The Flyers lost to the Golden Knights in a shootout on Monday night. Exciting game, that’s for sure. Morgan Frost had a goal and assist but probably should have scored here:

Tight angle, but still. Michkov is gonna tee these guys up and the chances will be there.

It’s been a theme through October and November so far, the idea that the offensive talent around Michkov isn’t capitalizing on his creativity and vision. You oftentimes hear people say things like, “well, Michkov would have 10 assists by now if (insert player here) finished that pass the other night.” And to be fair, that’s probably true all around the league, with talented players setting up blown chances. Here, it’s more of a larger-level discussion as to whether or not the lack of offensive talent around Michkov is bringing down his assist numbers.

I have been SCOURING the internet looking for some kind of data on this, like a chance creation or expected assists number. I can’t find anything worthy. We’re basically trying to identify and log passes that resulted in shot attempts, adjusted for distance, angle, etc. No dice. There’s difficulty with these arbitrary things, because one person might look at the video above and think Frost should have buried that, while another person might think it was not a slam dunk shot attempt. That’s why xG was created in the first place.

This metric exists in other sports. MLS tracks key passes, which is a pass that results in a teammate shot. Football has metrics to measure how many quarterback throws should have been caught. Basketball tracks shooting percentage off a specific player’s passes, and baseball obviously has every statistic under the sun. In hockey, you can look at broader stats like xG/60 and get a measurement for how much a certain player might influence the overall picture, but I just can’t find anything more specific. If I’m blind and/or an idiot, steer me in the right direction. In the meantime, we need some superfan to keep a collection of video clips like the one above, then we’ll put them all into a montage at the end of the year. A montage of headaches.