Track your player's shots, not just the goals

In youth hockey, most players on a team do not score tonight. It is arithmetic: three or four goals per game for fifteen skaters. A parent counting only goals therefore sees a column of zeros for weeks, and a kid reading that column concludes they did nothing. The shot tracker says otherwise: they shot four times, three on net, two from the slot. They did exactly what a player is supposed to do. The goal will come.

It is also the most honest measure of progression for a player who is learning. Shots per game climb when they dare to shoot instead of passing, when they find the open spaces, when they reach the offensive zone with the puck. Those three things can be trained; luck cannot. A logbook that keeps shots shows the work long before the scoresheet rewards it.

A shot on goal would have ended up in the net without the goalie: it was saved or it went in. A missed shot went wide, hit the post or was blocked by an opponent before arriving. A blocked shot, on a player's own sheet, is something else: an OPPONENT's shot your player stopped with their body or stick, a defensive statistic. The three are logged separately, because they tell three stories. The full definitions are on the shot on goal, missed or blocked page.

In RinkLog, a skater has two shot buttons: Shot on goal for the shot on net, Missed shot for the one that goes wide or gets blocked. The two together give individual Corsi (iCF), the simplest measure of the pressure a player creates. The Blocked shot button counts the opponent's shots they stopped. A defenseman will see plenty, a winger almost never, and that is normal.

Shooting percentage is goals divided by shots on goal. A player who scores 3 goals on 30 shots on goal sits at 10%. Over one game, that number means nothing: 1 goal on 1 shot is 100%, 0 on 6 is 0%, and neither describes the player. Over ten games, it starts to tell a story: a player who shoots a lot from distance will have a low percentage and a high iCF; a player who only shoots from the slot will have the opposite.

What it does not say: the quality of the opposing goalie, the zone the shots come from, the game situation. That is why RinkLog never reads it alone. Shot zones weigh every shot by where it comes from, and expected goals turn that into what a player SHOULD have scored with those shots. A low shooting percentage with plenty of slot shots is bad luck that corrects itself. A low percentage with shots from the blue line is a habit that can be worked on.

The reading rule is the same as for every statistic on a young player: the ten-game trend, never the isolated game. A 10 year old shoots more and more often as the season goes on, and that is the news. The percentage will follow or not that year; it is not the question. Our page on youth hockey levels says at what age shooting becomes a statistic worth tracking.

During the shift, your player shoots: you tap Shot on goal or Missed shot, and that is it. The button lights up, the counter climbs, your eyes go back to the ice. If the shot goes in, you tap Goal instead: two taps, where the shot came from on the half ice, then which corner of the net, and the shot on goal is counted automatically with the goal. No shot is ever logged twice.

If you turn on shot zones in the player's profile, every shot asks for a second tap: its starting point on the half ice. That is what feeds the shot map and expected goals. Logging zones is free; viewing the heat maps and game-by-game shot maps is part of Premium. So you can start logging from the first game and decide later whether you want to see them.

Between two shifts, the correction panel lets you add the shot you saw too late or remove the one you tapped twice. Shooting percentage, iCF and the ten-game trend compute after the horn, with no formula to know. All of it works without a signal at the rink, like the rest of the scoring app.

Once the number of shots is counted, two questions follow naturally. Where do they shoot from? The shot zones page shows the map, slot, point, circles, sharp angles, and why one shot from the slot is worth several from the blue line. How do they shoot? The four types of hockey shots explain the wrist shot, the slap shot, the snap shot and the backhand. In RinkLog, the shot type is optional: with shot zones on, a wheel offers wrist, slap, backhand, deflection or deke after the shot location, and one tap skips it when the play is moving too fast.

And for the goalie at the other end, the same logic applies in reverse: every shot faced counts, and RinkLog’s goalie mode logs them with their location to produce high-danger save percentage. The details are on the goalie statistics page.