In prepping for my own drafts (reading Dobber's Columns, listening to Keeping Karlsson, you know the things you do), I have been noticing a minor theme; interest in streaks. Players getting hot and going on point runs is something we all have experienced as managers. Sometimes it happens to your players, but it usually seems to happen against us. I would love to own a guy who can put up ten points in five games, I mean who wouldn't. The question though is are there actually players who tend to be streakier than others? Do some players tend to clump points more than others?

This week on Frozen Tool Forensics 2020's Streakiest players.

This week we are going to take a look at streaky players by using a consistency measure. Basically we are going to take a look at how frequently a player gets a point. There is an excellent Dobber Report for us titled Most Consistent. This report breaks down a player's total points, their number of games with a point, and then uses that to generate a Consistently Percentage. Basically the number of games where a player got a point divided by the number of games. It goes beyond points as well to look at goals and assists specifically. For the purposes of this article though we are going to look at points only.

As a little tidbit to get us started take a look at the top five most consistent players.

Our elite players then are giving us a point about 74 percent of the time. It is definitely an interesting data point, but this list is entirely predictable. Connor McDavid put up 105 points in 56 games. It stands to reason he likely had the highest consistency rating (had points in the highest percentage of his games). Conversely a player with only 20 points in the same 56 games is at most going to have a consistency rating of 35 percent (assuming there were no multipoint games).

What we need to do then is try and factor out total points a bit to see if there are players who are putting up big chunks of points in a small number of games, or if their points are more evenly distributed.

In order to do this I added a couple of columns to our table. The first is a rank column for points per game, the second is a rank column for consistency percentage. The theory is that a players consistency percentage rank should more or less follow their points per game rank (i.e. the McDavid vs the 20-point player example above). If we have players that have a very large difference between those two ranks it implies that they are clumping their points more or less than we would expect given their points per game rank. This strategy is a fair blunt measure, but it does highlight some interesting players.

First up we are going to tackle consistent players. These players are ranked higher in their consistency marker than we would expect five their points per game numbers.

Let's take Jesper Bratt for example. He averaged .65 points per game during the 2020-21 season. That pace ranks him 115th among players who played at least 20 games. Given that point pace we would have expected a similar rank for his consistency percentage (likely something in the 48% range). Instead he is up at 56.52% or the 62nd highest consistency rank. If we take a look at his game log we see only four multipoint games, and the longest streak without a point was four games and it only happened once. He had no three game pointless streaks and five two game pointless streaks.

If we compare him to Yanni Gourde (who had a similar .64 point pace) we see a game log that includes seven multipoint games, a six game drought, four three-game pointless streaks, and two two game pointless streaks.

Bratt and Gourde got to a similar point pace at the end of the season, but Gourde was significantly more boom or bust – or streaky. Bratt was much more consistent.

So, we have the top ten most consistent above, who then were the most streaky?

If you were paying any attention to the 2020-21 season you could probably have guessed a few on this list. Mika Zibanejad, probably most famously got his season back on track with a couple of huge six-point games, while Joel Farabee and Jordan Staal were must-owns for parts of the season, and dead weight for others. What do their game logs actually look like though?

Zibanejad put up 11 multipoint games (including two six point outings) between March 13th and and May 8th. In the two months prior to that he had one, and a six game pointless streak.

While Zibanejad definitely turned his entire season around in March, Farabee is the absolute definition here. He had nine multipoint games and only 13 single-point games. He had five-, six-, and seven-game point droughts. Basically Farabee was your golden boy or he was the anchor dragging you down.

Quick shoutout to Andrew Copp here also. He put up 11 multipoint games, with 13 single-point games (just a wild ratio). He also boasted a six-game and four-game point drought in addition to several three game pointless stretches.

The big question remaining: is repeatable in any way? Are we looking at the same players year after year who are in the top of this ranking or is this just the random fluctuations we would except in players who put up these kinds of point paces? Perhaps we can dig into that in another week.

That's all for now. Stay safe out there.

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