The goal is scored by the man who never sees the puck

Screens, tips and rebounds account for a great deal of modern scoring, and almost none of the credit.

Screen, tip, rebound. That is a large share of how goals get scored now, and it has been for years, and the highlight package still leads with the wrist shot from the circle.

The mechanism is not mysterious. Goaltenders are enormous and technically excellent, and against a clean shot from thirty feet with a clear sightline they are close to unbeatable. So the way in is to remove the sightline or change the puck's path after release. Both jobs belong to a forward standing in the most unpleasant real estate in the sport, facing the wrong way, being cross-checked in the kidneys, watching the point man's stick rather than the puck.

He does not see the shot. He cannot; if he turns to look he stops being a screen. He reads the shooter's release, guesses the height, and puts his blade in the lane. When it works everybody credits the deflection to his hand-eye, which is only half of it, because the other half was standing still in a bad place for four seconds while two defencemen tried to move him.

What annoys me is how the compensation market treats this. The net-front role is described as a grinder's job and paid like one, while the point shooter who fires a puck into a screen from forty feet is described as having a heavy shot. In practice the point man's job on that play is to hit a leg, or miss the net deliberately in a direction the tipper can reach, and the difficult part is happening ten feet from the goalie.

There is a tactical point buried in this that teams do get right. Since the goal comes from traffic, the shot should be low, hard and slightly wide, not a laser at the top corner. A puck aimed at a shin pad is a better play than a puck aimed at the net, which sounds absurd until you count how many goals go in off somebody.

The trade-off is real. Bodies at the net mean fewer bodies above the puck, and a blocked shot the other way turns into a two-on-one immediately.

Still, I would rather watch a team that puts people in front of the goalie than one that fires pucks at his chest all night and calls it a shot share advantage.