In my Ramblings on Tuesday, I talked about some predictions I made before the season and whether they panned out or flamed out. I want to go into this a bit deeper, looking into my methodology and the players we really, really missed on.

For season-long rankings, I use something called Standings Gained Points (SGP). I first heard of it from reading a fantasy baseball book by the author Tanner Bell, though I'm not sure he was the first to think of it. All SGP does is tell us how much a certain player can help in a certain category, based on replacement-level production for a given fantasy league. Then we tally how much they can help us when looking at the contributions across all categories. We are going to look at the three positions (C/W/D) and the misses therein. As always, it's important to learn lessons from mistakes, and that's the whole point of these exercises, right? We'll be using Yahoo rankings and getting some secondary stats from Natural Stat Trick.

Centre

Brayden Point (My preseason ranking: 15^th among centres by SGP)

While we could blame some of this on injury, his 82-game pace is still just 73 points. Barring an absolute nuclear tear, he won't come close to finishing top-15 among centres, and wouldn't if he were to play 75 games, either. The funny part is, the biggest concern about his multi-cat profile was a lack of hits, and he could pass (72) his total from the previous three seasons combined (78). The issue seems to be his individual points percentage (IPP), or the rate at which he garners a point when Tampa scores with him on the ice. He is under 55% at 5-on-5 this year, after not finishing under 66% in any of his last four seasons. I imagine we'll be drafting him highly again next year, but maybe this isn't a true-talent 90-point centre. (I think he is, but deeper digging is what the summer is for.)

Sam Bennett (My preseason ranking: 17^th)

Bennett was one of the players I was considerably higher on than most people heading into 2021-22. Part of it was the turnaround in shot rate when getting to Florida, and part of it was his likelihood of staying in the top-6 with top PP minutes. While he stayed in the top-6, he did not stay on the power play, and it has led to just 8 PPPs. He still had a very good fantasy season, but the lack of PP production capped his upside. One has to wonder if he gets the role next season or not. When it comes to power-play roles, don't count chickens for non-elite players.

Sam Reinhart (My preseason ranking: 28^th)

This was a guy I was going in the other direction with. His power-play production? His 28 PPPs in 73 games? That was what I was hoping for from Bennett. Not necessarily getting close to 30 PPPs, but even getting close to 20 would have made a huge difference. I did not expect Reinhart to not only get a significant PP role on this team, but to keep it all season. This was just a huge miss by me and there is something to be said about players that have experience in a given role.

Winger

David Pastrnak (My preseason ranking: 3^rd among wingers by SGP)

Not that he's had a bad season, as he still might crack 40 goals while playing under 75 games, and he's over a point-per-game. Oh, and he's managing 4.4 shots per game(!). But being ranked top-3 among all wingers and not being inside the top-10 RWs on Yahoo means this is a fail. One problem is his assist rate, which hit a 5-year low at 5-on-5. A big reason for that is a career-low IPP, but as league scoring rates rose across the league, Boston's 5-on-5 goal rate with Pastrnak on the ice is a 3-year low. Perhaps we'd be wise not to put too much stock into a winger whose original line mates combine for 70 years old, not matter how good they might be.

Nikolaj Ehlers (My preseason ranking: 16^th)

This was a miss largely because of injury but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the ongoing issue: his role and ice time. Following Paul Maurice's resignation, his Ehlers's ice time went from 18:45 a night to 17:33. Now, his production went up (as it did for a lot of players in the second half of the season) but he was still frequently behind Pierre-Luc- Dubois and Andrew Copp for top PP minutes. He's gotten more of those of late, but it's too late for most people taking part in a non-H2H league. This continues to be a disaster of a situation for like the sixth year in a row.

Johnny Gaudreau (My preseason ranking: 28^th)

This was the season it all came together for Gaudreau and his line mates. As of Wednesday afternoon, the team is scoring nearly 5 goals per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 with him on the ice. That is patently absurd, especially where he's never exceeded 3.5 on-ice goals/60 in a full season of his career. It's more than twice the goal rate from 2019-20 (2.35). I thought that the Flames would be better with Darryl Sutter behind the bench but did not think this level of offense would come. Swing and a miss.

