Nobody in the league shoots less
Anthony Elanga has scored twice this season and taken four shots to do so.
Newcastle took about 13 shots a game last season, the eighth 'busiest' attack in the league, and this season no side in the league shoots less often than they do. That is a long way to fall in one summer, and their summer activity is perhaps most of the explanation.
Tonali left for Tottenham for €108m, Bruno Guimarães joined Arsenal and Anthony Gordon went to Barcelona, so the passing, the carrying and a good deal of the running went out of the side in a single window. Matías Fernández-Pardo arrived from Lille and Nico González from Manchester City, and between them they have not yet played three full matches.
The crossing says it most plainly. Newcastle put more balls into the box than any other club in the league last season and now rank nineteenth of twenty, which is not a style adjusted but a route to goal closed.
The finishing...
What has held the results up is what happens on the rare occasions they do shoot. Newcastle are scoring from roughly one in six attempts, a rate only Manchester City are bettering.
It is not one forward in form, either. Joe Willock and Elanga have two goals each, and Harvey Barnes, Yoane Wissa and Lewis Hall have one each, so the sharpness is spread across the team rather than relying on a no.9 having a good month.
Barnes and Hall are also where most of the creativity that survives now comes from, a winger and a left back combining down one flank while the middle of the pitch is pretty quiet. It is a narrow thing to hang an attack on, and it asks both of them to keep this up without a midfield feeding them.
Very few sides finish at this rate for a whole season.
What happens when it stops
We can assume that generally, finishing drifts back towards the middle of a league far easier than chance creation does, and a side shooting as rarely as this one has nothing behind it when that happens. The fair objection is that Newcastle have changed style rather than declined, trading volume for better openings, in which case converting more of fewer shots is exactly what you would expect and nothing about it is borrowed.
The clear chances do not support that reading. A side taking fewer but better shots would be holding its count of clear openings while the total fell, and instead the two have come down together, which is the shape of an attack that has lost its supply rather than refined it. I guess...
The better objection is that two expensive signings have barely kicked a ball, and a midfield with them in it may pass and press like a different team by say, November. The last fortnight left room for both readings, a 4-1 defeat at Leeds and then a 2-1 win at home to Hull.