The slap shot was once the default shot in hockey — the long wind-up from the point was how defencemen scored, and how young players were taught to shoot for power. So we counted every shot attempt in the league’s record across 18 seasons: 1,831,808 attempts in 21,607 games, classified by shot type, position, and distance.

The three numbers

11.8%

11.8% — the slap shot’s share of all attempts in 2025-26, down from 26.6% in 2008-09. Slap-shot goals fell with it, from 15.2% of the league’s goals to 8.0%. The decline ran season after season — no single cliff, no rule change to blame.

24%

24% — the share of a defenceman’s attempts that are slap shots now, down from 54%. From the point itself, slap shots fell from 59% of attempts to 26.5%. The point still shoots; it wristers and snaps now.

8.4%

8.4% — of on-goal slap shots score now, up from 5.7% in 2008-09. The league did not abandon a broken shot. It abandoned the low-percentage version — the long wind-up at a set goaltender — and kept the good ones.

What replaced it

The snapshot rose from 14.6% to 24.8% of all attempts; the wrist shot’s share barely moved in eighteen years. The modern shot is not harder — it is faster off the blade, with no wind-up to read. The slap shot still holds its share on the power play, where it remains 19.2% of attempts against 10.6% at even strength, and its specialists remain: Darren Raddysh scored 16 slap-shot goals last season, Evan Bouchard attempted 143, and Alex Ovechkin attempted 106 at age forty.

What this means for your kid

Release beats wind-up. Teach the quick release first — off either foot, with no tell. Defencemen: walk the line, then wrist the puck through traffic, aimed at sticks and tips. Keep the slap shot as a specialty for the power-play flank, not as the foundation of a young player’s shooting game.

The source record contains no blocked attempts, so all shares are shares of unblocked attempts. Shot types are scorer-assigned, and there is no one-timer flag — the power-play pattern is read from the data, not a proven mechanism. Full caveats are on page 9 of the report.

We prepare kids for where the game is going. Not where it was. Modern Hockey Training and the Ultimate School Experience for grades 4-8 kids. GRIT Hockey · grit-hockey.ca