One trade chip that the Columbus Blue Jackets had was Gustav Nyquist as the winger was set to be a free agent this summer. He was having a down year with just 10 goals and 22 points, though everyone on Columbus is having a down year. Now, we get news that it looks like he is done for the season with a shoulder injury:

INJURY UPDATE: #CBJ forward Gus Nyquist, who was placed on Injured Reserve on Jan. 28, is expected to miss the rest of the regular season. He suffered a shoulder injury, which will not require surgery, at Edmonton, on Jan. 25.

— CBJ Public Relations (@BlueJacketsPR) February 1, 2023

He said he's going to try to return but with the NHL trade deadline in a month, it seems unlikely he's going anywhere at this point.

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Vegas got some bad news about Mark Stone:

The #VGK say that Mark Stone underwent back surgery yesterday and is out indefinitely.

If he's out for the rest of the regular season — which seems possible — the Golden Knights could open up considerable cap space by placing him on LTIR.

— Chris Johnston (@reporterchris) February 2, 2023

We will have to wait for an update on the timeline but it certainly isn't a positive update. More will be passed along when it becomes available.

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An update on Colorado winger Valeri Nichushkin

Valeri Nichushkin just hit the ice.

— Evan Rawal (@evanrawal) February 1, 2023

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Tage Thompson, Dylan Cozens, and Mattias Samuelsson all played on Wednesday night with Buffalo hosting Carolina. There had been injury concerns for each but all were in the lineup. Unfortunately, Thompson left after the second period due to an upper-body injury. More on this as we get it.

Carolina won that game by a 5-1 score. Brent Burns scored for the Hurricanes his 10th of the season in just his 51st game. He had that many in a full season last year. He looks primed for a solid 55-point season.

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A few days ago, we got the first huge trade piece to be moved as Bo Horvat was shipped from Vancouver to the New York Islanders in exchange for Anthony Beauvillier, Aatu Räty, and a first-round pick. Dobber has his breakdown of the trade here so be sure to get his thoughts on the matter.

Let's break down this trade further. What each player is at the moment, what they could be, the cap implications of all of this, and what it means for both sides in future seasons. Data will be taken from our Frozen Tools or Natural Stat Trick unless otherwise indicated.

Bo Horvat

It is clearly a tale of two NHL careers for Bo Horvat. There is everything he accomplished through the 2021 Bubble Season and everything he's done since. Let's look at those two sections separately.

Horvat's first seven seasons, a span of 502 games, saw him top out at 27 goals (2018-19) and 61 points (same season). From 2017-18 through the 2021 Bubble campaign, he registered somewhere between 0.32 and 0.34 goals per game with 0.68 to 0.77 points per game. Per Evolving Hockey's expected goals impacts, Horvat's 2017-21 stretch saw him roughly in the top-third of the league, not bad by any measure but just outside top-line status.

We also need to remember just the lack of talent the team had at that time. This year's roster is going to miss the playoffs, but in the four-season stretch from 2017-21, Horvat's five most-common line mates at 5-on-5 were Brock Boeser, Tanner Pearson, Loui Eriksson, Jake Virtanen, and Sven Baertschi. Three of those guys aren't even in the NHL anymore. Not only that, but Horvat was frequently used in a shutdown role in the defensive zone. This 2018-19 Player Usage Chart shows how severe that usage was:

Just going off that 2018-19 season alone, Horvat scored 27 goals and 61 points for a team that finished 26^th in scoring, all while driving the play positively despite having Eriksson as his most-common line mate.

One of the reasons Horvat could still thrive despite less-than-ideal conditions was his profile: he doesn't really have a weakness. Per CJ Turtoro's viz, from 2017-2020, Horvat was 82^nd percentile in shot assists (passes leading to teammate shots), second-line percentile in shot rate, and 90^th percentile by controlled zone entries:

There were times that Horvat could struggle a bit defensively but separating that from his role and line mates is difficult. He was on a bad team with (largely) poor line mates, charged with shutdown duties, and still did very well offensively. That speaks to the kind of player the team had.

Moving to 2021-22 when everything changed for Horvat. He saw his highest goals/60 rate of his career, passing his prior best by 27%, a career-best shots-per-minute, and all this led to 31 goals and 52 points in 70 games. That point/game mark is actually similar to what he did 3-4 years ago, but that goals/game rate was easily a career high. He did that on the back of a career 16% shooting mark but it's a bit lazy to just say it was all shooting percentages.

First, it isn't as if 16% is overly extreme (like Jared McCann's 23.7% this year). He had shot 14.5% the year prior, 13.9% in 2017-18, and 14% in his rookie season. Having a 16% season, in and of itself, doesn't seem to be a massive outlier for a guy with three seasons at-or-around 14%.

