A Shootout Shooter Needs More Than 200 Tries Before Skill Outweighs Luck. The Most Anyone Has Taken Is 135.

The Devils lost all 13

The Devils’ 2013-14 shootouts ran from Oct. 4 to that April night against the Islanders, and they lost every one. No team has lost more shootouts in a season since the shootout began in 2005-06. Next on the list are the 2011-12 Montreal Canadiens (5-12), then four teams with 11 losses each: the 2006-07 Washington Capitals, who went 1-11, the 2011-12 Florida Panthers, the 2013-14 Capitals and the 2014-15 Philadelphia Flyers. Patrik Elias, a 34.7% shooter over his career, went 0 for 8. Travis Zajac went 0 for 6. The team’s 4 goals on 45 tries were the worst shooting by any team with 30 or more attempts in a season.

The goalies did not save them either. Brodeur went 0-5 and Cory Schneider 0-8, and between them they stopped 24 of 45 shots, about 53%. A league-average shootout goalie stops about 68%. On the day of the last loss, Leo Scaglione Jr. wrote in The Hockey Writers: “When looking at the standings there is one simple yet glaring reason the Devils are missing the playoffs and that would be their shootout record.”

New Jersey finished with 88 points. Detroit and Columbus took the East’s last two playoff places with 93 each. Each shootout win is worth one more point, so a coin-flip team’s six or seven wins in 13 would have put the Devils on 94 or 95. The sum is only a rough guide. Every other game of their season, and everyone else’s, would have run differently.

Two seasons earlier the same franchise went 12-4 in shootouts and reached the Stanley Cup Final. Ilya Kovalchuk scored on 11 of his 14 tries that season, the most shootout goals by anyone in a season since 2005-06. In July 2013 he left the NHL to go home to Russia, walking away from $77 million, as Allan Muir reported in Sports Illustrated. “This decision was something I have thought about for a long time going back to the lockout and spending the year in Russia,” Kovalchuk said. He had taken 6 of the Devils’ 29 shootout attempts in 2012-13 and scored 2. His exit may be one reason the next season went so badly, and the data cannot say how big a reason.

So did the Devils fail a test of skill, or keep losing a coin flip? Twenty-one seasons of shootouts give a fairly clear answer. For shooters it is mostly a coin. A shooter needs more than 200 tries before his record tells you more about him than about his luck, and the most anyone has taken is 135. Goalies and teams carry a little more from one season to the next. Only one record in this story is hard to put down to luck alone, and it is the Devils’ 0-13.

For ten seasons, most tied games ended in a shootout

The Devils had 13 chances to win one partly because, in those years, the shootout was where most tied games ended. The first one came on the first night after the lockout, Oct. 5, 2005, at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto. Daniel Alfredsson had tied the game for Ottawa with 1:02 left in the third period, the AP recounted. He took the league’s first shootout shot and scored. Jason Allison, Martin Havlát and Eric Lindros did not. Dany Heatley scored on the fifth shot, and Dominik Hašek had the win over Ed Belfour. The man who took the first shot turned out to be an ordinary shootout shooter. Over nine seasons of shootouts Alfredsson converted 32.2% of his tries, the league rate almost to the decimal.

The record for length fell on Dec. 16, 2014, at the BB&T Center in Sunrise, Fla. Florida beat Washington 2-1 after 20 rounds and 40 shots, and the shootout lasted 17 minutes, 43 seconds. None of the first six shooters scored. Alex Ovechkin opened the scoring in round 4, and the Panthers “were down to their last shot five times and answered with a goal each time,” the AP reported. In round 17, two defencemen, Washington’s Brooks Orpik and Florida’s Dylan Olsen, traded goals. Nick Bjugstad, on his second try, beat Braden Holtby to end it. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” said Roberto Luongo, Florida’s goalie. “It definitely wasn’t fun to be a part of it,” Holtby said, the AP reported. “I think we made some history tonight, and the chances of that happening again are one in a million,” said Barry Trotz, Washington’s coach.

That was the last season of four-on-four overtime. Under today’s rules a regular-season game tied after 60 minutes gets five minutes of three-on-three overtime, then a shootout: three shooters a side, then sudden death. Playoff games never go to one; they play full 20-minute overtime periods. The shootout winner is credited with one extra goal in the final score and in its team goal total, which is why Florida’s win reads 2-1, but no player gets a goal, so any goals-per-game count should take those out. In 2025-26, 119 games ended in a shootout, the most since 3-on-3 began. That is 9.1% of all 1,312 games played. On the chart below, that share of all games is the lower line. The upper line counts only the games still tied after 60 minutes. Before 3-on-3, full seasons had 145 to 184 shootouts.

