Chris Kreider Is the Best Net-Front Presence in the NHL

By Trey Elder Aug 11, 2024

Not all NHL players are good at everything. Most players, even stars, have niches they have carved out over the course of their careers that they specialize and thrive in. You have your stay-at-home defensemen (e.g. Jaccob Slavin, Mikey Anderson), your snipers (e.g. Alex DeBrincat, Adrian Kempe), and your grinders (e.g. Cal Clutterbuck, Garnet Hathaway). In fact I’m convinced that given his pitiful play, the only reason Jeff Carter was in the Pittsburgh Penguins lineup last season is that he was still, in his final year in the NHL, one of the best face-off men in the whole league. One of the niches I thought was the most interesting and wanted to analyze was the net-front presence. This is the player that stands in front of the goaltender battling with opposing defensemen who are actively trying to remove them from that area, fighting to tip pucks, create second chances, screen the goaltender, and in general create chaos. Using data, I wanted to determine which player was the best net-front presence in the league.

Unfortunately, a lot of the aspects of a player’s game that make them a good crease threat are intangible and thus, hard to track. They cannot be analyzed statistically because there is no data that measures things like screens or “being in the right place at the right time.” But there is readily available data on tipped shots and rebound shots which, as two of the most efficient ways to score goals due to their proximity to the net, are requisite skills any respectable net-front specialist should have mastered. I figured that by analyzing these two phenomena, I’d be able to identify the top net-front presences in the league and ultimately, determine who the best is. I initially expected the results to be a bit murky and possibly require a bit of a judgment call to decide a winner, but as I combed through the data, it became more and more clear to me that there was only one player who truly deserved to be called the best.

For my analysis I focused on the last six NHL regular seasons, from 2018-2019 until now. I did this to prioritize sustained excellence over solely recent success, because while I do think that someone like Zach Hyman should be in the discussion for one of the top net-front guys in the league, he doesn’t have much of a track record as a dominant force outside of these past two seasons.

I began my analysis by looking at tip shots, getting a feel for which players may be in the conversation by looking at the top ten players who scored the most goals on tip-ins in each of the last six seasons to see if there were any discernible trends. There were a few names that appeared in multiple years that you would immediately think of as strong net-front presences, names like Anders Lee, Zach Hyman, and Joe Pavelski. But there is only one name that appears in every column: Chris Kreider. And there’s a good reason for that. Over the past six seasons, no one has tipped in more goals than the Rangers’ No. 20. And it’s not really close.

Tip-In Goals Since 2018

Kreider laps the field in this category. The difference between him and 2nd-place Joe Pavelski is the difference between Pavelski and the six-way tie for 29th place. So how has Kreider scored one and a half times more tip-in goals than any other player in the last six seasons? Is he that much better at getting his deflections to go where he wants? Not quite. Kreider isn’t necessarily the most efficient puck-deflector, with 58.1% of his tips going on goal and 23.3% of those shots on goal resulting in an actual goal. The former is the 66th best mark out of 141 players with at least 100 tip shot attempts and the latter 17th of 164 players with at least 50 tip shots on goal since 2018. Kreider is good, but not elite when it comes to making the most of his opportunities, which must imply that in order for him to score as many tip-in goals as he did, he would need to have a lot of them.

Tip Shot Attempts Since 2018                                        Tip Shots on Goal Since 2018

Not only does Kreider lead the league in both tip shot attempts and tip shots on goal, he leads them both by a substantial margin. So while Kreider is far from the most efficient tipper in the league, he has so many more tips, both in attempts and shots on goal, that one way or another he is bound to score more goals. And in the NHL, while efficiency is nice, the goal-scoring is what you get paid for. Although for the purposes of this article we are only focusing on data from the past six regular seasons, it is worth noting that Kreider’s dominance in this realm extends far beyond recent memory. In fact, since 2007, Kreider leads the entire NHL in tip-in goals with 90, and is second to only Joe Pavelski in tip shot attempts and tip shots on goal. Pavelski debuted in the NHL in 2006, while Kreider did not play in a regular season game until 2012.

The other statistic we can use to evaluate net-front ability is rebound shots. While certainly not the flashiest way to score, rebounds are one of the best ways to score goals because a lot of times the goalie can’t react to the puck’s new direction quick enough to be able to make a stop. Although it might seem like it takes less skill to tap a rebound into a half-open net, players who are good at scoring rebound goals tend to use a lot of the same skills as those who are good at scoring tip goals. It’s about being able to hold your own in the crease, knowing when and where to position yourself, and having soft hands when you're in close with the goalie. So if Kreider really is the league’s best net-front player, he must also be good at potting rebounds, right?

Rebound Goals Since 2018

As was the case with tip-in goals, since the 2018-2019 season, Chris Kreider leads the entire NHL with 38 rebound goals. But in contrast to his tips, Kreider is much more efficient on his rebound chances. 86.1% of his attempts resulted in a shot on goal, good for 18th among players with 100+ attempts, and 29.2% of those shots on goal resulted in goals, which put him 5th among players with 100+ shots on goal. So while Kreider only finished 8th in rebound shots on goal, his strong finishing rate, which was better than the seven players ranked ahead of him, allowed him to score more rebound goals than anyone else**.

