It was somehow fitting that after Ottawa's Daniel Alfredsson scored on the NHL's first ever shoot-out penalty shot, Toronto's Jason Allison lost the puck on the next one and didn't even get a shot off.

Toronto's second shooter, Eric Lindros - who hadn't taken a penalty shot since he missed one in the 1998 Olympics - also missed the net before Dany Heatley mercifully ended the game, scoring on a wrist shot from 27 feet out.

Usually a one-on-one situation in hockey gives the offensive player a huge advantage, and breakaways make for great goal-scoring opportunities. So how were Toronto's two top offensive players so bad at taking penalty shots that they couldn't even hit the net from less than 20 feet away?

Through October 23rd of this year, NHL shoot-out and penalty shot results have been remarkably bad (for the shooters, that is):

Incomprehensibly, almost one in six penalty shots has missed the net. And even when the shot is on net, it's still more likely to be stopped than to go in. This has been true over the last six seasons:

Perhaps due to the reduction in the size of goaltender equipment this season, the penalty shooting percentage is higher than in the past. But the difference is not very substantial - just three or four goals per 50 shots - and is within the bounds of random variation.

Most fans would tell you that the reason so few goals are scored on penalty shots is that very few players have the offensive "moves" required to beat a goalie one-on-one. So what if we control for offensive skills?

The table below shows the shooting percentage for different groups of players, separated by offensive production (goals scored) per 82 games:

The bottom line here is no relationship between regular goal-scoring skills and those on a penalty shot.

Perennial 30-goal scorers actually performed worse than the group of players who averaged 2-14 goals per season. Over the last six years, Mike Comrie, Jarome Iginla, Ziggy Palffy, Martin St. Louis and Mats Sundin have been a colletive "o-fer" on penalty shots. Clearly, superb good offensive skills offers no penalty shot guarantee.

Given such futility, what then are the characteristics of successful penalty shots?

During regular game play, shots taken closer to the net are more likely to become goals, since players find it easier to pick a corner or the five-hole from close-in. The following chart shows shooting percentage versus distance from the goal:

The pink series shows Penalty Shots and Shoot-outs only, while all other shots are shown in blue.

Note that our play-by-play data only tells us the distance of the shot, not its location on the ice. Penalty shots are taken from the slot right in front of the net, while during game play, shots also come from many low-percentage angles. The further one gets from the net, the harder it becomes for a player to score-- though less so in the case of penalty shots.

It's also obvious that linear regression does not predict penalty shot shooting percentage as well as it does shots taken during the course of the game. The correlation of our line of best fit is just 0.47 for penalty shots compared to 0.994 otherwise, which suggests that something else is influencing penalty shots.

What about the type of shot taken? The majority of penalty shots are wrist shots, which our analysis shows, are slightly more likely than the average to slip past the goalie.

Inside 15 feet, shooting percentages for backhands and wrist shots are identical and the shots occur in equal numbers. Since only 40 such shots have been taken since the 2002-03 season started, there's a problem with statistical significance.

Winding up for a slap shot in the shoot-out rarely pays off, like when Tampa Bay's Martin St. Louis recently wound from 29 feet out against Washington's Olaf Kolzig.

So is there any good news for shooters?

In the past, most teams didn't face more than two penalty shots in any given season. The Carolina Hurricanes had a four year span without one.

But now that penalty shot competence decides one in ten games, we can only assume that teams are practicing much more than before. Shooting percentage does seem to be edging up very slightly with each new week of the season. And players have been missing the net much less often than they did during the first week of shootouts.

While the penalty shot has historically been a rarity in the NHL, by the end of this season, we'll have seen so many penalty shots that it should be obvious who figured out how to score on them.