The drop came in one season: 55.6% of overtime games reached a shootout in 2014-15 and 38.9% in 2015-16. It has stayed between 28.4% and 38.9% since. Counted against every game played, the shootout went from about one game in seven (13.4% from 2005-06 to 2014-15) to about one in thirteen (7.6% since). Three-on-three now settles 66.3% of overtime games before the skills contest starts. Our overtime story covers how many games get past 60 minutes in the first place; this one is about the shootout itself. Some players still love it. “Whenever I went to Wild games (as a kid) and it went to a shootout, it was like winning the lottery,” the Dallas goalie Jake Oettinger told The Hockey News.

Shooters have scored about one time in three from the start

Every one of those shootouts is a string of one-on-ones, and neither shooters nor goalies have won the long argument. Across 2,605 shootouts and 18,469 attempts, shooters scored 32.1%: 32.5% before three-on-three overtime and 31.5% since. No season has fallen outside 29.4% (2018-19) to 35.8% (2012-13). A season has had anywhere from 448 to 1,398 attempts, and at that size luck alone can move a season’s rate by about 2 points either way in the season with the most tries and about 4 in the season with the fewest. No season on the chart below strays more than about 4 points from the average.

Even the rule changes after the Devils’ season barely registered. Before 2014-15 the NHL dropped its rule that crews scrape the ice dry before every shootout, The Hockey News reported. In that piece Jordan Eberle said the dry scrape had given shooters a fresh surface. The spin-o-rama was gone too. Shooters scored 31.6% in 2013-14 and 30.3% in 2014-15, a smaller change than chance alone produces in a typical season.

The league’s shot-by-shot game logs start in 2017-18 and cover the 816 shootouts since. They show one small split by type of shot. Snap shots scored about 36% of the time, on 729 tries. Wrist shots scored about 31% and backhands about 32%. When Pittsburgh beat Montreal in a 12-round shootout on Dec. 13, 2023, the first four shooters, Nick Suzuki, Kris Letang, Cole Caufield and Sidney Crosby, all scored on snap shots, and the winner was a snap shot too. The snap shot came out ahead both in seasons that started in an odd year and in seasons that started in an even year. That split comes with two catches. The official scorer decides whether a shot was a snap or a wrist shot, and that call is a judgment. Shooters also choose their shot, so the men who snap it may differ from the men who don’t.

The late rounds go to the end of the bench

One in three is the league as a whole. Coaches act as if some shooters are better than others, and they save the end of the bench for last. The first long shootout shows how far down the bench a coach can go. It came seven weeks into the shootout’s life, at Madison Square Garden on Nov. 26, 2005, and the Rangers and Capitals went 15 rounds and 30 shots. Washington sent Alex Ovechkin, a rookie, first, and he was stopped. In round 14, Washington’s Bryan Muir scored and the Rangers’ Jason Strudwick answered. In round 15, after Henrik Lundqvist, another rookie, stopped Matt Bradley, Marek Malik, a defenceman who had not scored that season, skated in fast, put the puck through his own legs and shot it over Olaf Kolzig’s shoulder.

“As soon as I scored that goal I kind of didn’t know what to do,” Malik told NHL.com in 2016. “The Statue of Liberty came to me, so I was trying to maybe kind of pose like the Statue of Liberty, with the hand up to look like that.” It was the only shootout attempt of his NHL career. Muir and Strudwick also took one each and scored. So did Orpik and Olsen in Sunrise. So did Pittsburgh’s Jansen Harkins, who won that 12-round shootout in Montreal in 2023, the longest in the league’s shot-by-shot game logs. Six men, six for six, and through 2025-26 none of them had shot again.

Those are the end of the bench, and in most games the end of the bench scores less. In those logs since 2017-18, the first three rounds score 32.2% and rounds four and later 29.0%. The gap shows up both in seasons that started in an odd year and in seasons that started in an even year. Look at round one by itself. Once luck is allowed for, its real rate probably sits between 30.3% and 34.8%, sudden death’s between 26.5% and 31.5%. The two ranges barely overlap. The simplest reading is that coaches send their best shooters first, so sudden death draws from the bench’s second tier. Pressure itself shows little. Shooters who must score to stay alive converted 30.0%, those who could win it with a goal 31.7%, and all others 32.4%. The three are close enough that the differences could be luck, and the order is the same in rounds one to three alone.

