I read the tweet. But this is all convoluted stupidity.
It certainly is, but assigning where that exists is the challenge here.
Hughes was much more a shooter then Nico was, UNTIL Meier came aboard. At which point Hughes became more of a distributor. Those 21 games don't override the previous 60.
Did you show your work on this one? Absolutely not. How about you give it a moment's thought and wonder about where Hughes is on the power play versus where Nico is - Nico cannot distribute much from where he is. Hughes is where he is so that he can distribute as well as shoot, that's why he is credited with way more passes than shots - this isn't hard. The only hard thing is that we don't have passing numbers on the power play, so somebody has to count all of them by hand, just so you can wave your hand and say, this contradicts the stuff I'm not even willing to look up.
So just to fact check you here - hey, you may be right, but I'm not editing this after the fact:
Hughes shots/60 pre-Meier: 19.1 S/60
Hughes shots/60 post-Meier: 11.8 S/60
So yeah, there is a noticable drop in his shots. Meier himself didn't have that many, though, only 13.5/60 which is fewer than Nico had over that time.
And this metric some how is not valuing shots from the dots where all the best shooters in the league are. Ovi, Laine, Pasta. Middle of the ice shots are dangerous, sure, and teams do look for that, but teams put their shooters on the wings, and tons of goals are scored from those spots. See Hughes as the team leader for NJ.
You're making a giant mistake here extrapolating from one team's power play what it is saying about the other 31 power plays. The reason why teams put their shooters on the wings is to give them the space to operate. Those are not 'better shooting locations', they are just 'the spots where it is most likely players can get the time and space to score from'. This might seem like a distinction without a difference but it absolutely is not.
Ovechkin has 79 more goals than xG predicts over his career on the power play. How would this metric think about him? I don't know - I don't subscribe to the Patreon and don't have access to it. All I know is that people like you bitch about things like this not taking into account pre-shot movement, this is attempting to do that, and you're here complaining about the wording of a tweet.
You said yourself you thought calling Nico a shooter was odd, but nah, it's me not reading the tweet.
You're patting yourself on the back for calling out the wording in a tweet instead of taking a look at the hours of work that went into crafting the metric the tweet is about.