We also have to note some changes last year. No, he wasn't given softer deployment. Our Player Usage Charts have him against tough competition and being stuffed in the defensive zone yet again in 2021-22. He also skated more with Conor Garland than any other Vancouver forward. That may not seem like a big deal, but Garland is one of the more underrated play-drivers in the league. Here are his offensive and defensive impacts from 2019-22, again from Evolving Hockey:

He does that because he's so versatile all over the ice. He is basically a Swiss Army Knife of a hockey player, capable of digging pucks out in the defensive zone, capable of creating off zone entries, possessing great playmaking micro-stats, and isn't afraid to shoot the puck himself (from Corey Sznajder's Patreon):

Whenever Horvat was skating with Garland at 5-on-5, the team was scoring 3.0 goals per 60 minutes. When Horvat was without Garland, that fell to 1.9 goals/60. Having Garland next to him helped Horvat immensely and finally gave him a player with which he could create offense and not have to do all the heavy lifting on his own.

Something else changed, too, and that's Horvat's shot selection. From 2017-2020, the NHL has Horvat taking 60.5% of his shots as wrist shots. He scored on just 11.7% of his wrist shots, lower than his snap shots (16.7%), backhands (12.7%), tips (29%), and deflections (12.8%).

Fast forward to 2021-22 and that percentage of wrist shots fell from 60.5% to 52.5%. The big change, as a result, came from more snap shots. In the three-year sample, 10.7% of Horvat's shots were snap shots, a ratio that climbed all the way to 23.2% in 2021-22. He scored on 17.8% of his snap shots and that helped him reach his career-high in shooting percentage and goals per game.

There has been another change this season, too. He is taking even fewer wrist shots (42%) but has similarly relied less on snap shots (18.9%). The increase has come from tips as a full 21% of Horvat's shots have come off tips this season. He has a 36.7% conversion rate on those tips, leading to 11 of his 31 goals coming off that type of shots. To put into context how absurd that is: he had 11 goals off tips over his prior five seasons, a span of 341 games. For even more context on how absurd that is: Chris Kreider is the leader in goals by tip for a single season in the last decade with 17 in 2021-22. Horvat is already tied for second-most in a single season over the last decade with his 11 in just 48 contests (ironically, tied with now-former teammate Andrei Kuzmenko).

It’ll be hard for Horvat to maintain that shooting percentage on his tips, as even the elite guys are typically around the 30% mark. It is a concern for his raw goal totals, but one rebuttal is this: he's a forward learning how to score in a variety of ways besides wrist shots. He can still score off wrist/snap shots, but he's added that net-front-ish presence to his repertoire and that's important to note. He won't repeat 21-22% shooting seasons, but is 15-16% within reach? It seems so, and with his shot rates, that still works out to 35-goal campaigns. The upside beyond that is obvious, as we're seeing this season. Whether he can do that with the Islanders is another matter entirely but there should be interest in his fantasy services if he signs elsewhere in the offseason.

Anthony Beauvillier

As Dobber has mentioned a couple times, Beauvillier is kind of a favourite around these parts. He scored 21 goals as a second-year 20-year-old, doing so playing under 15 minutes a game. Hopes were high for him, but he has yet to post a 40-point season and hasn't cracked 20 goals since. (In fairness, full 82-game seasons in 2019-20 and 2021 likely would have gotten him to 20 goals in both campaigns, but not a whole lot higher).

It wasn't unwarranted, either. From 2018-21, Beauvillier did an excellent job at driving the play for the Islanders, particularly on offense:

He did this because he, like Horvat, didn't have any huge weaknesses. Things like shot assists, shot rate, and controlled zone entries were all above the 50% mark. Not elite, not even great, but good, and good enough to be a reliable middle-6 winger.

Things have not been good for a couple years, though. The Bubble Season was the start of the decline as his shot assists fell from slightly above average to over a standard deviation below average, nearly the same fate fell his controlled zone entry percentage, all while any playmaking ability was not being shown:

Beauvillier maintained good defensive metrics but playing for the Islanders at that time meant having a defensive mindset. It's good to see he maintained that aspect of his play, but the offensive issues were starting to show through even as he was producing reasonably well.

That all came to the forefront in 2021-22. He managed a five-year low in goals per game, a three-year low in points per game, and saw his shots per game decrease as well. That was all despite his second-highest ice-time rate. Shooting 7.8% will do that to a guy, but there was more to the story.

In short, Beauvillier just did not rebound from the decline of the 2021 Bubble Season in any meaningful way. His shot assist rate was still below average, his scoring chance assist rate was below average, and his controlled zone entries improved but weren't much above average. We have to remember all the issues the Islanders had last season from COVID to the circus road trip, and that clearly affected the entire team. But it was another season of Beauvillier not performing to the standards he set in his early 20s, and he turns 26 years old this offseason.

