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Question of rust on the Colorado Avalanche side of the ledger were put to be quickly in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final against the Tampa Bay Lightning. Gabriel Landeskog and Valeri Nichushkin both scored before the 10-minute mark of the first period to give the Avs a quick 2-0 lead. The teams traded goals later in the frame for a 3-1 game heading into the second.

Tampa Bay did what they do best, though, as all playoff teams do: show resiliency. A beautiful play by Nikita Kucherov set up Ondrej Palat to bring the game to a 3-2 margin, and then Mikhail Sergachev scored on a screened shot not even a minute later to tie things up 3-3. It truly was a wonderful dangle and dish by Kucherov on the second goal:

What a pass from Nikita Kucherov to Ondrej Palat to make this a one goal game. pic.twitter.com/6Z5qPvI6lu

— Shayna (@hayyyshayyy) June 16, 2022

Colorado had the run of play at times, including their share of power plays, but it was a tied hockey game after 40 minutes, and it would stay a 3-3 game until overtime.  

It didn't take long for the game to end as Andre Burakovsky finished a feed from Nichushkin to give the Avalanche a 4-3 overtime win less than 90 seconds into the extra frame, and a 1-0 series lead. A spectacular game to watch, as a fan, basically from start to finish. Game 2 goes Saturday.

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We had a Florida update, and specifically an update on a Grigori Denisenko injury:

#FlaPanthers prospect Grigori Denisenko received season-ending surgery on a broken kneecap in January.

He should be ready by training camp and could factor into the opening night lineup. Whether it's via trade or making the roster is to be determined. https://t.co/cPWqhYRfMW

— Colby Guy (@ColbyDGuy) June 15, 2022

Denisenko was once part of a coveted group of prospects the Panthers had and not (m)any of them have panned out. Hopefully he can get healthy, get a good AHL season under him, and start to force the team to consider him at the NHL level. With how stacked that roster is likely to be, it's a long road to fantasy relevance for him.

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Over the last month or so, I have been discussing a number of players and the seasons they have had. Readers may notice I have been leaning on data and visuals provided by Corey Sznajder (Patreon here). For anyone unfamiliar with that name, he is the best NHL game tracker we have, or at least one doing public data. He tracks dozens (hundreds?) of individual stats for every player in the league by simply watching games and keeping note of what happens. Something as simple as a puck being dumped in results in stats like who dumped it, who was on the forecheck, whether the forecheck resulted in a turnover, whether the dump-in was retrieved or not, and so on. It's like this for everything that happens on the ice. While not all of it is hugely relevant for fantasy hockey, there are some specific areas that are very important to us fantasy players and poolies.

One of these areas I want to talk about is scoring chance contributions (SCC). It is simply the rate at which a player either A) takes a scoring chance themselves or B) creates a scoring chance for a teammate. The application is fairly obvious here, as players that either take or create scoring chances at a high rate are typically your top offensive players. From Sznajder's data, the top-3 in SCC per 60 minutes in 2021-22 were Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, and Johnny Gaudreau. We'll discuss others further down the list, but it can help us identify players who were wizards for their teams offensively. Some of them will be obvious, and some won't. But these are players worth discussing and we're going to do exactly that.

The final note here is that not every game is in this data set, as most players only have roughly half their games in the data. My time-on-ice cut-off is 250 minutes, which is about 20 games or so worth of data. Not a huge sample, but it can give us a good idea of how a player performed in a significant chunk of the season. Good? Great. Let's get to it. As usual, data from Natural Stat Trick or our Frozen Tools. Cap information from Cap Friendly.

Jack Hughes

I mentioned the top-3 players by SCC per 60 minutes a little earlier. Fourth on that list is none other than Middle Child Hughes. Whenever we see a player take a huge jump in production – 52 points in 117 regular season games in his first two seasons up to 56 points in 49 games in 2022-22 – it's always worth noting if it was some sort of mirage. He did set career-bests across the board at 5-on-5, but it seems as if it were earned. And the note here is nothing was at an extreme of the league: Hughes's 5-on-5 shooting percentage was outside the 80^th percentile and the team's on-ice shooting percentage with Hughes skating was in a similar percentile. In other words, he wasn't near the top of the league in either regard, and considering the scoring chances generated with him on the ice, there's no guarantee of a big regression.

New Jersey has a couple of important restricted free agents to deal with in Jesper Bratt (more on him in a minute) and Pavel Zacha. There are lesser deals to be handed out as well, but with over $25M in cap space, they can make a splash in free agency (or the trade market) if they feel so inclined. With Alexander Holtz on the way, and guys like Hughes, Bratt, Nico Hischier, Dawson Mercer, and Yegor Sharangovich a year older, there could be a lot of offence in this top-6 forward mix. New Jersey's rebuild looks to be rounding into form and Hughes is leading the way. Maybe there's a pullback in his overall shooting percentage, but he should be able to more than make up for it in assists as the scoring chances keep piling up. Hughes should be a superstar sooner rather than later and if your fantasy league-mates don't believe in him, reap those rewards at the draft table. Just watch for his multi-cat value because he has 26 career penalty minutes and 33 career hits. He is a dud in those areas.

