On Blocked Shots

In the NHL a big deal is often made about blocked shots. After watching the Caps nearly lose Brooks Laich to injury last night I wondered again why teams put such emphasis on them.  For one thing, players lack the padding to safely block such shots so they regularly incur injury from doing so. Secondly, the shots blocked are typically low percentage outside shots. Thirdly, the player takes himself out of the play when going down to block a shot. A number of times in the NYR-Washington series I've seen a player simply skate around a player who had gone down to block a shot. (These people aren't Bobby Orr in terms of their ability to spring up after blocking a shot.)  Since the NHL records this stat, I used it to do a Pearson correlation calculation between the total shots a team had blocked and points accumulated during the season:

NYI	1387	73
TOR	1323	85
PHI	1317	106
NYR	1301	93
ATL	1292	80
MTL	1272	96
WSH	1257	107
TBL	1249	103
ANA	1248	99
EDM	1219	62
CGY	1209	94
DAL	1204	95
CAR	1203	91
COL	1176	68
BOS	1172	103
BUF	1168	96
CHI	1144	97
SJS	1141	105
MIN	1129	86
FLA	1125	72
OTT	1115	74
CBJ	1114	81
STL	1099	87
PIT	1082	106
VAN	1071	117
PHX	1056	99
LAK	1032	98
NSH	1007	99
DET	917	104
NJD	875	81

Unsurprisingly, to my mind, total blocked shots doesn't track at all with point scoring success, the Pearson correlation number is actually negative, -.1428. Of course, this isn't definitive proof of its ineffectiveness, no one claimed it was a key to the game and maybe the stat gathering is bad or maybe some teams block only key shots while other teams do a lot of ineffective shot blocking. Nonetheless, it remains difficult for me to see why people think this is a laudable thing for a hockey player to do.