Looking at his 2022-23 thus far, it's been a lot of the same. Below average by shot rate, below average by shot assist rate, and below average by controlled zone entries. Even worse, his defensive metrics that declined last year persisted this year. From HockeyViz, we can see how his offensive impacts, which were above-average for years, have dipped of late while similar can be said for his defensive impacts (the highlighted purple box):

The final note is his power-play usage. Beauvillier doesn't have a single power-play point in 2022-23, a season after posting 11 in 75 games. Part of the reason is seeing a five-year low in PPTOI per game. Even 5-6 PPPs at this point of the season would have him on a 40-point pace. Not great, but a lot better than what he's currently showing.

There are lots of players who peak early and then decline quickly through their 20s. Names like Alex Galchenyuk and Bobby Ryan come to mind, though they may have had personal reasons for that decline. It is just to say that it does happen, but there was a three-year span where Beauvillier looked to be on the cusp of being a good second-line winger, perhaps third line on a Cup contender. Then when trouble hit the Islanders, it bled into Beauvillier's performance, and now he's a Vancouver Canuck.

One parallel that can be made but isn't entirely accurate is Martin Necas. He had a nice rookie season, had a great sophomore campaign, then cratered in his third season. He rebounded from that crater very nicely in 2022-23 but the difference is the underlying numbers. Even in Necas's poor 2021-22 season, he had great shot and shot assist numbers, great controlled zone entry percentages, and had great playmaking numbers. There were a lot of micro-stats that suggested a turnaround, and he's made good on that. Beauvillier doesn't have the same micro-stats to use as backup.

At this point, it's hard to say Beauvillier will be more than a 25-goal, 50-point two-way winger. That is very valuable in real life, but not all that valuable in fantasy, especially for a guy that doesn't put up much peripherals. Compounding the problem is that he's unlikely to earn top PP minutes unless one of Brock Boeser or Andrei Kuzmenko is traded. A scoring rebound at 5-on-5 seems very possible if he has Elias Pettersson as a centre, but without the top PP minutes, improving much on what he did earlier in his career will be difficult.

Aatu Räty

We've gone long so we won't go much longer here but Räty is the key to this deal. Beauvillier might not be a usable roster player in two years and even a turnaround just gives them a player similar to Garland or Ilya Mikheyev. A first-round pick is nice but evaluating that pick three years after it's made is too long. It is valued once we know where that pick lands and if it's not inside the top-10 or so, it's not overly valuable. Whether Räty pans out will matter. His Dobber Prospects profile can be read here.

If he reaches his potential, Räty can replace Horvat in a few years, becoming a reliable two-way centre who can score 30 goals. If he doesn't reach his potential, he might not play 100 games for the Canucks. My personal opinion is that he becomes a full-time NHLer, but whether he becomes a bottom-6 fixture or a top-6 star is up for debate.

In the fantasy game, this could be good for Beauvillier if he can get Pettersson as a centre and meshes with him. If he doesn't, and is off the top PP unit, it could be a slog for him. Not to mention we don't know what this roster will look like come September. There are so many variables that have to go in Beauvillier's favour that he has an uphill battle back to fantasy relevance.

Horvat's issues are a bit different. First is the Islanders power play. Horvat is 1 of 14 players with at least 30 PP goals since the start of the Bubble Season, or just over 38% of his markers, averaging one such tally every 5.7 games. He has 11 PP goals this year alone while Jean-Gabriel Pageau, Anders Lee, and Mathew Barzal have combined for a total of 12. He is going from a team that was 9^th in PP goals per minute over the last season and a half to one that is 23^rd by the same measure. It is hard to see him maintaining his power-play prowess unless the Islanders find another gear.

The second problem is natural regression. He is shooting over 20% at 5-on-5 while no Islanders forward is over 14% with the team sitting 13^th overall in this regard. If that shooting percentage at 5-on-5 regresses, and the power-play production dips, what can he actually produce? It is unlikely to be over a point per game as he's currently managing.

There is also the ice time problem as he skated 20:49 per game with the Canucks this season. No Islanders forward is over 19 minutes a game. It is easy to see Horvat losing (at least) a couple of minutes per game right off the top, and then becoming less efficient in the minutes he does get.

My final note is the Islanders are one of the shot-happiest teams from the blue line in the league (last I checked, only Carolina got a higher percentage of their 5-on-5 shots from defensemen). If Horvat is intent on sticking with his tip-first mentality, perhaps that complements the Islanders' penchant for point shots?

For my money, if Horvat can score a dozen goals over the team's final 30 games, posting around 25 points, that will be a success. It is up to fantasy owners if they want to risk Horvat's production carrying over or getting out from under him before a decline likely comes.