Rob looks at the underlying stats for this season’s six largest overachievers.

There are always a handful of players that defy all scoring expectations early in the season, much like Alexander Steen did last year. At the quarter mark, let’s see if we can figure out who this year’s surprises are, what’s driving their performance, if we could have seen it coming, and if it will continue.

The methodology for finding them was simple. I took the average scoring expectations from Dobber and four other popular projection sites, pro-rated that to the number of games everyone has played, and looked for the largest differences.

By definition this will find only players in whom we had modest scoring expectations. Ultimately I found six players who were exceeding those expectations by at least 10 points: Jakub Voracek, Filip Forsberg, Jori Lehtera, Nick Foligno, Brock Nelson, and T.J. Brodie. Let’s take a closer look at each one.

Jakub Voracek, RW, Philadelphia Flyers, +12.9 Points

Average Projection: 77 25 38 63

Current Totals: 21 8 22 30

Back in the day, before our annual hockey drafts, we’d try to figure out who was going to play with Mario Lemieux that year. Remember that? A career 40-point player could go in the first or second round, if he lined up next to the Magnificent One in pre-season. The same thing could occur to someone playing with Denis Savard or Peter Stastny, to a lesser extent.

This is still done in hockey pools today, but more frequently for Sidney Crosby than for Claude Giroux. But why? Giroux had 81 points in the last 67 games last year, and 93 points in 77 games back in 2011-12, and should be able to boost just about anyone’s scoring totals.

Could that be what’s happening with Voracek this year? The 25-year-old Czech always plays with Giroux, almost inseparably so, ever since being acquired from Columbus in a great trade for Jeff Carter (that also netted Philadelphia the pick used on Sean Couturier). Purely an offensive weapon, this year Voracek is in better shape, and enjoying an extra two minutes of ice time per game, mostly on that incredible power play.

As long as he remains with Giroux, Voracek’s scoring should continue, making it quite fortunate that the Flyers have him locked down for just a $4.25 million cap hit for one more year after this. Andrew Hirsch, who just took a more detailed look at him over at SB Nation, concluded that "this fast start is no fluke, and when we look back in a few years, these last couple months should go down as Voracek’s emergence to stardom."

Filip Forsberg, RW/C, Nashville Predators, +11.9 Points

Average Projection: 55 12 16 28

Current Totals: 22 10 13 23