What Alex Bump’s shooting habits reveal about his goal-scoring potential

Alex Bump\'s arrival with the Flyers was little short of a revelation. Jumping right into the thick of their post-deadline push into the playoffs, Bump was able to hit the ground running, getting quickly comfortable with the pace of play at the NHL level, and flex some of the strength of his scoring game in the most critical stretch of the season. Bump\'s stint with the Flyers was undoubtedly positive, but as we revealed in our deep dive last week, for as much as there was to like about what he was able to do in his debut, there\'s an acknowledgment that he outperformed his expected results pretty significantly, and there\'s a real inevitability that his production is going to regress back to earth, if some adjustments to his underlying process aren\'t made.

But where is that over performance coming from? And how can he produce more sustainable offense for himself next season? His shooting habits might illuminate some things for us.

Looking at Bump\'s shooting habits in the AHL -- even though public data available in the AHL is scant and all that we have to work with are the shots that made it on net, without delineation for game state -- we can begin to paint a picture of his process. It\'s notable that almost all of his scoring through this sample of games came from quote close to the net, either from the area around the low slot, if not the netfront itself. These are chances that Bump had to work much harder for -- and work that he was able to dedicate himself to in an increasing degree in the later part of that sample -- and the process made for an appropriate, though not out of control, output as he shot at a 13.21 percent rate over those 17 games.

Still, the spread of shots from the perimeter made for, if nothing else, a frustrating accompanying trend. That is, Bump leaned heavily on shots from the perimeter at times, as his game had this ongoing tendency to fall back on this mode of shooting from anywhere as soon as he got the puck, just to try to get anything on net to see if that could be the shot to sneak through traffic and past the opposing goaltender, but the lack of conversion on any of those perimeter shots should make the lesson clear that this is just not a model of offensive generation that will work in the pros to the same degree that it did at the college level.

What\'s more, there was a period in there where Bump really seemed to be favoring shooting from a severe angle, low in or just below the left circle, and it was not an approach which worked out particularly well for him either -- he wasn\'t able to score on any of those shots, and a look back through the tape would remind us that if those shots weren\'t stopped outright, they quickly turned into a change in possession and a rush back up-ice, which is the kind of possession-killing play that the coaching staff was trying to get their players to avoid.

Of course, those hard lessons are what time in the AHL is for learning, and by the time that Bump arrived up with the big club, it was clear that some of those lessons had already taken. Looking at his 5-on-5 shot attempts through his 17 games up with the Flyers, we see that he had worked out those severe angle forced plays by the time of his promotion, playing a little smarter in his shot selection, in that regard, and that\'s something that should help him in the longer run.

But the more troubling of the trend in the underlying process is the more or less complete shifting backwards of his shot map. Bump was still able to generate a good grouping of shots from the low slot, but the netfront activity close to dried up for him. The gap in shooting locations here is notable, too, as his offense went a bit boom or bust -- that is, he was either shooting from in and around the low slot, or from the perimeter, as that high slot (and adjacent) flurry didn\'t appear in the same way in the NHL sample as it did in the AHL.

And with that, the split in his shooting locations became even more stark -- in that sample of AHL games, 35.85 percent of his total shots were coming from outside the home plate area of the ice, but in the NHL, 46.88 percent of his attempts were from the perimeter. So, even though his shooting luck was clicking well for him (that was a 21.7 percent), it didn\'t really match the broader work being put in to create quality chances in bulk. His shot is good enough to give goaltenders trouble, but the shot plot makes it clear that shooting from that distance isn\'t going to bring him the same success over the longer term when the rest of the league gets more of a book on him. What was working for him in the AHL should inform his process at the next level, but it\'s been a bit of a process in and of itself to implement all of that at the NHL level.

Now, certainly, there\'s a degree of growing pains at work here in the same vein as those he had to work through immediately after graduating from college to the AHL -- that is, it\'s harder to get to the interior under coverage by pros in that league, and it\'s even harder still to get there for a high volume of chances against NHL defenders. It\'s going to take more physical development and reps to get to a point where he can hold up to that physical pressure better, and also know how to choose his spots to get to those hard areas without giving the puck away, but a good offseason committed to training for that would go a long way.

And the good news, in all of this, is that Bump has already shown himself to be quite a malleable player. The core elements of his game are what they are, but his process took a marked step forward by the end of the season from where it was when he began the year with the Phantoms, and there\'s every reason to believe that he has the ability to continue on in that refinement process to get his approach to where it needs to be to support more sustainable success. It\'s not going to be easy, but there\'s a blueprint left for him, he just has to put his head down and follow it.

Talking Points