Robert Thomas

There is always a good feeling that comes with believing in a player and seeing him reach his potential. In June of 2021, I wrote that the biggest obstacle to Thomas rebounding from a down/injured year was garnering a bigger role. The month before that, I wrote about how Thomas and Jordan Kyrou were the two keys to St. Louis becoming a Cup contender again. Both had career years, coming in over a point-per-game pace, with Thomas skating 18:47 a night. The talent was always there, he just needed more than 14 minutes a night, and the dividends are obvious.

As to how much of a mirage Thomas's performance was, he finished 6^th in our sample for SCC per 60 minutes, nestled between teammate Vladimir Tarasenko and Brayden Point. The team was generating a ton with either, or both, of those guys on the ice, and it showed in their results.

There are concerns here, though. Thomas shot 14.8% at 5-on-5, far higher than his career average of 11%, and near the 90^th percentile of the league. The team also shot 13% at 5-on-5 when he was on the ice, fifth in the league among all forwards. The only guys ahead of him were the entire Arizona top line and Michael Bunting. As for his own shooting percentage, this is where he took his shots from (via Hockey Viz):

If you're going to shoot 13%, it seems he's shooting from the right areas to do it.

The other concern is his shot rate. He improved from COVID 2021, but declined from 2019-20, and had a similar shot rate to Radek Faksa, Zack Kassian, and Matt Martin. Unless that shot rate takes a massive jump, he is not a threat for 30 goals, and the muted shot totals hurt in multi-cat leagues. As does his very muted hit totals.

Whether Thomas is turning into an elite playmaker (or is already, for that matter) doesn't seem to be in question. The question is whether he can do enough to bring significant value in multi-cat leagues. For a player that doesn't shoot or hit, and plays on a team that tends to split its power-play units, these questions will persist. He seems to be a player who will have much more real-life value than fantasy value.

Reilly Smith

For scoring chance contributions, Smith finished inside the top-25 of the league, between Jake Guentzel and Jonathan Huberdeau. Looking at our list, no other Vegas forward finished inside the top-70, which speaks to how poorly that team performed offensively (with injuries being a big factor, no doubt). Despite that, Smith's season has gone basically unnoticed, which is important for us fantasy players. He finished at 38 points in 56 games with very little PP production (seven points). His points per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 (2.19) saw him finished just behind names like Patrice Bergeron (2.22) and Andrei Svechnikov (2.21) and just ahead of names like Brady Tkachuk (2.17) and Brayden Schenn (2.15). Had he played a full season with reasonable PP production, he cruises past 60 points and maybe pushes for 70. For all the talent they had, Smith was one of the bigger offensive engines Vegas had in 2021-22.

We bring him up because he's a free agent. Vegas will have to move out some money as it is, so him re-signing there seems very unlikely. He is going into his age-31 season, so it's fair to wonder how much longer he can keep up this level of play.

All that aside, there is a very good fantasy option here. He should be good for around 2.5 shots per game and maybe 70 hits in a full season. Those aren't huge peripheral totals, but they don't hurt, and he has 60-point upside in the right landing spot. With all the big-name free agent wingers available this summer, he could fly under the radar and come as a steal on draft day. Make sure to watch where he lands when free agency opens.

Jesper Bratt

The last guy we'll mention today is a guy we mentioned a bit earlier, and that's pending restricted free agent Jesper Bratt. He had a marvelous season, posting 73 points in 76 games. While it may be tempting to say he was a product of playing a quarter of his time with Hughes, the team scored nearly as much when Bratt was playing elsewhere (3.4 goals per 60 compared to 3.6 with Hughes). It also didn't come out of nowhere, either. In the COVID 2021 season, Bratt had 30 points in 46 games, which is just a 53-point/82-game pace. The important part here is he shot 6.9% overall, compared to 12.7% over his first three seasons. If he shoots 12% in the COVID season, he adds five goals, and he jumps to a 62-point pace. From Evolving Hockey, he showed good play-driving promise in his career before the 2021-22 season:

That Bratt took a step forward in his age 23 season after having 231 regular season games under his belt – including a career-best 17:26 in TOI per night – seems very reasonable here.

As for his goal scoring, his shot attempt rate has increased every season of his career, culminating in 15.2 per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 in 2021-22. That rate puts him around the 85^th percentile of the league. Though he managed just 2.6 shots per game, he wasn't getting huge amounts of ice time. If that can jump close to 19 minutes this coming season, he could flirt with three shots per game, making him a more well-rounded fantasy asset. Like Hughes and Thomas, he doesn't hit or take many PIMs, so be careful in multi-cat leagues.

Another key point for Bratt is the team was excellent offensively whether he was playing with Hughes or whether he was with Nico Hischier. As long as those guys can stay healthy, Bratt should have a centre he can play very well with. That gives us a bit of security, no matter if he's on the top or the second line.

This is a player we should believe in. As mentioned in the Hughes section, this rebuild is really coming together now. Bratt is the team's top winger and should get all the prime offensive roles on this roster because of it. He is just coming into his prime and if the top PP unit can really start flying, then a point-per-game winger is available here. He just finished the season 13^th in scoring chance contributions, nestled between Kirill Kaprizov and Connor McDavid. With much of the Devils's rebuild all coming together now, it's an exciting time for this team.  

That's it for today. We'll talk about some more players and their contributions tomorrow.