Single games go either way. In Sunrise the first six shooters all missed, and the next 34 scored 11 times. Over whole careers, the 302 skaters who took exactly one shootout shot scored 15.2% of the time, and shooters with 40 or more attempts 35.5%. Part of that gap is built in, because a shooter who misses his first try often never gets a second.

Oshie’s best season did not carry into the next

If coaches are right that some shooters are better, the best ones should stay good. T.J. Oshie is the test case. On Feb. 15, 2014, at the Sochi Olympics, the United States and Russia went to a shootout. Oshie, who “made the team, in part, because of his solo gifts,” Michael Farber wrote in Sports Illustrated, took six of the American shots. The NHL’s shootout rule, 84.4 in the rulebook, doesn’t let a player shoot twice until every eligible teammate has shot. Olympic rules let a coach repeat shooters after the first three rounds, and the U.S. coach, Dan Bylsma, kept sending Oshie back out. Jonathan Quick stopped Kovalchuk, now shooting for Russia, and on the next shot Oshie slid the puck through Sergei Bobrovsky’s pads to win it. “I’m glad it ended when it did,” Oshie said. “I was running out of moves there.”

He went four for six. “Oshie’s performance was brilliant yet, oddly, also below average if you do the arithmetic,” Farber wrote: he had scored on seven of 10 for St. Louis that season. He finished that NHL season 9 for 12. Over the next four seasons he went 4 for 11, 4 for 6, 4 for 6 and 1 for 4. Kovalchuk’s line swung even harder. He went 1 for 10 in 2005-06, the shootout’s first season, and 11 for 14 in 2011-12, then 2 for 6 the season after.

Hot seasons like those are not a clean test. Shooters have had 254 seasons of ten or more shootout tries. Six times, a shooter has scored on 75% or more of at least ten tries in a season. Kovalchuk’s and Oshie’s hot seasons were two of them. Suppose shooters differ only a little in skill, as the tests below find, and luck does the rest. Then we would expect about one season like that in 21 years, not six. Cold seasons went the other way. The same calculation expects about 16 seasons of 10% or worse on ten or more tries, and there were only seven. That many hot seasons is more than luck explains. One likely reason is the coach. A shooter on a hot run keeps getting picked until he reaches ten tries, and a cold one gets benched before he does. A shooter who really was sharper for a few months would leave the same mark, and one season cannot tell the two apart. So a hot season tells you who the coach kept sending out as much as who was good. To find out who was good, you have to look at other seasons.

So we sorted every season since 2005-06 into two sets: seasons that started in an odd year (2005-06, 2007-08 and so on) and seasons that started in an even year. Odd and even years take turns, so each set holds part of a shooter’s young years and part of his old ones, and neither set is just his best run. Then we compared each shooter’s rate in one set with his rate in the other. If some shooters are truly better, the ones who scored a lot in the odd years should score a lot in the even years too. They barely do. For the 257 shooters with at least 10 attempts in each set, a shooter’s odd-year record tells you almost nothing about his even-year record. The same holds for the 115 with at least 20 in each.

A dot on that chart can sit a long way from a shooter’s real rate. Oshie went 9 for 12 one season and 4 for 11 the next, and a shooter with 10 to 40 tries in a set can drift 7 to 15 points on luck alone. So we tried a second split that gives each shooter more tries on each side. We took the 142 shooters with 40 or more career attempts and cut each career in two, the earlier tries against the later ones. Here the link is a little stronger. A shooter who scored a lot early tended to score a little more than average later. It is a hint of skill, and it sits right at the edge of what luck alone could produce.

The best shootout shooters are only a few points better than average

Shootout skill does exist. Line up the career records of every regular shootout shooter, meaning one with 20 or more career tries, and the best and worst sit a little further apart than luck alone would put them. Skill makes up the difference. Measured that way, most regulars’ real scoring rates sit within about 3 points of the average. Luck moves a typical career record by about 6 to 8 points, roughly two to three times as much. The more tries a shooter takes, the more his luck evens out. He needs roughly 208 to 285 tries before his record tells you more about him than about his luck. Patrick Kane has taken the most since 2005-06, 135.

