Back in April, I posted an article about Unlikely Playoff Heroes. It was the next in a series that I have written over the last several years. The idea is every year there are always a couple of players who step up in a noticeable way in the playoffs, both in terms of on ice performance, but more importantly for this article, fantasy production. Rick Roos started the idea way back when in his article on playoff heroes, but he was looking toward the next season. He is continuing to provide that looking forward content here. My article comes out prior to the start of the playoffs though and is aimed at managers embarking on playoff pools. It looks at several regular season factors to try and predict which players have the best shot at becoming this season's unlikely playoff hero. For this article we are going to take a look back and see how well the process worked and if picking from that list during a playoff draft made you more likely to pick a playoff hero.

We won't go into the full criteria here (for that full article and criteria go here), but basically a player needed to be doing something – getting some kind of production – in the time they were given, without any big spikes in underlying numbers (like shooting percentage), but have room to grow in opportunity (icetime at even strength or on power play), or get a favorable spike in percentages. Essentially room for either improved deployment, or good luck. Most importantly though they needed to play enough games to be impactful, and for most players that means getting to the conference final.

The full pre-playoff list was 23 potential players.

Most importantly, if as a drafter you successfully predicted the final four your choices were whittled to six.

That begs the question; which players were actually the unexpected heroes in the 2021-22 playoff season? In order to assess these player's production, we turn to our handy Frozen Tools reports. We are going to be using two different Big Board sample sets. We first take our regular season report, and export that, and then compare that to the playoff Big Board. Other reports would also work since basically what we are looking at are changes in point pace.

In order to be counted as an unlikely hero we are looking for a point pace improvement of about 0.2 points per game, or a 15+ point pace improvement over an 82-game sample. We are also excluding players who scored at a high rate during the regular season (as they are not unlikely heroes), and/or players with a history of general strong production.

The following table shows players who were close to that mark and their playoff performances.

So basically, when we include those who just played in the first round, we had six players who loosely met our criteria for an unlikely playoff performer. This number is a bit lower than we have had in the past. We just had a lot of excellent performances from star players.

So how do we evaluate this? Three of these 23 were reflected in our pre-playoff list. If you randomly picked from the list of 23, you had a 13 percent chance of getting an unlikely playoff performer. Not a huge hit rate, but the hit rate if you were to select a middle six player at random from a playoff team was 7.5 percent. So definitely better (almost double in fact), but not a fantastic result this time around (past years have been a bit higher).

If we flip the script a little three of the six players were recommended (50 percent), which is decent, but again not quite as good as in the past.

If we fast forward to the final four, only two players hit the unlikely hero threshold. Both of them were recommended (100 percent), making for a 33.33 percent hit rate overall compared to a 10 percent hit rate for a randomly selected middle six skater.

In summary, the hit rate was not quite as high as in past years, but we also had fewer players meet the unlikely hero status than in past years. Also, this year was a bit unique in that most of the potentially qualifying players did not make it out of the first round leaving us with only two by the final four. The trend is consistent with previous years though, that this list combined with selecting the final four teams (and really in this case all you needed to do was guess Tampa and Colorado) is a pretty powerful tool for getting a little extra value out of your roster depth.

I will briefly return to Ondrej Palat and Artturi Lehkonen.

I would hesitate at crowning these performances as new normals for either of these players. Obviously, they are small samples and more subject to variance – and we definitely see it. They both saw fairly large increases in shooting percentage. Palat saw his season average of 12.7 percent (pretty consistent with recent career history) balloon to 23% while Lehkonen's increased from 12.2 percent (already career high) to 18.6.

The big question going into next season for both of them though will be deployment. Both saw more time on ice in the playoffs and at least in Lehkonen's case, it was because he was getting better minutes (and not say because there are overtime games so more general minutes to go around). He is staying in Colorado, but the offseason fallout isn't done yet with Nazem Kadri's destination unknown, and no practices to see how the lines are shaking out, so it is hard to say how much of that time he is going to expect next season. Palat in New Jersey is definitely a candidate for top line, top power-play minutes and getting to play with Jack Hughes at all strengths would definitely raise his value next season. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that is going to be the case, and again we are lacking any information about what the coaching staff will do. Both of these players are going to be significantly line dependent. With an increase sustaining this postseason point pace seems possible. Without it though they likely return to their previous regular-season form.

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

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