The NHL playoff teams are officially sorted, and the season officially ends this weekend. For many fantasy managers their quest for glory has already concluded either because they have been eliminated, or their leagues finish prior this final week of the season to avoid the random end-of-season scratches. This week, we are going to take a look back over the fantasy playoff period at the players who best served us (and maybe a few who didn't).

There are some complicating factors here in that fantasy leagues don't all start on the same date, and clearly don't all end on the same date. For the purposes of this review, though, we are going to look at a month's worth of data starting on March 28. March 28 is the Monday that a lot of leagues started their playoffs, and we will be going through until April 28, as that is the date I was able to pull the data. For those of you still in the hunt until the final day, my apologies. There is still time for a fantastic performance to boost one of your players listed here. Even if the dates are not exactly what your league experienced, there should be enough overlap for the trends to hold true.

For those following along at home, I have exported two Multi-Category reports from the reports page. These reports contain basic scoring information as well as blocks, hits, and plus/minus. I used the Multi-Category reports as I am also relying on the basic Yahoo scoring system, which includes plus/minus (unfortunately) and blocks. Obviously if your league counts different categories, there will be variations in specific player values.

So without further ado:

I must admit, I did not realize the extent to which some members of this list went off over the last month. I was fully aware of Auston Matthews' brilliance after bearing the full brunt of his success, but Steven Stamkos, Nikita Kucherov and Vladimir Tarasenko meeting or exceeding his standard was a bit of a surprise. For Kucherov and Stamkos at least that is understandable as they had a relatively quiet week or two during my matchups, and have exploded for 20 and 21 points in the seven games since April 16. Tarasenko is slightly more distributed, but still with 21 points over 11 games with a particularly heavy week in the second week of April.

At the end of the day, there isn't really much advise/analysis here. For the most part, it is big-name players living up to their potential at the right time for fantasy managers.

It is worth taking a look at Robert Thomas and Kevin Fiala though. For Fiala this makes the third season where he has had a bit of a slow start, but finished very strong. His current 86 full-season point pace is the strongest of his career as his past inconsistencies have usually landed him in the 65–70-point range. His recent 23 points in 11 games certainly isn't sustainable, but his full season numbers don't actually look that scary. It isn't unreasonable to look at Fiala as a 75–80-point player – we just now have three seasons of data to suggest it is all going to come in the second half.

Thomas is a slightly different case, as his 88-point full season pace is a pretty huge shift from his previous career high of 56. The reason in this case is fairly obvious. He spent the vast majority of his season with Tarasenko and often Pavel Buchnevich, saw a career high of almost 19 minutes of total ice time (up a solid five minutes), and over two minutes of power-play time. If Thomas can keep this deployment, look for those point numbers to continue next season.

Raw totals for the manager's playoff runs are fun and all, but I am also interested in players who really came through in an unexpected way. To look at this I compared a player's fantasy production per game during the playoff window to their production for the rest of the season. Not surprisingly there are some familiar faces on the list, but definitely some new names as well.

Victor Olofsson, Mathieu Joseph, Alex Chiasson had great runs for their managers primarily due to changes in deployment that happened at the right time. Olofsson was bumped to the top line in Buffalo to play with Tage Thompson and Jeff Skinner (imagine writing that sentence at the beginning of the season), taking Alex Tuch's spot. Joseph was an immediate success after getting traded to Ottawa and got to spend time with Brady Tkachuk and Josh Norris. Alex Chiasson was bumped up to play with JT Miller at both even strength and on the power-play. These guys were probably all available in leagues prior to the playoffs, so hopefully you were the manager who got to take advantage.

Matty Beniers is kind of a similar story, new face in a new role, but in his case, he has only been in the league for these eight games and has no prior history to compare to. His seven points in eight games for a Kraken team that has all of a sudden scored three or more goals in six of their last eight games certainly has meant short-term value to anyone who took a flier on him. It also gives the fanbase a little glimpse and what might be possible in the future.

And finally, what is there left to say about Elias Pettersson? Essentially left for dead in the first half, he has been absolutely resurgent in the second. His 100-point full season pace over the second half brings him up to about a 70-point pace on the season, which just demonstrates how awful the first half was.

But of course, we won't spend the entire time reveling in the success stories. We also need some scapegoats for our playoff woes. This is the list of those players who dropped the ball the most for us during the playoffs.

Tanner Jeannot leads the group here, and although the drop is pretty large, it is hard to get too worked up over it. Jeannot's value was primarily goal based (and hits for those leagues that used them) and as a rookie whose primary value was coming from goals, his ability to maintain value through the season was always a question.

I did briefly want to touch on Bryan Rust, Tyler Bertuzzi, and Mark Stone. All of these players were essentially point per game or higher throughout the season and absolutely disappeared over the playoff window. I think it is probably safe to say that Stone came back too early to try and help Vegas make the playoffs and just wasn't ready. I won't necessarily say he gets a pass as managers were clearly hoping for better, but it seems pretty understandable.

Rust and Bertuzzi leave a few question marks though. My best theories are that they were victims of line shuffling and some regression in their other numbers. Both were performing higher than expected through most of the season, so some regression was probably in order. Add to that that Rust was moved off of the line with Sidney Crosby and Jake Guentzel a little prior to the playoffs (though did still get to play with Evgeni Malkin), and Bertuzzi was off of the Dylan Larkin and Lucas Raymond line for periods of time, and some regression makes sense. Rust in particular though was just an absolute train wreck. In the 14 games over the playoff period, he put up just three points. That includes zero points in his last eight games. His previous worst stretch of eight games was five points in his first eight games of the season.

Bertuzzi did have a similarly rough stretch with only three points over a nine-game stretch of this period, but has now put up four points in his last three games. Certainly not helpful if your playoff pools have already wrapped.

Neither performance ultimately changes a lot for me. It isn't a big enough cold stretch that I am overly worried about next season yet. It is something that might be worth checking in on in the off season though.

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

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