At the beginning of every season a lot of the fantasy advice revolves around patience and small sample sizes. That is because by and large most of the players we draft, we draft because they have a track record and it is more likely that they end up near that track record than whatever wild pace they have after four games. The problem with patience is that sometimes we miss out on Lucas Raymond or other players who end up doing unexpected, yet sustainable things (usually because of a change in deployment).  

For a chunk of this new season, and particularly lately there has been a lot of discourse around several Winnipeg players (and not for the good reasons). Mark Scheifele and Blake Wheeler dominated the questions early on, and in fact we touched on Wheeler's slow start in a recent article, but recently managers appear to be panicking even more about a wide variety of Winnipeg players. I have seen drops, trades, and plenty of mentions on social media and in fantasy articles. It seems like it might be time to take a look under the hood.

For starters let's look at the Frozen Tools home page. If we scroll down to Winnipeg we have cold streaks for Nikolaj Ehlers, Josh Morrissey, and Kristian Vesalainen. That doesn't include the questions folks are having around Wheeler and Scheifele. Given the five names that are already popping up it seems like the perfect opportunity to take a look at the Dobber's team pages and see if we are dealing with a bigger team issue.

If we navigate to the top menu bar under Teams, and then Depth Charts we get to a great summary of a team's performance. In this instance: Winnipeg.

At the top of the page, we have a breakdown of all of the players on the team. It breaks those players out by position (left wing, right wing, center, defense, and goalie) and also shows which of those players are on hot or cold streaks. For Winnipeg the only hot streak is Connor Hellebuyck, but the full cold list now includes:

Ehlers (zero points in last five games)

Morrissey (zero in seven)

Vesalainen (zero in thirteen)

Scheifele (one in five)

Neal Pionk (two in ten)

Andrew Copp (one in seven)

Nate Schmidt (one in seven)

Evgeny Svechnikov (one in nine)

Paul Stastny (one in four)

–

Not included on the 'cold list':

Kyle Connor (two in five)

Wheeler (two in seven)

Dylan Demelo (zero in seven)

Adam Lowry (zero in seven)

Pierre-Luc Dubois (two in five)

That basically accounts for the entire top nine and top defensemen. For those of you keeping track at home the best point pace for any Winnipeg Jet over these stretches is 0.4 points per game, or a 33 full season pace. I think it is safe to say that we are dealing with a Winnipeg problem, not a Wheeler, Schiefele, and Ehlers problem.

The team page can offer a bit more insight into what is happening, but we are going to take a quick detour and highlight two other features of the team pages.

First up: recent line combos and line production. These are definitely helpful when looking at an individual player's deployment. For example, when we were discussing Wheeler one of the first places, I looked was at who he was playing with. Was he still in the top six? On the top power play? When we see a player doing unexpected things it is really helpful to know if they are in an unexpected situation. For Wheeler, and most of the top six players, the deployment hasn't really changed.

The second piece I wanted to touch is way down at the bottom where we have a customizable chart courtesy of Natural Stat Trick Data. It essentially lets you pick three different variables and see where various teams plot according to their performance. There are a lot of shot type metrics including shot attempts, shots, scoring changes, low, medium, and high danger shots goals, and expected goals. By comparing these metrics, we can see which teams are generating good scoring opportunities and the rate teams are converting scoring opportunities into goals (more on this in a minute).

As a side note (not super helpful in this context) we also see a great little section on prospects linking to Dobber Prospects and giving NHL upside and certainty metrics for each player.

And now onto the game log.

Date	OPP	Result	Goals For	Goals Against	Shots For	Shots Against	Power Plays (PP)	PP Percent
Nov 29	@ARI	L	0	1	46	15	0 / 5	0
Nov 27	CGY	W	4	2	28	36	0 / 3	0
Nov 26	MIN	L	1	7	31	38	1 / 3	33.3
Nov 24	CBJ	L	0	3	36	31	0 / 4	0
Nov 22	@PIT	L	1	3	31	35	0 / 2	0
Nov 19	VAN	L	2	3	39	29	0 / 0	0
Nov 18	EDM	OTL	1	2	47	32	0 / 5	0

These are Winnipeg's most recent seven games. Right off the bat we see that they only have one win during this period, have been shut out twice, and only scored more than two goals once. It amounts to only nine goals scored in seven games. Not great. It isn't like they haven't been shooting, though. They have two games where they put up over 45 shots, and only one game where they registered less than 30. In fact, they are averaging over 36 shots per game during this stretch. That means as a team they are shooting at an abysmal 3.5 percent during this time period (their opponents have been scoring at 9.7 percent). Their power play is also similarly abysmal with a 4.5 percent conversion rate.

For a bit of context here the seven games prior to this slump they put up 23 goals, had a team shooting percentage of 10.2 and a power-play conversion rate of 23.5. The implication here is that this slump for the players and team seems to revolve around some pretty unusual low conversion rates.

Back to the charts. If we do a pretty simple comparison of goals and expected goals, we see that Winnipeg is scoring, but not scoring at the rate we would have expected them to score. This is true over the course of the season and is clearly true over this recent stretch. When we look through most of the other measures, Winnipeg is in the pack over the course of the season. That means their overall scoring metrics are fine even if their goals haven't been coming recently. If they were scoring at their season expected rate over these last seven games, we would have seen about 17 goals – as compared to their nine actual goals.

The moral of this story is that any decisions managers are making for Winnipeg players, whether that is Scheifele and Wheeler, or Copp and Pionk, should not be based on recent games (pending Friday's games). The goals are not coming for the team as a whole, but that is likely only temporary. More likely than not, Winnipeg will start scoring again, and when that happens the point paces for a majority of these players will rebound.

That is all for this week. Do your part to support organizations working to make hockey for everyone.

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