Vladimir Tarasenko's 23 goals come with a warning for two interested Canadian teams
Photo credit: USA TODAY Sports via Reuters Connect
Vladimir Tarasenko scored 23 goals with the Minnesota Wild, but his shot volume and finishing rate tell a very different story for Montreal and Edmonton.
Vladimir Tarasenko scored 23 goals last season. The debate around him has fixed on where he fits, not on how those goals were produced.
Pierre McGuire has argued the 34-year-old winger no longer belongs in the Montreal Canadiens' top six, a view raised on The Sick Podcast.
The question underneath that is whether 23 is the right number to plan around at all.
The shot volume never came back
Tarasenko fired 148 shots for the Minnesota Wild across 75 games and converted at 15.5 percent, per Hockey Reference and MoneyPuck tracking.
His career shooting rate is 12.8 percent. The season before, in Detroit, he shot 8.3 percent on 133 shots and finished with 11 goals.
Run those same 148 shots at his career rate and the total lands near 19 goals instead of 23.
That difference is where the market misreads him. His finishing returned, his volume did not, sitting below half the 306 shots he took in 2017-18.
Why Montreal is the wrong buyer
The Canadiens went 48-24-10 in 2025-26 partly on a team-wide shooting percentage jump, alongside a stronger power play and more offence from the blue line.
Adding a forward whose bounce-back was itself a percentage event stacks one unsustainable thing on another.
Sixteen of his 23 goals came at five-on-five in under 15 minutes a night, which is genuinely good.
Five came on a Minnesota power play that ranked third in the NHL at 25.2 percent.
Kent Hughes would be buying that finishing rate at second-line money while Edmonton weighs the identical math.
The honest read is that Tarasenko is a 19-to-21 goal winger who finished well, not a 23-goal winger who slipped through free agency.
That is a useful signing at two million dollars and a poor one at four.
Whether Montreal, Edmonton, or anyone else bites remains to be seen.
Also read on House Of Hockey :
Evander Kane's public feud comes at the worst possible time
Evander Kane's public feud comes at the worst possible time