As fans and writers, we sometimes like to pick arbitrary times as opportunities to look back or to group sets of games. For instance, the All-Star break is often used as a halfway point and a comparison for first half/second half splits when it is not in fact the halfway point of the season. Given the ridiculousness of the NHL schedule this week caused by American Thanksgiving I am going to take this opportunity to dig into some past data and see if American Thanksgiving as a quarter point marker can tell us anything about what we might expect going forward.

The focus of the work today is going to be on point-per-game players, though we are going to start with some general info. To get this all sorted I used the reports page to pull three Big Board Reports. I used the custom time searches to get reports from the start of season to American Thanksgiving in 2021, from that Friday until the end of last season, and then the same beginning of year report for this season. For 2022 the data was pulled on 11/23 as my own schedule prevented me from including Wednesday night's games. Once I had the reports, I exported them so I could pull forward and combine the data I needed. In this case I am mostly interested in point paces in each of these sections.

Fast forward to some of the results. Basically, the point pace a player puts up in the first quarter is only loosely correlated to their point pace for the rest of the season. (Pardon a few sentences of stats lingo and feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph if that is not for you). I used r squared to determine this and the value came back as .505. In 30 seconds or less basically r squared is an equation that tells you how correlated two sets of data are. A returned value of zero is no correlation and a returned value of one is an exact match. .505 indicates that there is some connection between these data points, but that there are lots of other variables at play here.

This loose correlation isn't much of a surprise. We know that players can perform differently in different splits, and that some players have a reputation for slow starts, or second-half surges. We are also talking about slightly different sample sizes with the first quarter being about 20 games, while the rest of the season's sample is closer to 60. The smaller sample is therefore more likely to include a bit of noise.

To illustrate how that translates we can turn to a couple of more data points. To start we are going to look at players who were around the point-per-game threshold or above (with a minimum threshold of 15 games played). Of the 36 players who met that criteria to start the season 55 percent of them saw a drop in point pace of at least ten points over the remaining games. For example, Troy Terry started the season at a 95-point pace but dropped down to a 66-point pace over the remainder of the season (a drop of 29). Dylan Larkin dropped from an 87 full season pace to a 77-point full season pace (a drop of 10). There were eight players (22 percent) who maintained about the same pace through the rest of the season, and eight players (again 22 percent) who increased their pace by more than ten points (Aleksander Barkov going from a 93-point pace to a 112-point pace for example).

For the rest of the league (assuming a 30-to-78ish point range) the numbers are a bit closer. About 40 percent of those players dropped in their production, about 30 percent stayed the same, and 30 percent increased. Overall, the league's production increased after the first quarter from an average of .4 points per game to .43 points per game, while fantasy relevant players saw their point paces decrease on average from .73 to .70.

So, what does that tell us? Well, if last season's data is any guide there will be a large chunk of players who fail to live up to this first quarter's pace, and this will be particularly true for players performing over a point per game. We should expect about 55 percent of them to drop off in a meaningful way and about 42 percent of them to actually fall below a point per game.

For this season our production seems to be up (or at least less balanced). There are 67 players who are scoring at a .95 points per game or higher pace. Given that number I won't be including the entire list here, but I wanted to touch on a few notable names.

We have touched on Kevin Hayes before and much of what we reviewed then still holds. He is currently pacing for 82 points and there is a lot to like about what he is doing. He is matching his career high shots per game, accompanied by career high power-play time (over three and a half minutes), and total time on ice (almost 19.5). He is seeing elevated expected goal numbers which indicate that he is more dangerous than in the past and his shooting percentage is just about normal. The only red flag is a team shooting percentage that is too high. Likely that means his line will experience a bit less success than it has to date, and his points may drop a little as a result.

Ok. We also need to talk about Tage Thompson. Thompson has 23 points in his last 12 games, is averaging almost 5 shots per game on the season, and getting over 18 minutes of total ice time. His personal and team five on five shooting percentage look too high but are in line with last season so either he has reached a new relatively unexpected level of play or some of the luck that carried him last season is still with him. His game log is ridiculous though. Six of his last 13 games he has eight or more shots, and six of those games have also been multi-point. The other area of note here is that ten of these points have come in two games – a six point, and then a four point night.

Jamie Benn is on an 86-point pace. The last time he put up higher than a 56-point pace was 2017-18. He is playing less than 15 minutes a night on average, and only about two minutes on the power-play. He is shooting at almost 20 percent and has put up nine power-play points (essentially equaling his full season production on the power-play in three of the last four seasons). So, there are a couple of things going on here. First, he and his linemates at even strength are shooting at a very high rate and that won't continue. Also, the power-play is clicking and Benn seems to be in on it. He has gotten turns on the top power-play in the past and not produced much so we will have to watch how that goes. If it goes well some of this production might sustain, but very likely well under a point-per-game.

Has Nico Hischier arrived? His 100-point pace to start the season certainly indicates so. It feels like forever ago that he was drafted with expectations and then proceeded to disappoint for several seasons. His 70-point pace last season was certainly a step in the right direction, but he (and the Devils as a whole really) are on another level this season. He is maintaining his high overall ice time and playing on the top power-play unity. His shot rates are up (over three per game), as are his expected goals numbers. Those things indicate that some of this is for real. He is also experiencing an elevated personal and team shooting percentage. Those should probably fall, but that might just mean dropping from his current 100-point pace to a career best point-per-game plus. There is a lot to like from Hischier this season for sure.

That is all for this week

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