How much better can we reasonably expect Taylor Hall to be in the future, from a production standpoint? I think we can safely say that Hall has been an elite performer in the NHL for the past 2 seasons and he's still very young, but it is rare to score more than the 80 points he did this past year. Just look at the scoring race for 2013-2014. The leading score broke 100 points and then nobody else even cracked 90 points. 20 years ago there were 8 players with 100 points or more and 13 more in the 90 point range. That's right, you had to go 21 players deep into the scoring race to hit someone in the 80's. 21 players deep into this year's scoring race you get Blake Wheeler and his 69 points.
So that brings us back to Hall. His 80 points is a career year for most players, even the elite ones in this day and age. Jonathan Toews, for example, has never reached 80 points and his 4th season (same as Hall's this past year) was his highest achieving in terms of point totals. Taylor Hall was better than a point per game for the course of an 82 game season and that kind of production is special enough that we need to consider that it was a career year for him, maybe THE career year him.
There are a lot of factors that go into preventing special players from reaching those kinds of totals again. Number one is going to be his health. Taylor Hall is no stranger to injury in his NHL career ending seasons to ankle and shoulder problems in the past. He's a feature player, a franchise player, and will be the focus of defensemen for the entirety of his NHL career. Any chance the opposition has to lay a hit or take a shot they will, especially so if this god forsaken team ever gets good enough to pose a threat to the other team. I think for the short term this might be Hall's biggest concern.
Hockey teams are ever changing and there's no question that team makeup can affect scoring too. Players come and go and chemistry can become an issue. How many times do we hear about player X not fitting in with player Y in a season? Perhaps more than it actually merits comment, but you catch my drift. For Hall this is unlikely to be an issue in the short term at least though. Barring a major deal he is likely to be paired with at least one of Eberle and RNH for the next 6 years. He can look forward to continuity in his linemates for a long time and those linemates are also elite talents. What's more is that while Eberle had a solid season, RNH did not. He can do significantly better offensively and bring Hall's totals up with him.
Coaching can also play a big part in a Hall's ability to put up points in the future. Alain Vigneault was famous in Vancouver for loading the Sedins with Offensive Zone starts. Quenneville in Chicago this past year gave those sugary minutes to Kane while Toews took on harsher starting positions (relatively speaking). If Eakins decides to force the heavy lifting onto Hall we can expect him to see less looks and subsequently fewer points. The Sedins went from roughly 43% O Zone starts to roughly 37% O Zone starts (among other things) and their points imploded. Good news for Oiler fans is that Hall has the 3rd best OZ% but it was still only 32.7%. That's the sign of a team that never actually plays in the offensive zone, so if the Oilers get better we could see his O Zone starts increase by quite a bit, theoretically giving him even more good looks.
When we look at a lot of career years we end up seeing career highs in shooting percentage. Sh% is generally out of the control of the shooter. Elite shooters have higher percentages but they shoot up and fall down all the time and when they go sky high we see special years. Getzlaf and Perry took the NHL by storm as a duo both shooting above 15%. That kind of shooting should regress over time closer to their career averages. So was Taylor Hall's season driven by a career high shooting percentage? No. He shot 10.8%, which is actually BELOW his career average. And while his On-Ice Shooting Percentage (The combined shooting percentage of all players on the ice at the time) was the highest on the team, it was still only 26th in the NHL for players with more than 400 5v5 minutes.
So was this Taylor Hall's career year? I think there's reason to believe that with the right set of circumstances he can top his point totals, but we should temper those expectations with the reality that scoring more than 80 points is extremely difficult. We can also wonder if in the future Taylor Hall starts to sacrifice Offense in the name of overall team success. He may take on a more defensive role by his own volition of that of the coach. That said, we can also expect a rise in shooting percentage and better production from his linemates.
After this many losing seasons there's plenty of reason to believe that both Hall and the Fans would sacrifice his production for more overall team success. It has just been yet to be determined if the future success of the Oil depends on Hall's elite production or on what he might gain by giving it up. What do you think?
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