To start this week, here are the top point scorers over the last month.

It is an interesting list. No Connor McDavid. No Leon Draisaitl. Auston Matthews, check. Mitch Marner, sure. Sidney Crosby, sure. Johnny Gaudreau, Matthew Tkachuk, Mark Scheifele, Joe Pavelski, I mean these are good players who have been having good seasons but a little surprised to see them in the top 10. Dylan Larkin? Mats Zuccarello? Larkin is coming off of a 43-point pace in 2020-21 and is now up to a 93-point pace. Zuccarello is continuing his strong play with Kirill Kaprizov and is currently on a 101 (?) point pace. I don't think there is enough being made of these players at the moment. Additionally, I don't think I have heard enough about Andrei Svechnikov, who has clearly arrived with a career high shot rate and 82-point pace.  Svechnikov has been trending this way for a few seasons, but what makes this season special? Well, it is his fourth, of course.

We have occasionally touched on this phenomenon in this column where we often see players breaking out in their fourth seasons. To be fair breakouts can happen at any point (looking at you Larkin and Zuccarello), but for young players it tends to happen when they have matured a little and have earned bigger roles with their teams. The fourth season seems like a time when this often happens. This week I wanted to take a look at some of our fourth-year players and see if we have some breakout stars this year as well.

To get this data Frozen Tools has an aptly named 4th Year Breakout report that pulls data for active fourth year players. I ran that report and exported to rearrange the columns a bit for this article. Incidentally there is also a Next Year Breakout report as well, which pulls data for third year players as a way to get an idea of who might be breaking out next season. We have used this report in the past as well.

For this season if we run the basic report and then sort by points per game, we get the following list. Since it is sorted by points per game, it also has some games played cutoffs to eliminate players who have only played one or two games. In this case we are looking at players scoring higher than a .90 points per game rate.

While you may not have realized that each of these players is in their fourth year, no one on this list should really be a surprise. Each has made a name for themselves this year, proving to be incredibly valuable to both their NHL and fantasy teams. Several of these players were free agents in most leagues and have been putting up close to point per game paces.

I did want to take a moment and highlight Devon Toews, though. He is the only defenseman on this list, which isn't really surprising since we are sorting by points per game, but he currently sits with .95 points per game. He is seeing career high total time on ice, average power-play time, and shot rate (though not by a ton). His team and personal shooting percentages are a bit inflated, so he might fall off a bit, but what he is doing is significantly impressive. What is also wild is that even with his .95 point-per-game pace, he is actually only the second highest scoring D on his team. That honor goes, of course, to Cale Makar (1.11 points per game).

The above players are doing well, but is this season really all that different from their past work? To get a basic answer to that question I went back over their last three seasons and grabbed point per game paces over that time. This does not necessarily allow us to see how big a jump their performance was over last season. Players like Roope Hintz certainly had impressive showings in 2020-21, but it does allow us to compare this season to a relatively large sample of games.

The following table has all of the same columns as the one above, but adds First 3 PTS/G, which is the average points-per-game number for their first three seasons, and the last column is the difference between 2021-22 and the prior number. Our first section is the top five players who are performing better now than that larger sample.

Unsurprisingly, it matches the first list exactly (except for the fact that it contains five names instead of six – but that was just because I was giving a top five). Each of the players above who is having a strong season is performing well above their prior pace. Hintz is slightly lower on the list as he did have a strong per game pace last season so the difference is not quite as large.

But just in case any of you are thinking, "well sure, aren't all players going to be performing a bit better in their fourth seasons than in their first few – how is this news?" Let me present exhibit B, players who are performing worse this season than in their earlier career.

Sure a few of these players have smaller sample sizes this season (Karson Kuhlman, Philippe Myers), and I suppose D are always going to be hard to judge this early (so knock off Tucker Poolman), and maybe we look at Victor Olofsson and say well he lost Jack Eichel, and isn't really that far off anyway (to which I would maybe counter that Jeff Skinner, Tage Thompson, and Alex Tuch really don't seem to mind). That would still leave us with a really interesting list of Elias Pettersson, Max Comtois, Eeli Tolvanen, and Filip Zadina.

I would separate these players into a couple of buckets. For Max Comtois, Eeli Tolvanen and Filip Zadina, it is really interesting to see them here as I don't think we would really have classified them as having broken out yet. Tolvanen and Comtois were almost relevant for a brief stretch in 2020-21, but for the most part we have been waiting for all three of them to make an impact. And it isn't like other players on their teams haven't been having a lot of success. Lucas Raymond, Tyler Bertuzzi, and Dylan Larkin are killing it in Detroit, Troy Terry and company in Anaheim had significant success to start the season, and Matt Duchene, Mikael Granlund, and Filip Forsberg have been leading a resurgent Nashville. The point is there have been plenty of breakout success stories out of these three teams this season and seemingly plenty of points to go around and not only have these three not joined the party so to speak, but are actually having worse seasons than their recent career averages before these big breakouts.

The second bucket really just contains one name. Elias Pettersson. He is the exact opposite of the fourth-year breakout, as he has tanked pretty hard. He started the season getting his usual 20 plus minutes a night, but over the second quarter lost about four minutes a night, and two on the power-play before Bruce Boudreau took over the floundering Canucks. In his last 15 games Pettersson has rebounded somewhat to 17:45 of total ice time, 3.5 minutes of power-play time, and a 55-point pace. And yes, a 55-point pace is a rebound.

Thus far in his career Pettersson has been a high efficiency shooter, so yes even his 13 percent personal shooting percentage is a bit low, and his five-on-five shooting percentage is about half of what it has been throughout his career. He is also shooting a bit less, and his expected goal numbers are a bit off. Moral of the story is that a chunk of this disaster of a season has been bad luck, but even if that were to all balance out, I think he would have a hard time reaching his average 70-point pace from his career thus far. It really does feel like we have hit the point of a lost season and have to just hope that he (and the team) can use the remaining games and offseason to get himself back on track.

That is all for this week

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