Back when I was writing the Wild West Column, every so often I would take a break from scorers and focus on some adds managers could make to boost their category coverage. This week I would like to dive back into the world of hits and blocks and take a look at multi-category players. We will break this into a two-part series, and this week we will be focused on forwards.

First for a little background and process. Frozen Tools has an incredibly helpful report for grabbing these stats and it is helpfully titled, Multi-Category. It, like all reports, can be run based on different time periods, and contains helpful information like hits, blocks, shots, points, and penalty minutes. For the purposes of our work today we will be focusing on data from the 2019-20 season, and on shots, blocks, hits, and briefly on points. I won't be spending any time on penalty minutes as I don't like their use in leagues (counting them as a negative for your fantasy team is something I could get behind though). The report gives all stats as totals, and for the purposes of comparing across individuals I have turned them all into per-game numbers (oh and everything is filtered for at least 20 games played).

For this article I want to take a look at a number of ways we can look at our multi-category data and see if we can find a few players who are worth an extra look.

To start let's just take a quick look at shots. I find shots to be a really important factor to consider when adding your multi-cat players. It is pretty easy to find players who do a lot of hitting (for example), but if you can find a player who does a lot of hitting, and also shoots you are that much better off.

Our most basic look is our list sorted by shots per game.

There are a lot of usual suspects on this list, and not necessarily a ton of new information. Mika Zibanejad and Brady Tkachuk are new additions to this ranking, and it is nice to see Max Pacioretty back in the top ranks for shots per game as well. I really wanted to include this ranking though as a reference point for when we start looking at other categories. The elite players are shooting 3.5 plus shots per game.

If we move on to hits, we will see some lesser known names for sure.

Adding someone like Ryan Reaves to your team gives a big boost in hits, but given his really low stat performance across the board he might not be that helpful depending on how heavily weighted your hit category is. Brady Tkachuk really stands out here as someone with an incredibly high hit count, and at over three shots per game some really strong contributions across the board. Tom Wilson and Nick Foligno make up your next tier with around 2 shots per game.

Blocks isn't necessarily something we look to forwards for (it will definitely play a bigger role with defensemen), but they can still be helpful contributors.

Noel Acciari obviously leads the league here, and has some decent hit numbers. Boone Jenner and Ryan Getzlaf really stand out on this list as guys who are putting up pretty solid numbers across the categories here.

What I am pointing out above is really the value of players with combined contributions. So next I wanted to take a look at players with combined hit and block value. We are going to take the fairly unscientific approach of adding the per-game values of hits and blocks together.

Given the relatively low number of blocks that are in the forward categories here, it really does resemble the hits table (again that will be different for when we look at defensemen). We do see guys like Tyler Motte and Cal Clutterbuck rising in the rankings though.

If we add shots to the mix (again simple addition here – very scientific) we get a really interesting combination of players, and a number of players who were not featured on any list.

Brady Tkachuk is pretty incredible here, almost a point above Alex Ovechkin here, who typically reigns supreme in categories that count hits and shots. Blake Coleman, Patric Hornqvist, and Evander Kane are all suddenly in our top ten when they weren't featured in any of those categories individually. They could all be great potential targets as they likely won't be snapped up as quickly as some of the other big producers on this list.

And finally, for our last list we are going to apply some filters to the categories and get a list of our true top performers here. To make this list players had to shoot more than twice a game, hit more than twice per game, and have put up a 50-point pace.

The list has a lot of the same players as our combine shot/hit/block list, but just emphasizes how valuable the above players can be across the board. The one surprising addition (who made zero of the above lists) is Timo Meier. He might be a bit forgotten after what was a bit of a disappointing point production year (after all of the hype), but it is clear he was contributing across the board.

That is all for this week. Thanks for reading.

Stay safe out there.

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