Well, that's a wrap on the regular season. Playoffs have begun, and while there are certainly some story lines, we will be reviewing games at a series level, so expect some playoff content once some of the rounds have wrapped. For now, I want to take a look back over the full season and find out which players provided the most, and best value at each position.

Most Valuable is a tricky term that is going to be completely dependent on the league specific context. For the purposes of this article, we are going to use standard Yahoo point scoring to come up with a value for each player. That (unfortunately) includes plus/minus, and categories like hits and penalty minutes, which means there are some instances of players with increased value who did not have the best scoring seasons (and several players who are more pure point producers who dropped a little in the standings).

Once we have the fantasy point totals, we can rank those players to get an idea of how well our top players performed and then develop an estimated points number based on their draft position. We will be able to use those comparisons to show which players performed a lot better or worse than their draft positions.

A quick note on average draft position: The data was pulled from Yahoo earlier in the season, and only for the top 200 players. 200 was picked as it is a round number that is a reasonable (if slightly low) approximation for a lot of leagues and it is a pain to export data from Yahoo. It also will not completely match Yahoo's current ADPs as those will take into account drafts that took place once the year began and will boost the ADPs of guys like Ryan Hartman or Nazem Kadri who significantly outperformed expectations so were drafted much higher through in-season drafts.

As well, we are pulling all of the season data from Frozen Tool's Multi-Cat report to ensure we get those hits, blocks, PIMs, and plus/minus.

Preamble done, now on to the highest performing centers.

Not sure how much of a surprise any of these names are at this point. J.T. Miller certainly took off this season, putting up a 101-point pace and providing a ton of value from the power play. He also leads this group in hits by at least double and by a factor of three in some cases, which is another boost in value for him. He is the second-ranked center with 788.2 fantasy points, and the sixth-ranked skater overall (the far-left column).

The other note here is Auston Matthews and the surprise is that the league's only 60-goal scorer is listed as the fifth most productive center. He played fewer games than the rest of this list, which certainly is a big part of it and he would sit third behind Miller and Connor McDavid if we were judging on a per game basis. His downfall according to this scoring metric is the lack of power-play points and assists (and likely power-play assists). He is 10-15 points off the pace of this group (again some comes down to GP) in terms of power-play points and 20-30 total assists back from McDavid and Miller. His shot count was excellent, but he also doesn't have the hit total like Miller does to put him over the top.

Another interesting note here is there is also a huge gap between these players and the next cluster of players, with five or so being grouped around 650 fantasy points.

Miller and Steven Stamkos stand out on this list as players who were most certainly not drafted in the top five. We would expect our top drafted center to be highly ranked here so next we are going to account for draft position somewhat and see how much value players provided above their draft position. To do this we are going to rely on Expected Fantasy points, which is an estimate of end-of-season points based on their draft position. To get this number I took everyone's ADP and their final fantasy points and found the trend line equation, which I could then reapply to each player's draft position.

Vincent Trocheck is the poster child in this case for value from peripheral categories. He wasn't drafted highly so only was expected to put up 334-ish fantasy points. He also has the lowest point-per-game numbers of anyone on this list, but if your league counts hits, PIMs, and plus/minus he was a late round gold mine (otherwise, kind of an eh season from Trocheck).

All five of our top performers are still on this list, but it is also impressive to see that even though McDavid, Matthews, and Leon Draisaitl were among the top four players drafted, they still beat out the value trend very significantly.

The above list only contains players who were drafted in the top 200 so I also want to include the short list of those valuable players who were later picks or not drafted it most leagues

Honorable mention here also goes to Erik Haula (89^th-ranked player) and Tage Thompson (96^th-ranked player).

Nazem Kadri had the season of his life and the only reason he isn't tops on this list is that so did Ryan Hartman (though to a lesser extent) – and Hartman played more games. Kadri easily crushes this list in per-game metrics.

Sean Kuraly and Joel Eriksson Ek are on this list on the power of their peripheral contributions, while Ryan Johansen had a nice bounce-back season and derived his fantasy points almost entirely from points, and power-play production.

Now I won't leave it entirely at that as there are a number of players who absolutely tanked their fantasy managers this season.

Injuries obviously play a role with this list, but just in case anyone needed any reminders Nicklas Backstrom's season was one to forget. His production fell woefully short of his draft position and while that is also true of Jack Eichel and Sean Couturier he had 15ish more games to accumulate points but still leads this group by a mile.

Ryan Nugent-Hopkins was clearly hurt by injuries and his move to the third line (even if that helps Edmonton as a team). Mathew Barzal is something of a question mark, and was not the go to guy down the stretch. Both cases will be worth digging into in the offseason and seeing if there is any ray of hope for the future.

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

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