I will say this again - im not implying that the team needs to change its style of play in order to influence an advanced stat (a ridiculous one in my opinion)
What makes all the "deflections, random bounces, and unscreened wristers" inordinate compared to other teams?
Hypothetical:
Vancouver has 4 out of 6 d men that take less shots than the average d man - a couple of these guys are like in the bottom 1/4 of the league... Juulsen is like bottom 3 of d men that have played more than 20 games . So if these guys had added an average of 3 meaningless shots per game to the shot total (altering the team shooting percentage) would all of the luck suddenly have been diminished? Its a hypothetical question.
I might repeat some things that have already been said, but here's what I think of PDO.
First, PDO is a sustainability metric. This metric bases itself of the following premises :
1) League wide, SV% + SH% will be approximately 1.
2) Thus, the distribution of teams' PDO across the league should be centered at 1.
3) Given the number of teams, it should follow a normal distribution.
4) History shows teams generally end the season between 0.97 and 1.03, with some very rare exceptions.
As you can see by the calculation, PDO is a metric that shows how things HAVE BEEN. It's not, per se, a full proof predictive metric. It's important to mention this : Teams aren't good or bad because they have a high or low PDO. Rather, in general, good teams will have a higher PDO than bad teams. This explains the strong correlation between PDO and wins/standing points.
In general, it's either calculated at all strengths or at 5v5. Both of these provide some contextualization, but also lack a lot of contextualization.
Consequently, trying to "cheat" PDO by allowing weak goals (hypothetically) to lower it because it's too high won't change anything to how your team will perform. While not completely independent between each other (hot streaks, mental, injuries, etc.), you can see each game as being independent from each other in the same way a coin toss is independant from (i.e. its outcome is unaffected by) the previous toss. If you have 10 tails in a row, the probability of getting a tail on your next throw remains 50%. In this situation, we know the expected outcome. However, what you can expect is that if you continue playing 1000 more games, it's extremely unlikely that you'll have maintained a 65% tail rate, for example. It will be much closer to 50%.
With PDO, it's obviously more complexe as the "outcome" would be the PDO for a given game, which can fall within a wide, extended range. All we know is that better teams should (not "will") be expected to "outperform" the "expected". That's what history shows us, as stated previously. Teams that don't outperform the expected, in general, are still high in the standing generally have, as a basis, a very high expected outcome due to how they play (like the Hurricanes have been for a few years). What we also know is that the equivalent to that 50% for a coin toss should be a PDO of about 1.00±0.03 for a team's entire season.
One other important thing I should mention before going into the Canucks stuff and your hypothetical scenario is that systems naturally adjust, to a certain degree, to conversion rates. This is why some teams don't necessarily move in the standings despite having their PDO increase or decrease towards normality throughout a season. When you start converting less, you might generate more shots, and vice versa. This causes mitigation.
Finally, PDO can be both a team metric AND a player metric. In the case of players, it's very rare to see players finish outside of the 0.95-1.05 range, and outside of 0.97-1.03 over ~3 seasons. In a way, team PDO will be the weighted combination of its players'.
With that being said, let's analyse the hypothetical scenario you present. In it, yes, this would lower their PDO. As I mentionned before, though, the past is not garant of the future, and these 3 meaningful shots won't magically mean they can continue converting like they are otherwise. In this case, these shots won't affect individual player's on-ice PDO much, especially those that are exceeding expectations. Moreover, while you say "meaningless" shots, this notion doesn't really exist that much in hockey. I will however assume they're not strategic shots to create rebounds. From a standings point of view, these meaningless shots could hurt your team by offering the opponents the puck for a counter-attack. This is all moot though, because no team that is well coached will take meaningless shots for no reason other than being pressured to do so by the opponent.
In the case of the canucks, if we break down the PDO components, their goaltending is perfectly sustainable. It's their SH% that really drives up everything, and to my knowledge, it's by like 1.5% better than the 2nd best season SH% for a team since 07-08. This seems little, but that's quite a lot. Their global PDO as a result is the highest in the same period. While it's in no way a guarantee that they don't maintain their conversion rates, it's expected that their PDO finishes in a more "natural" range (remember that the Bruins did finish with a 1.04 PDO last year, 0.01 than the Canucks this year so far - so being outside of the normal range is not impossible). Shooting fatigue, opponents adapting, physical tiredness, injuries, etc. Reasons could be multiple and not just tied to luck. It could also be that their goalies start being terrible, although I wouldn't say that's the more likely scenario. The Canucks have a lot of talented players and I fully expect, if this regression is to happen, for it to have minimal impact on the standings. Like, they won't miss the playoffs just because of that. They'll likely start taking more shots, having more rebounds, etc. It's also possible that their PDO regresses simply due to a horrible 10 games streak and magically everything seems more "sustainable". That's the weakness of the lack of contextualization.
However, none of this removes the value of the insight PDO offers. Keyword : Insight. It's a tool amongst many others that you can use to "predict" if you so wish. I know people that use it in fantasy hockey with great success to get or drop players.
In the end, everything about that metric is organic. It just happens.
The Jets and Canucks havent played each-other yet but play 3 times coming up. Should be fun!
