Nashville – Matt Duchene

You could easily list Ryan Johansen and his seven goals and 22 points (0.46 pts/game) in 48 games or the recently traded Viktor Arvidsson and his 10 goals and 25 points (0.50) in 50 games but I'm going to go with Matt Duchene. Duchene was coming off of a pretty significant injury and only played 34 games this past season, so there is a level of diminished expectation for him. The problem is if he was healthy enough to dress for 34 games, it was still a disappointment for him to only post six goals and 13 points (0.38). There is an argument to be made that his PDO of 963 and his net expected goals of 2.61 indicate he played better than his production level. I don't think there is the danger that Duchene will be struggling to put up 30-35 points in the NHL but he will probably top out at 45-55. He has taken a step back, just not two at this point.

San Jose – Erik Karlsson

Other names on the Sharks could be Timo Meier or Brent Burns but Erik Karlsson had his least productive season in the NHL this past year with eight goals and 22 points (0.42) in 52 games and he was relatively healthy for the whole season.In 12 NHL seasons, Karlsson had never had below 0.43 pts/game and other than that season (his rookie year) he had never had less than 0.60 pts/game. His game is not trending in the right direction at 31-years of age to guarantee a bounce-back season as his power-play ice time is going down, his offensive zone deployment is only 50.9 and his expected goals this past season was minus 5.79. He has entered that dangerous area for offensive players that don't have a good defensive side to their game. When their offense diminishes their overall game is not worth having on the ice for top-four minutes. This season will be a real test to see if the Sharks still give him 22-23 minutes per game and trot him out on the power play over 50 percent of the time. His contract almost forces the issue but I don't see him rebounding to anything more than 0.60 pts/ game and Karlsson has never been one to play more than 70 games in a season.

St. Louis – Robert Thomas

There are quite a few Blues that could be listed here including Torey Krug, Zach Sanford, Vladimir Tarasenko, Colton Parayko or Jordan Binnington but we are electing to go with Robert Thomas. To be fair to Thomas he was injured for a good chunk of the season and only played 33 games where he had only three goals and 12 points (0.36). Thomas had a very good season in 2019-20 with 10 goals and 42 points (0.64) in 66 games, so it raised hopes that he was into the 50-55 point range for his career moving forward, not the 25-35 point range. Thomas has never been much of a shooter, averaging only 1.2 shots per game in his career before this season where he only managed 22 SOG in 33 games (0.7). The issue with Thomas is that his shooting percentage has been consistent in his three seasons between 11.3 and 13.6 but if he only manages 80-100 shots per season, he will be hard-pressed to ever score more than 15 goals in a year, so most of his production will rely on assists. In the past two seasons, his secondary assist rate has been about 33-34 percent so he should still produce some pretty good totals there, but his overall production has a limited ceiling especially in his current role on the Blues. His current ceiling might be 35-45 points for the next few seasons.

Vancouver – Nate Schmidt

We could include J.T. Miller, Elias Pettersson and Jake Virtanen here, but my vote is for Nate Schmidt this past year. I didn't know much about Schmidt before this season other than the playoff games that I saw him play with Vegas against Vancouver in the bubble in 2019-2020. I thought the Canucks were getting a very mobile puck-moving defenseman that would slot right in as their second-best defender right away. While he certainly showed glimpses of that with Vancouver, overall he was a disappointment, because he wasn't nearly consistent enough overall and turned the puck over quite a bit. Looking at his deployment I would say that the Canucks did him no favors with his offensive zone starts of only 34.1 and if they have hopes of Schmidt being more productive next season this number will need to get closer to 50. Schmidt should be much closer to his average of the prior three years between 0.47 and 0.53 pts/game than this year of 0.28. I would expect a bounce-back year from him no matter where he plays next season.

Vegas – Cody Glass

This was between Cody Glass and Robin Lehner for me this season as I thought Lehner had won the 1A goalie job from Marc-Andre Fleury after last season and when he struggled out of the gate and was injured, Fleury just took his job back from Lehner and never let go. I'm choosing Cody Glass over Lehner because I never put all my eggs in the basket of a former backup becoming a full-timer starter over a starter that has had success in the league.

Cody Glass to me had all the makings for a slight improvement on his 12 points in 39 games (0.31) from his rookie season in 2019-20. He started the season, struggling to stay in the lineup but did manage seven points in his first eight games so the optimism for a good season was never higher at that point. Unfortunately, he scuttled the rest of the season with only two goals and three points in the 19 games he managed to dress for including only one game in the playoffs. The concern for me is that he is no closer to getting into the Vegas top six and out of his 22 career points, 11 of them have been on the power play. At 22 years of age, he is at a bit of a crossroads, as he might be too good for the AHL, but not quite ready for the NHL. I think we just have to preach a little patience with him for 1-3 years.

Winnipeg – Pierre-Luc Dubois

Some Jets fans would have Blake Wheeler and Josh Morrissey along with our choice of Pierre-Luc Dubois but I don't think that they are even close to Dubois. I think that most people assumed that when the Jets acquired Dubois, his disinterested play would stop and he would get back to what he was the prior three seasons. He had a few decent games in a season where he put up eight goals and 21 points in 46 games (0.46) which were quite down from his output of between 18-27 goals and 48-61 points (0.59 to 0.74) in the prior three years. Most concerning for the Jets is that he went scoreless in his last 24 games with Winnipeg (including seven games in the playoffs). Winnipeg gave up quite a bit in trading Patrick Laine, so anything less than a bounce back from Dubois will be a disaster.

It is never a good sign when a team has a lineup of players vying for the most disappointing player of the year and most teams would love to limit it to one or two players per season.