Last week we started looking at what I called the impacts of the All-Star Break. It really was less of an impact, but more of a look at trends over the first half versus the second half of the season. The biggest takeaways were that over the last two seasons Leon Draisaitl has been a strong second half performer and generally scoring seems to be a bit down in the second half compared to the first.

This week on Frozen Tool Forensics:Impacts of the All-Star Break Part 2

The term 'half' is a bit of a misnomer though. Usually at the All-Star is at about the 50-game mark so we are really talking about slightly different sample sizes, not just a first half, second half split.

As a reminder, to get these data I went in pulled Big Board reports for specific time periods. I was looking at two seasons, roughly split in half, so I used the Custom Date Range option to set beginning of the season to the break, and then from the break to the end of the season. The seasons in question are the 19-20 season and the 18-19 season as they were less impacted by COVID than the 20-21 season.

Last week we left off by identifying a list of high performing folks from the first half that had a reasonably low chance of continuing their high pace over the second half of the season. This week we are going to focus on players who saw the biggest changes in their splits, and players who saw the same changes in both seasons.

First off let's look at players who saw the biggest points per game increase over these two seasons. As a reminder this table includes both points per game (PTS/GP) and goals per game (G/GP) numbers for both pre and post All Star Game. It also has summary columns to show the difference. The table below is sorted by the difference in points per game for both seasons.

These are single season increases, but there are 16 players who increased in their point per game numbers in both seasons. The 10 most fantasy-relevant players are listed below. Each player has both of their seasons listed to display the points per game numbers, and a new column that shows the average increase in points per game.

A few notes here:

Several of these players are already stepping into bigger roles this season, Jesper Bratt, Adrian Kempe, and Pavel Buchnevich so it might be a little harder for them to show improvement again.

New Jersey is well represented with Pavel Zacha and Jesper Bratt.

Our highest average gains are Pavel Zacha, Buchnevich, and Bratt. Bratt is already on an 80-point pace (with a previous high of 53) so again wondering how much his second half can really improve. Buchnevich is on a career high 78-point pace on a new team (after a previous high is 73). While a lot of it looks sustainable it is again hard to see him pushing his pace even higher over the second half. Zacha's point pace has actually dropped quite a bit from his 20-21 season. Unfortunately, nothing seems incredibly off in his numbers, but he might be the best bet of the three for the three-peat.

And now on to the players who have seen the biggest losses.

Again, these are one off losses over the last two seasons, and a number of them are due to small sample sizes. These are interesting, but what we really want to know is if there are players who are consistently doing this. Overall, there were 36 players who dropped pace over the second half in both seasons, the following table is the 12 most owned players.

There are some big names on this list that have been performing better in the first half. Mitch Marner, Nathan MacKinnon, Jack Eichel, and John Carlson lead the way. Eichel is clearly going to be the exception this season given he hasn't played. Generally. these players are just such elite talent that there really isn't anything to do about this. It isn't like managers should be selling these players because they have a history of performing slightly lower in the second half.

Elias Pettersson makes this list though it seems at least pretty likely he won't be on it for a third season. His 46-point pace over the first half (plus Vancouver's dramatically poor start) seem more like the outliers given his career numbers. That being said, nothing about Pettersson's first half screams breakout coming, so I am not exactly saying that, but getting worse than his 46-point pace should be a challenge for someone of his skill.

Players like Viktor Arvidsson, Sam Reinhart, Matt Duchene, Jeff Skinner, and Pierre-Luc Dubois are all having good starts (relative to their recent histories). For the most part they are all players getting a new lease on life, whether a new team or new deployment. That change provides some optimism that they can keep their paces from the first half, but these are definitely the kind of historically borderline players that bear watching.

That is all for this week

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