One part of the game in particular where a net-front specialist should be at his most impactful is on the power play. Typical penalty-killing formations allow an attacking player to stand in front of the goaltender relatively uninhibited, meaning their ability to deflect pucks and knock in rebounds should be at their most effective during the man advantage. Over the past six seasons Kreider has scored 79 power play goals, which is tied for 7th-most in the NHL in that span, trailing only Leon Draisaitl, David Pastrnak, Steven Stamkos, Alex Ovechkin, Mika Zibanejad, and Auston Matthews. So basically, the only six players better at scoring power play goals are five of the best goal scorers in the league and Kreider’s own teammate, who definitely benefits from his presence in front of the net. Also, all six of those players play on the wing during the powerplay, typically setting up for one timers from near the faceoff circle, unlike Kreider setting up in front.

What makes Kreider’s power play goal scoring so impressive is that he is able to maintain such a low average goal distance while having nearly double and triple the sample size of other net-front specialists. Of all 141 players who have scored at least 20 power play goals in the last six seasons, Kreider ranks 4th in the average distance from the net of his goals at 10.2 ft. But Kreider is the only player ranked in the top 25 in average proximity of those 141 to have scored at least 45 power play goals since 2018, and he scored 79. The guy is just on another level.

Chris Kreider Power Play Goal Locations

What’s truly remarkable about Kreider’s dominance in this realm is that despite being 33 years old, he seems to only be getting better, with his three highest single-season point totals coming in his three most recent seasons. He owes a lot of that success to being at the height of his powers around the net during this time, scoring 63 tip-in and rebound goals, well clear of second-place Zach Hyman with 45. But Kreider’s 2021-2022 regular season might be the most impressive of them all, and one of the most impressive seasons of the salary cap era for just how dominant it was in a single aspect of the game. In that season Kreider scored 52 goals, nearly doubling his previous career-high of 28, along with 25 assists for 77 points. He had 17 tip-in goals, the most by any player in a single season not just since 2018, but since 2007. He also had 12 rebound goals, tied for the 2nd most in a single season since 2018 and tied for fifth most since 2007. Despite scoring 26 power play goals, the fourth-most in a single season in the past two decades, the average distance from the net of his PPGs was just 11.1 ft, the 5th-closest of 81 players who scored 15+ power play goals in a season since 2018. And when we add together tip-in and rebound goals, Kreider’s total is, predictably, the most of any season in the last seventeen years.

How about his 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 seasons? Well, for tipped shots, Kreider’s specialty, they rank second and first in both tip attempts and tip shots on goal since 2007, respectively. Adding together tip and rebound goals, the 2022-2023 season ranks T-25, while his 2023-2024 season ranks second (behind only himself, of course). He had a down year on the powerplay in 2022-2023, only scoring 8 PPGs, but in 2023-2024 he returned to form with 18 goals on the man advantage. And his average proximity to the net was even closer than in 2021-2022, clocking in at only 8.09 ft. per goal, which amongst 488 seasons of 10+ power play goals since ‘07, is the second-closest, behind only Zach Hyman from this past season.

I know these numbers and ranks may seem like a lot to digest all at once, but while going through and analyzing the data, that’s what I felt the evidence for Chris Kreider starting to become: overwhelming. While his overall efficiency may not be elite, his volume is so immense, so unrelenting, that his production remains unrivaled. He has scored 95* tip and rebound goals since 2018, 23 more than second-place Joe Pavelski. To put it another way, over the past six seasons he has been 30% more productive when it comes to goal-scoring than the second-best net-front specialist.

I could go on and on about how much the numbers support Kreider’s case, but to fully appreciate his unique skill set, you just have to watch him play. The video below shows three goals from this season that perfectly encapsulate how Kreider has mastered his craft. The first shows his relentless hustle, jamming in a backhand rebound off of what looked like a harmless shot from Mika Zibanejad, stunning the goaltender. The second is a power play goal where Kreider, as always, is parked in right in front of the net and expertly deflects Artemi Panarin’s point shot into the top corner, giving the goalie absolutely no chance. On the third goal, he fights off the defenseman in front, gains inside position, receives the centering pass in the crease and one-touches it into the net. These three goals represent the kind of grit, toughness, and skill that has made Chris Kreider not just the best player in the league around the net, but one of the best players in Rangers franchise history. Oh and they all happened in the same game. Actually, in the same period. The third period. In the playoffs. In an elimination game, to go from trailing by two to leading by one.

To someone not as familiar with the game of hockey, these goals might at first glance appear to be flukey, or to be “easy” goals to score because of their proximity to the net. But if it was so easy, wouldn’t everyone do it? Wouldn’t everyone be able to be in the right place at the right time to score these “easy” goals? Wouldn’t someone other than Kreider lead the league in tip-in and rebound goals over the last six seasons? Wouldn’t someone else be the all-time postseason goals leader for the New York Rangers, an original six franchise whose history goes back to 1926? The answer is yes they would, but no one else can. To some, they may seem lucky, but for Chris Kreider, it’s all by design.

* Some goals were classified as both a tip-in goal and a rebound goal, thus were only counted as one goal instead of two separate goals in the total.

**Poor Brady Tkachuk, who leads the league in rebound attempts and shots on goal since 2018, but has an abysmal 13.5% finishing rate.