Chris Kane has started the summer series off for the Western Conference – I recommend checking out the Anaheim article.  Nothing better than stuffing your lineup with a couple Anaheim players to reap the off night schedules.  In order to find out which team has the best off night schedules you should be chomping at the bit waiting for Dobber’s Fantasy Guide. We’ll be getting to an Eastern Conference summer series but first I have a few more stats I’d like to touch on to continue mining for some potential steals at next year’s draft table.

The stat that I want to cover this week is Rebounds created.  Skaters that can create rebounds are in theory more likely to create assists for themselves since a sloppy rebound could lead to a tap in goal.  And really who doesn’t love a pass of pads play. I took a look at 2017-2018 rebound data courtesy of Natural Stat Trick and I wanted to test this theory out.  So before we start looking at skaters who may return value next year, it’s probably prudent to show a couple graphs and significance factors to continue the conversation.

Most importantly I want to point out that the data below is assuming 14 teams with 15 skaters – it is worth noting that the data summary for a 10 team league doesn’t change very much when you consider only the top 150 scorers from that season.

So what do I find interesting about this?  I like that the rebounds created per shot is a stable stat for three years – it certainly looks like a skater who is below that threshold could have more rebounds in store for next year.  It also appears that Rebounds per Total Assists is a stable value that could definitely highlight a player who was snake bitten last year and someone who got really lucky passing off pads and having D kick the puck in their own net.  So before just assuming that these values have some predictive value, you can see from the graph of below of Rebounds per Primary Assists that the values do appear be correlated (a linear regression also agrees with this analysis).

Ok well this is pretty self-explanatory – maybe it’s just that guys who shoot more create more rebounds and so we should just be graphing Primary Assists vs Shots.  However what if certain players are significantly better at passing off the pads or getting pucks on net from angles that make it tough on goalies to control the rebound? For this reason I created a stat that shows rebounds created as a function of number of shots taken. Using this derived variable to plot primary assists we find that this also has significance when looking at the league as whole.

It appears that these stats could have some value!

So when we look at assists and their correlation to rebound, obviously we cannot say that every rebound creates an eventual goal, but the data does say there is some value in this thought process.  For this reason what we really need is someone to start keeping track of the number of assists someone gets from rebounds (please send me a link if you know of one – my initial google search came up empty)

Below you’ll find some of the top players in the East but they also excelled at having a rebound relationship that indicates they were lucky compared to their peers. 

Eastern Conference Rebound / Assist Leaders

The players that really are sticking out to me in this are the skaters who have a rebound / assist rate that is less than the league average.  How Sidney Crosby is on this list is amazing to me – same with Phil Kessel the guy got an assist every time he was on the ice last year.

I’ve talked a lot about how excited I am for Jeff Skinner next year and this is one analysis that could possibly point the other direction.   I think my favorite player on this list is Alex Galchenyuk mainly for that it seems everyone in the fantasy community is buying the dip and Bergy is out there Buying High and Selling Low. 

Again as with last week those of you who have made it this far can now take a look at some of the top 150 scorers who had the worst potential luck with their rebounds being created into goals.

Difference from League AVG (.62) Rebounds/Assists

Like Sidney Crosby it is impressive that Barzal and Kucherov find themselves on this list.  I gave Kucherov a pretty hard Hold based on his goal scoring stats earlier this year but it certainly looks like he was unlucky with his rebounds finding their way into the back of the net. Even reaching league average on their rebound assist ratio could add an extra 5 points to these players’ totals next year.

I know there has been a lot of statistical discussion in my articles but as we get closer to next season I think it’ll be important to reference these articles on primary point percentage, rebounds, and shooting percentage.

Enjoy Summer!