Tyler Toffoli (My preseason ranking: 31^st)

We are going to have a couple of Canadiens on this list and maybe that's cheating, but my word they were bad. I didn't think the team would be good, but they were last in goals/60 across the league when Ducharme was fired (yes, even worse than Arizona). The thing is, he didn't really see a massive resurgence when he got to Calgary. He is down near 15 minutes a game with 11 goals in 32 contests, and a 56-point/82-game pace. He may not have even cracked the top-30 if he were in Calgary all year. Beware in investing in bad teams.

Defence

Dougie Hamilton (My preseason ranking: 2^nd among defencemen by SGP)

Even without the injury, there's no way Hamilton would have finished as a top-3 defenceman. He had 20 points in 30 games leading up to the facial fracture, with 7 PPPs. Sorry, but pacing for like 55 points and under 20 PPPs would have been a hugely disappointing season regardless. We can blame IPP for this one as well, as his 31.5% at 5-on-5 is the lowest of his career, and the first time finishing below 42% since leaving Boston seven years ago. Hopefully that rebounds next year on an improving, high-scoring team. Just beware that a guy who doesn't typically get a lot of ice time – relatively speaking – doesn't have a lot of margin for error.

Tyson Barrie (My preseason ranking: 8^th)

His ranking made my skin crawl but there's only so much that can be done about the guy running Connor McDavid's power play. Unfortunately, his ice time got nuked, he lost his PP role for extended periods, and his shot rate cratered along with that ice time. This is the concern about highly ranking players that really aren't that good in fantasy; if they don't over-deliver, there's a good chance they end up being a huge bust. That is what happened here.

Jeff Petry (My preseason ranking: 11^th)

The second Canadiens player on this list, but this is for a different reason. What we saw from Jeff Petry for the first two-thirds of the season was… shocking. He had 6 points in 37 games through the end of January. In 82 games, that works out to 13 points. This, from a guy with four straight 40-point seasons. Now, we've already talked about the Canadiens' trouble scoring, but Shayne Gostisbehere is going to push 50 points on a similarly-awful offensive team down in Arizona. Honestly, I don't know what to make of his first 30-some games. I've seen talk of injury (which could be part of it), bad coaching (but he had the same one last year), and a bunch of other reasons. His IPP dropped, but he had similar rates 3-4 years ago when he flew past 40 points. It appears the biggest culprit, aside from what's been mentioned, was an awful power play combined with a career-low power-play IPP. We'll see where he ends up in preseason draft slotting but I may be inclined to buy into a bounce-back season.

Torey Krug (My preseason ranking: 18^th)

This was a combination of believing in his potential as a power-play blue liner and the team's prowess with the man advantage. He isn't having a bad season by any means, but the problem with producing roughly the same amount of points per game as last season is there are defencemen elsewhere reaping the benefits of the increase in goals this year. Having a similar performance to last year, but in a higher-scoring environment, means we're not treading water, we're drowning. He also losy a couple minutes in ice time and it's really hurt his peripherals, particularly hits and shots. Those were areas he didn't have a lot of wiggle room to begin with. Not sure how this plays for next year but losing ice time is not a good start.

*

We have a Gabriel Landeskog injury update:

Coach Bednar says Devon Toews is home & taking this road trip off. He's ok, just getting as healthy as possible for playoffs.

Kadri is on trip & will hopefully play tonight.

Landeskog is home and will start skating this week along with Ryan Murray.

Good news! #GoAvsGo

— Marc Moser TV (@RadioMoser) April 20, 2022

There are nine days left in the regular season and that means the playoffs start in about two weeks' time. Whether that's enough to get Landeskog's legs under him, having been out for six weeks, is a good question. All the same, it's a good step forward and getting him back early in the postseason would be a big boost for this Cup contender.