So the best records are partly luck. To take the luck out, we made a best estimate of each shooter’s real rate, which pulls his record back toward the average. The average here is the regular shootout shooter, who scores about 34%. That is a little above the 32% for all attempts, which also counts the end of the bench. The fewer tries a shooter has, the further we pull his record. Oshie’s record comes down the most among the top scorers: 47.1% on the record, about 38% in our estimate. Tomas Plekanec, 4 for 30 for his career (13.3%), moves the other way, up to about 32%. On the record the two are 34 points apart. In our estimate they are about 5.5 points apart. Kovalchuk’s 42.3% comes down to about 36%. Trevor Zegras led the league with 7 shootout goals in 2025-26 and is 20 for 34 for his career (58.8%). He has only 34 tries, so his record gets pulled a long way, to about 37%.

Two things make the skill harder to see. Coaches choose who shoots and when, so the shooters with many attempts were already judged good, which hides part of the gap between good and bad shooters. And most shooters have only 10 to 40 tries in any stretch we can compare, so a real gap of 3 points is nearly invisible in any one test.

Alex Ovechkin, the NHL’s career leader in goals, is 37 for 128 in shootouts (28.9%), below the league rate. Even that could be luck for an average shooter: a shooter at the league rate would do this badly or worse about one time in four over 128 tries. Dany Heatley, who scored the league’s second shootout goal, finished 6 for 35.

Shooting first and playing at home are coin flips too

Before putting the Devils down to luck, check the rules. Teams carry so little from year to year that a lasting edge, if there is one, might sit in the rules instead. The shootout gives two possible ones, the order of shooting and home ice, and both come out as coin flips. The same shootout rule gives the home team the choice of shooting first or second. Since 2017-18, home teams chose to shoot first 83.5% of the time. The team shooting first then won 51.8% of 816 shootouts, close enough to half to be luck: allowing for luck, its real rate is probably somewhere from 48.4% to 55.3%, and that span includes 50%. The edge also flips between the two sets of seasons: 53.9% in odd years, 48.8% in even years.

Home teams themselves won 49.3% of all 2,605 shootouts since 2005-06: 47.8% under four-on-four overtime and 51.6% since. Allowing for luck, that 51.6% could really be anything from 48.5% to 54.6%, and that span includes 50%. Single seasons swing from 38.9% to 64.1% on 65 to 184 shootouts each, which is what chance looks like at that size. In a shootout, playing at home has bought nothing we can measure.

None of the numbers in that table is more than about 4 points from a coin flip’s 50%, and they miss in both directions.

The streak ended on an ordinary night

The Devils’ last shootout win before the streak came against Winnipeg on March 10, 2013. Their next win came against Winnipeg too, on Oct. 30, 2014, after 18 straight losses, as Sports Illustrated counted them. Jacob Josefson scored the only goal the Devils needed. He had taken one shootout shot in 2013-14, and scored it.

That season Josefson went 5 for 8, and he finished his career 13 for 24. The Devils went 5-7, close to what a coin would give.

Show the work

Tests written down

Not in advance (exploratory)

Results computed

October 27, 2026

Every regular-season shootout from 2005-06 to 2025-26 (2,605) from the NHL stats API team, skater and goalie shootout reports and game list. Per-attempt detail (round, order, pressure, shot type) from our play-by-play for 2017-18 to 2025-26 (816 shootouts). Skill tests split seasons by odd and even start year; the team test compares consecutive seasons. Named team seasons, career and season lines, the Devils’ shootouts by date and the luck benchmarks come from the same REST reports; the shooter order of five single shootouts (Oct. 5, 2005; Nov. 26, 2005; April 11, 2014; Dec. 16, 2014; Dec. 13, 2023) comes from the NHL gamecenter pages. Luck benchmarks: a team flipping a coin each shootout; for the league-wide odds, every team-season with 13+ shootouts, and a second version where teams differ by a true-talent spread of 4.5 points of win % (method of moments on team-seasons with 5+ shootouts, as a Beta distribution). Hot and cold seasons compare shooter-seasons with 10+ attempts (254) with a Beta-binomial at the regular shooters’ mean and spread; attempts per season are taken as given. How the numbers were computed: Season-to-season scoring: with 448 to 1,398 attempts a season, chance alone moves a season’s rate by about ±2.4 to ±4.3 points (95% range, binomial at the 32.1% league rate).

