A shot on goal is one that would enter the net if the goalie did not stop it — a puck wide or blocked by a defender does not count, which trips people up when comparing against broadcast shot totals.

This is the most consistent skater market in hockey, because shot volume is a function of ice time, role and style rather than luck. A winger who shoots four times a game will shoot roughly four times most games. Whether any of them go in is an entirely different and much noisier question.

If you want a hockey number that means something over a 10-game window, this is the one.

A skater's "points" in hockey means goals plus assists, which is a different meaning from basketball's points and a common source of confusion. Because scoring is scarce, these lines sit at 0.5 or 1.5 for most players.

Assists carry an extra layer of dependence: hockey awards up to two assists per goal, so a playmaker's number rests on teammates finishing and on the scorer's setup being credited. A player can generate chances all night and record nothing.

Saves is the market that most reliably surprises people. The intuition is that a good goalie on a good team should have the higher line. The opposite is usually true.

A save requires a shot to save. A goalie behind a leaky defence faces far more rubber and therefore has far more opportunity to accumulate saves, while an elite team's goalie can win comfortably facing 19 shots and fall well short of a line. Saves measures workload, not quality.

This also means a saves line is partly a bet on the game being played in the goalie's own end — which is closer to a team-strength question than a goaltending one.

These are effort and role markets. Blocked shots concentrate in defensive defencemen and penalty killers; hits concentrate in physical forwards and depth players. Neither correlates much with scoring ability, which makes them a genuinely different way to find value on players who never appear in the points markets.

The caution is that both are recorded by human scorers at the arena, and the standard for what counts as a hit is known to vary between buildings. That introduces a source of noise you cannot see in the number.

Hockey coaches change forward lines constantly — sometimes between periods of the same game. A winger promoted to the top line alongside a star will see more ice time, more power-play minutes and more shot opportunities; demoted to the fourth line, his volume collapses.

This happens more frequently and with less warning than rotation changes in basketball. A hit rate computed over ten games may be averaging across two or three quite different roles, and the game log is the only way to see it.

A trailing team pulls its goalie in the final minutes, which creates a burst of scoring chances at both ends that has little to do with the run of play. Empty-net goals inflate goal and point totals for players on the leading team, and the extra offensive-zone time inflates shot totals for the trailing one.

These are real results and they count, but they cluster in close games. A player whose hit rate rests partly on empty-net production is a slightly different proposition from one who accumulates at even strength.

NHL teams play three to four times a week, so the windows behave much like basketball's in terms of elapsed time. The difference is variance: because the underlying counts are so small, hockey scoring markets swing more than their basketball equivalents over the same number of games.

Our suggestion is to trust shots on goal over a short window, and to want a longer window before reading much into a goals or points hit rate.

Every figure on the NHL slate is computed the same way, and the full explanation — what a hit rate counts, how the window changes the answer, and what the numbers cannot tell you — is on our methodology page. If a market term above is unfamiliar, the glossary defines every one we cover.

Nothing here is betting advice. We are not a sportsbook, we take no wagers, and a historical rate is a description of the past rather than a prediction. If gambling stops being fun, help is free and confidential: call or text 1-800-GAMBLER (1-800-426-2537) in the US.