Every hockey player in the game wants to score more goals, and to score more goals they need to shoot the puck. This is an oversimplification - Zach Hyman scores a lot of rebounds and deflection goals, but those still technically count as shots, so bear with me. 

When I'm coaching in a game my style is to narrate the action for the players on the bench. Then I can basically repeat myself when players finish their shift and change. I'm never telling players to shoot the puck more if we found ourselves defending in D-Zone coverage the entire shift. Or let's say we successfully broke the puck out and chipped it into the zone, but the forecheck broke down and they came back the other way. 

It drives me nuts when players on the bench say we need to get more shots. For sure we do!

But there are so many other actions that need to click into place before we're in a position to score. Jack Han has made a career out of finding these types of counter-intuitive lessons in the game. Of course we want more shots, but chances are you've got a lot of shooting built into your practices already. A shot on net usually starts 200 feet away from the opponent's net. 

• We need to shoot more! We need to break out more
• We need to shoot more! We need to clean up our neutral zone regroups
• We need to shoot more! Our forecheck has been useless tonight

I like to think of shooting as a result of good work elsewhere on the ice. Kind of like the game as a whole, right? Everything else is the process, and a shot or scoring chance is a reward for a healthy process. If your team is consistently being out-shot, it's not because they lack the same skill to shoot the puck as the opponent. In other terms, it's not the quality, it's the quantity you should concern yourself with more. Ryan Reaves' wrist shot might be just as hard as Auston Matthews if you measure it in practice, but Matthews has the ability to give himself more chances to shoot during a game.

Now if you're getting 40 shots a night and none of them are going in?

That's a good problem to have. Ask the right questions about how you can boost your shot totals and a whole new world of possibilities will open up. 

Check out this snippet from Han's presentation and view the full video here a membership to The Coaches Site.