Power outage among ‘scorers’ in EURO

Talgat Zhailauov, Minsk LW. No goals and 1 assist in 8 games.

The start of Season 13 has seen some surprisingly sluggish starts by some teams that did well last year and were expecting better this season. While Madrid and Dublin have soared up the standings, Oslo, Minsk and Bratislava have found themselves mired in the bottom handful of teams. Oslo has to be especially disappointed after the Outlaws’ fantastic Season 12 performance that had them place a point out of first place overall.

So what’s the problem? It sounds simplistic, but scoring goals is kind of important. These teams are having trouble beating goalies. Minsk is an intersting case. The Hussars are not having trouble getting shots on goal; they just haven’t been finishing for some reason. They rank 6th in shots on goal (31.75 per game) but dead last in goals (1.75 per game). Ten of their regular starters have yet to score. The fact they are getting a lot of shots is a hint that once they do start scoring, they have a good chance of stringing together wins from then on.

Bratislava doesn’t do quite as much shooting as Minsk, but the Eagles are second-lowest in goals. St. Petersburg and Oslo rank 3rd-worst and 4-worst, respectively.

It doesn’t help those teams that some of the players they have been counting on for tallies are “O-fers” so far. Bratislava for example is still waiting to celebrate goals scored by Anze Kopitar and Zemgus Girgensons. Krasnyye Zvezdy Artemy Panarin is still sitting on zero goals too, but no player in the league has taken more shots without scoring than Connor McDavid of the Outlaws. He is 0 for 31 so far. Taylor Hall of Helsinki was right there with McDavid until he scored his first goal against Bratislava on Friday. Hall has 1 goal in 31 shots.

The one team that has been able to cover for star scorers who haven’t scored is 3rd place Belfast. Once Sean Couturier and David Pastrnak start scoring, look out.

Here are the players who have taken 20 or more shots so far without scoring: