As we kind of returned to hockey over the last couple of weeks, there have been a number of new look lines that have popped up across the league. We have players getting injured/returning, and some general just line shuffling. I wanted to take this opportunity to dig into which lines have been having the most recent success.

This week on Frozen Tool Forensics: Hottest Lines

Frozen Tools of course has an excellent option for looking at line production. A couple actually. We can access through the Reports page, by selecting Top EV Line and then selecting the date range. We can also access the last week's report through the Lines drop down and selecting Top Week Forward Lines.

To generate the below tables I used Top Week Forward Lines. I exported the data, rearranged a couple of columns to fit better in the article, and to account for games played added a goals-for percent column.

First up, let's just take a look at the lines who have been most productive. The cutoff for this table was three goals for.

Joe Pavelski, Roope Hintz, and Jason Robertson are certainly having an excellent run. Pavelski for example has 14 points in his last seven games, helped by a five point night on 1/12 against Seattle. Robertson has twelve  in his last eight games, and Hintz has six in his last eight. After starting the season very cold, this line has been on fire basically since Robertson has returned. Not really anything actionable here unfortunately.

Nikita Kucherov and Brayden Point being healthy certainly does good things for Tampa, and Timo Meier and company have just been putting on an impressive show essentially all season. So, again, not a lot actionable, unless Alex Barabanov is available in your league, thus the other lines I wanted to touch on here are in Boston.

The Perfection Line has been split for its longest period to date, and the results so far seem to be… good? Boston has been scoring about five goals per game since the split. The second line seems to be doing just fine with David Pastrnak is starting to rebound with six points in his last five games, Taylor Hall has eight in his last seven, Erik Haula has five in his last six. And the top line hasn't missed a beat here either. Patrice Bergeron has four points in his last four games and Brad Marchand has eight points in his last four games.

The actionable advice here is that if somehow these top six are still available you want to consider giving them a shot. Bergeron, Marchand, and Pasta are definitely owned, but managers may have cut bait with Hall, and Haula and Smith were likely not owned prior to this week (I would add them in that order at the moment).

If we adjust the script slightly and look at which lines are having the most success compared to their opponent, we see a lot of the same.

A notable addition here is the Auston Matthews line with Alex Kerfoot and Michael Bunting. Unfortunately, that line wasn't together in Toronto's most recent game, with Kerfoot playing again with John Tavares and William Nylander and Ondrej Kase playing with Bunting and Matthews. As with above, let this serve as a reminder to keep an eye on Kase, Kerfoot, and Bunting, all of whom are getting excellent turns of deployment on Toronto, particularly with Mitch Marner out. Kase's seems to be the most fleeting but all are worth a look while in the top six.

Now let's shift from actual production to potential production. For this we are going to look at corsi for. By looking at corsi (essentially shot attempts) in this context we are getting a rough idea of how much a line is controlling play. For this first table we are sorting by total so we can see which lines have the most total shot attempts for.

There is a lot of overlap in this list and our most productive goal scoring lines. This is pretty unsurprising. I think most people would assume that lines with the most shot attempts should have a high number of goals.

One big exception is Reilly Smith, William Karlsson, and Jonathan Marchessault though. They have one goal for over the last week, but the third-highest shot attempts with 50. That amounts to one goal and 29 actual shots on goal – a pretty terrible 5-on-5 shooting percentage. Smith only has three points in his last six games, same with Karlsson, and Marchessault (who has 31 shots over that span). The moral of this story is that this line is still very effectively generating shots, but just isn't scoring. They have a combined shooting percentage of 3.4 over this time period. Given that their average combined shooting percentage is something like 12 percent, things should swing right for them again soon.

For our last table we are looking at which lines have the best share of shot attempts. These are the lines who are best controlling the play. Getting shot attempts while limiting their opponents'.

Again some familiar lines here with the Meier, Kucherov, Marchessault lines represented. Our top line over the last week though? Phillip Danault, Viktor Arvidsson, and Trevor Moore. On the one hand this isn't that surprising, this is sort of Danault's thing. On the other though, they have only managed to generate two goals despite dominating play.

The good news is that might be something of a blip as a couple of games back this line had a huge game that puts Danault with five points in his last four games (including both of the goals above), Arvidsson with six in his last four, and Moore with seven in his last four. It is highly unlikely that these paces will continue and are definitely buoyed by that huge game on Jan 1st, but the line might be worth a look if they continue to dominate play like they have been recently.

That is all for this week

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