Welcome back to another week of the Wild West. Count this as another reminder to go a pick up the  Midseason Guide due out soon. My portion takes a look at all of the teams and identifies some trends and historical production that should be helpful when analyzing players for the second half of the season. Wild West readers are going to get a little sneak peek this week.

One of the trends I look at in the west is a comparison between the first half and second half production.

The first table below shows the top three point per game increases between the first and second half of the 2017-18 season.

Connor McDavid tops the list, surprising no one. His incredible second half came right on the heels of a ‘disappointing’ start to the season where he only averaged more than a point per game. Mikkel Boedker wallowed a bit in the first half, but then found his way onto a scoring line with Pavelski in the last quarter of 2017-18. Viktor Arvidsson kept similar deployment throughout the season, but things didn’t start clicking until the second half.

The second table shows the top tree point per game decreases for 2017-18. Jordan Oesterle actually played more games in the second half, but couldn’t keep up the his hot start. Jaden Schwartz was shuffled around the lineup a bit and lost power play time in the second half. Milan Lucic takes the cake for the worst splits of 2017-18 and absolutely shed time on ice over the course of the second half.

What will happen in 2018-19? Will these trends repeat? What about the rest of the league? Get the guide to see what the Dobber writers think!

Potential Streaming Pickups: (Stats as of Sunday)

Charlie Coyle: Coyle is hot right now with six points, seven shots, and a power play point in his last four games. He has been averaging almost 18 minutes a night overall and lining up with Zach Parise at even strength and Mikko Koivu on the power play.

David Perron: Perron is on fire. He has nine points in his last six games to go along with eight shots and two power play points. His line with Ryan O’Reilly and Alex Steen is clicking, and he is averaging more than 2.5 minutes of power play time per game.

Last article’s recommendation:

Tyler Toffoli, Alex Iafallo: Toffoli pulled together one goal, one assist and 10 shots over the four games this week. It was a reasonable week, though not exactly an extraordinary one. Iafallo on the other hand was a complete bust. In the ten games prior to the recommendation he had ten points. In the four games after, zero points. It isn’t even like he had some shots to help you out either, managing five over the course of the week. 

Ty Rattie: So he did spend some time with McDavid this week, but that was about the only thing the recommendation got right last week. He tops Iafallo as this week’s worst reccomendation managing zero points and a measly four shots over the week. 

Some weeks are just like that.

Drop or Not:

Like our streaming candidates this week Nick Ritchie is also on a hot streak. As of Sunday he is running five points in his last four games. Like our streaming candidates you can pick him up if you want to run with him for a few days, but that should be the extent of it.

Ritchie currently has 17 points in 27 games, or a .63 point pace. That pace is double 2017-18 which is his previous high water mark. Now this is technically his fourth year, so if you believe in the 4th year breakout he is right on schedule. In support of that theory is the fact that he is getting about one more minute of ice time per game. He is now getting an average of 14 minutes a game, mostly on the second line (but it isn’t really the ice time that might signal a true break out). Another plus is that essentially all of that time is power play time.

Unfortunately every other metric (IPP, 5 – 5 shooting percentage, PDO, personal shooting percentage) are all high and indicate that this point pace is unsustainable.  In fact even though he is seeing more time on ice overall his shot per game numbers are falling. 2017-18 saw him shooting 1.6 times per game (not great) and now half way through 2018-19 he is down to 1.37 (even worse).

At the end of the day a career season could certainly be in the cards for Ritchie, but if you can find someone who is prepared to buy on a 50-55 point Ritchie pull the trigger ASAP.

Thanks for reading.