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Shot type (play-by-play, 2017-18 on): snap 36.4% (729 attempts; 36.6% odd years, 36.0% even), wrist 31.0% (3,734), backhand 31.7% (1,286). Rounds and pressure: 95% ranges are binomial. The three pressure groups (must score, goal wins, neutral) overlap within their 95% ranges, and the same order holds in rounds one to three alone. Hot and cold seasons: 6 shooter-seasons of 75%+ on 10+ tries, against 0.9 expected; 7 of 10% or worse, against 15.5 expected. Both expectations come from a Beta-binomial at the regular shooters’ mean and talent spread, with each shooter-season’s attempts taken as given (254 shooter-seasons with 10+ attempts). Odd vs even seasons (split-half): Pearson r between each player’s rate in odd-start-year and even-start-year seasons, with Fisher-z 95% ranges and a 5,000-shuffle permutation p. Shooters with 10+ attempts in each half (257): r = 0.04 (−0.08 to 0.17); 20+ in each (115): r = 0.00 (−0.18 to 0.18). The luck swing on the scatter is one binomial standard error at the league rate, ±7.4 points at 40 attempts to ±14.8 at 10. Early vs late half of each career, 40+ attempts (142 shooters, 15+ in each half): r = 0.16 (−0.01 to 0.32). Talent spread (method of moments): shooters’ career rates spread out more than binomial chance alone would spread them, and the extra is skill.

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Shooters with 20+ career attempts (304, mean 34.3%): talent SD 2.8 points, luck SD 7.8, half-signal at 285 attempts. Shooters with 40+ (146, mean 35.5%): talent SD 3.3, luck SD 6.3, half-signal at 208. “Half-signal” is the number of attempts at which skill and luck explain equal parts of the spread in records; the body puts it as the number of tries a shooter needs “before his record tells you more about him than about his luck”. The method assumes simple binomial chance. Best estimate (shrinkage): estimate = (goals + 34.3% × 285) ÷ (attempts + 285). It counts the average of shooters with 20+ career attempts (34.3%, above the 32.1% league rate for all attempts, which also counts the many shooters with only a few tries) as 285 extra attempts, the number implied by the skill spread measured on those shooters. Goalies and teams: goalie split-half permutation p = 0.01 (30+ shots in each half) and 0.20 (60+). Team carry-over is the Pearson r (Fisher-z 95% range) of shootout win % in consecutive seasons, team-season pairs with 5+ shootouts in both. Shooting order and home ice: 95% ranges are binomial. First shooter 48.4% to 55.3%; home teams since 2015-16 48.5% to 54.6%; 2005-06 to 2014-15 45.4% to 50.3%.

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• How Hockey Changed: NHL data stories →One chart-led story a day about how the NHL game, its players and its rules have changed.
• Nearly one game in four goes past 60 minutes →Ties, overtime and the loser point since 1917, and whether tied teams coast.
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Sources and method

1. NHL stats (NHL.com), every season since 1917-18
2. NHL stats API: team, skater and goalie shootout reports and the game list, 2005-06 to 2025-26
3. NHL gamecenter API: shooter-by-shooter shootout order for single games (e.g. Dec. 16, 2014)
4. NHL Official Rules 2024-25, Rule 84 (overtime and shootout)
5. Scouting the Refs: NHL historical rule changes
6. NBC Sports, Cam Tucker: Islanders use the spin-o-rama twice to score in shootout (April 11, 2014)
7. The Hockey Writers, Leo Scaglione Jr.: Blown leads and shootout woes lead to playoff-less spring for Devils (April 11, 2014)
8. Hockey-Reference: 2013-14 NHL standings (Detroit and Columbus in the East playoffs on 93 points; New Jersey 88)
9. The Hockey Writers, Matt Brauckmann: Breaking down the NHL’s 2014-2015 rule changes (spin-o-rama ban, Sept. 16, 2014)
10. Sports Illustrated, Allan Muir: Devils’ Ilya Kovalchuk retires (July 11, 2013)
11. Sports Illustrated, Michael Farber: T.J. Oshie stars as USA beats Russia in Sochi shootout (Feb. 15, 2014)
12. AP via Fox News: Panthers outlast Capitals in longest NHL shootout (Dec. 16, 2014)
13. Sports Illustrated: Panthers top Capitals after 20-round shootout, the longest in NHL history
14. NHL.com, Cutler Klein: Catching up with Marek Malik (July 26, 2016)
15. AP via Fox Sports: 20 years of the shootout in the NHL (Oct. 6, 2025)
16. The Hockey News, Jared Clinton: Shootout salutations, are shootouts still exciting in season 20? (Dec. 6, 2025)
17. NBC Sports, James O’Brien: Red Wings’ playoff streak ends at 25 seasons (March 28, 2017)
18. Sports Illustrated: Devils end 18-game shootout losing streak with win over Jets (Oct. 31, 2014)

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