-teens over a lengthy period of time, and Boeser is a real sniper. His 14.1% career percentage is already exceptional, but then he beat it by more than 3% for 2025-26 – albeit on route to only 25 goals, which is nowhere near a career-high. His career-high, of course, came last year, when he scored 40 goals with an even higher shooting percentage of 19.6%.

The primary culprit here seems to be a lack of shots. Boeser fired just 145 shots through 75 games this past season, compared to 204 in 81 the season before. This was a team-wide issue, really, but it’s going to affect shooters like Boeser more than others.

Looking at his full NHL seasons, Boeser has gone from 16.2% to 12.4% to 9.5% to 16.3% to 11.8% to 10.1% to 19.6% to 17.2%. That’s quite a wide range of results, and it makes it hard to predict where any given season will go.

The safest money is always on Boeser regressing to that 14ish% mean, but then it’s also true that he’s exceeded 16% on four separate occasions – or half his NHL seasons.

Boeser has become a more consistent player over the past couple of years. Because of that, perhaps the predictions should err on the high side.

Kiefer Sherwood

2024-25 Goals	2024-25 Shooting %	Career Shooting %
19	13.5%	10.4%

You had to know Sherwood was going to show up on this list. Two years ago, he was in the AHL, and this year he exploded for 19 goals and 40 points. That almost has to involve some puck luck.

And, yes, his shooting percentage was up by about 3% above his previous career average. But that career average was already over 10% on a pretty small sample size, and without Sherwood ever having been used in scoring situations.

In other words, there’s not much of a long-term book on Sherwood, the scorer, yet. That 13.5% shooting percentage looks high for someone who’s not going to be a consistent top-six sniper, and we can expect it to come down a bit.

Then again, given his deployment and salary, Sherwood doesn’t need to hit 19 goals again to be considered a success. The eye-test says that Sherwood worked for the majority of his goals, as opposed to relying on lucky bounces, and that work ethic isn’t likely to change.

Drew O’Connor

2024-25 (Vancouver) Goals	2024-25 Shooting %	Career Shooting %
4	11.4%	8.5%

We’re not sure what to do with O’Connor’s placement on this list. He scored four goals in 31 games for the Canucks post-trade, exceeding his career average shooting percentage by 2.9%. That’s about the same amount as Boeser and Sherwood, so he bears mentioning. But it’s almost too small a sample size and too small a discrepancy to draw any meaningful conclusions from.

O’Connor was on pace for just 11 goals over a full 82-game schedule with the Canucks, but he scored 16 for the Penguins just last year. Expectations for O’Connor are a little undetermined at this point, and there’s not much to glean from his shooting percentage quite yet.

Players with Notably Low 2024-25 Shooting Percentages

Filip Chytil

2024-25 (Vancouver) Goals	2024-25 Shooting %	Career Shooting %
2	4.6%	9.5%

Here’s another player with too short a sample size to make much of. But, there’s still some interesting commentary we can offer vis-à-vis Chytil’s shooting percentage.

More of a playmaker than a sniper, Chytil has never had an exceptionally high percentage. But then he came to Vancouver, took a butt-load of shots – 78 in 15 games, or 5.2 per game – and only scored on two of them.

One can imagine a play-driver like Chytil coming to a low-shooting team like Vancouver mid-season and feeling the need to take more shots himself than usual, and that’s what it seems like happened.

That left Chytil with a shooting percentage of just 4.6%, which is less than half of his career average. That’s almost guaranteed to rebound, but then Chytil’s per-game shot totals should also probably come down.

Where Chytil’s goal totals wind up is far more dependent on his health than his shooting percentage, anyway?

Elias Pettersson

2024-25 Goals	2024-25 Shooting %	Career Shooting %
15	13.8%	16.3%

Pettersson is the most interesting case on this list.

Like Boeser, he’s a genuine sniper with a career shooting percentage in the mid-teens. Or, at least…he was.

For most players, a 3ish% drop in shooting percentage could be chalked up to bad puck luck. But anyone who watched Pettersson in 2024-25 will know there’s a lot more to it than fortune. Pettersson simply looks like a less dangerous – and less confident – shooter than he used to be, and that should naturally come with a decrease in shooting percentage.

But that was also the case somewhat in 2023-24, and Pettersson still shot at a 16.4% rate. A big difference in 2024-25 – and you’ve heard this before – is less shooting in general. Pettersson took just 109 shots in 64 games last year, or 1.7 a game.

If Pettersson, his health, and his self-esteem have rebounded as much over the offseason as many think they have, he should both shoot more and score at a higher rate on his shots in 2025-26 than he did in 2024-25.

One has to hope this translates into him scoring a lot more goals than 15, too.

Nils Höglander

2024-25 Goals	2024-25 Shooting %	Career Shooting %
8	9.6%	12.0%

All told, Höglander’s shooting percentage of 9.6% wasn’t as bad as one might have expected. But it’s all about the swing. Höglander went from a 20% shooting percentage and 24 goals last year to a third of the goals and half the shooting rate in 2024-25.

The shooting percentage drop was predictable and expected. But this was probably a bigger swing than anyone saw coming, and it was paired with a team-wide drop in shot totals. Expecting Höglander’s shooting percentage to get back to 20% is a fool’s hope, but it could definitely rebound to some extent. When it comes to the goal totals, however, it’s probably safe to say that the number of shots Höglander takes – and where in the lineup he takes them from – are the bigger factors.