The "Worst Finishers" Chart and What It Misses About Jordan Staal
A graphic went around this week from Data Driven Hockey ranking the NHL's least efficient shooters over the last 10 seasons. Jordan Staal is fourth: 184.0 expected goals, 147 actual goals, 20.1 percent below expected.
I'm not going to tell you the math is wrong. It probably isn't. Staal has been a below-average finisher for a long time and anyone who's watched him fan on a breakaway knows it.
But look at the other nine names on that list before you decide what it means.
The list is one job description
Mikael Backlund. Brendan Gallagher. Brady Tkachuk. Jordan Staal. Corey Perry. Phillip Danault. Sam Bennett. Zach Hyman. Blake Coleman. Vincent Trocheck.
That's four shutdown centers and six guys who make a living standing in the blue paint getting cross-checked in the kidneys.
There is not one perimeter shooter on that list. Not one power play specialist. Not one guy whose job is to find soft ice and wait for a pass. Every single name belongs to a player who goes to the net, forechecks, kills penalties, or all three.
When a metric's bottom ten is a single archetype, the metric is measuring the archetype. That's not a knock on expected goals — it's a limitation the people who build these models talk about openly.
Why the model gets these guys wrong
Expected goals is mostly a location model. It takes where the shot came from, what type it was, whether it was a rebound or off the rush, and asks what an average NHL shooter converts from there.
What it can't see is whether you were in any position to shoot.
A one-timer from the slot off a cross-ice pass and a backhand jam at a loose puck from the same spot get priced about the same. The coordinates are identical. The outcomes are not, because in the first case the goalie has moved and you have your feet set, and in the second you're falling down with a defenseman's stick under your armpit.
Guys who generate their own chances by crashing the net bank an enormous amount of xG on plays where nobody was scoring. Guys who get fed by a playmaker on a set play bank less xG per goal. The model doesn't know who passed you the puck, because public models don't have good pre-shot movement data.
So the "underperformers" list fills up with net-front grinders, and the "overperformers" list fills up with guys who play with elite passers. That's the whole trick.
Two other things the chart doesn't account for
Deployment. Staal has spent a decade taking defensive-zone draws against the other team's best line, killing penalties, and getting close to zero power play time. His slot chances come off forechecks and turnovers, not off Aho walking the blue line and finding him in a seam.
Scale. The gap is 37 goals across 10 seasons. That's 3.7 a year, or roughly the difference between a 14-goal season and an 18-goal season. Real, but not the difference between a useful player and a bad one.
The part that should have killed this take
Sam Bennett is seventh on the list at minus-17.1 percent.
Bennett won the Conn Smythe in 2025 after leading the NHL with 15 goals in 23 playoff games. He tied Corey Perry — who is fifth on this same list — for the NHL lead in high-danger goals that postseason.
Zach Hyman is eighth. Hyman scored 54 goals in 2023-24 and 16 in the 2024 playoffs.
Jordan Staal is fourth. In June he won the Conn Smythe at 37 years old.
So the back-to-back playoff MVPs both appear on a graphic labeled "the worst finishers in the NHL," along with the guy who tied one of them for the high-danger goal lead. If a statistic keeps flagging the players who decide championships, the statistic is answering a narrower question than the headline suggests.
What the number actually says
Here's the honest version, and I think it's more interesting than either the chart's framing or the fan cope.
Jordan Staal takes a lot of hard shots from good places and converts fewer of them than a league-average shooter would. That's true. It's been true for 14 years. He is not, and never was, the offensive player Pittsburgh drafted second overall in 2006.
He also generated 184 expected goals over a decade while playing the most defensively demanding forward role in the sport. Getting to 184 xG as a shutdown center is the achievement. The conversion rate is the price of getting there — those chances exist because he went to the ugly parts of the ice, and the ugly parts of the ice are where finishing percentage goes to die.
Expected goals models are good. They're better than what we had. But they were built to evaluate shot generation, and this graphic is using them to evaluate a skill they only measure indirectly, on a population where the error runs in one direction.
The short version
Staal isn't on that list because he's a bad hockey player. He's on it because he does a job that xG models systematically underrate, alongside nine other guys who do the same job.
He's got a Conn Smythe and a ring. The chart doesn't have a column for that.
