Welcome back to The Journey, where we track the development of prospects as they excel in junior, make the NHL, and push towards stardom.

Although we are in the midst of playoff action—and wow, do I ever miss this time of year!—fantasy managers have already begun performing retrospectives on their rosters, assessing strengths and deficiencies ahead of the 2023-24 campaign. Evolving Hockey has a useful tool for this purpose that runs every player's actual stats against their preseason projections to see who outperformed and underperformed expectations. This week, we will cover a slew of young players who did better than expected; next week will be the disappointments.

For this exercise, I am using EH's standard category weighting—although you can adjust them to perfectly match your league settings if you do this yourself: Goals (3), Assists (2), Shots (0.15), Hits (0.1), Blocks (0.1), PPP (1), SHP (1). I am leaving goalies out of it for now and using the Fantasy Points Value Adjusted (FPV Adj) score that adjusts slightly to allow comparison between positions.

Scanning the Top 100 players by FPV Adj, here are the top "young players" (loosely defined as not yet having hit their Breakout Threshold) who outperformed expectations in 2022-23. Let's break this list down in chunks of ten players at a time.

Matty Beniers 111.4

Mason McTavish 97.6

Dylan Cozens 84.6

Shane Pinto 76.6

Martin Necas 73.7

Kent Johnson 72.8

Gabriel Vilardi 66

Matias Maccelli 63

Noah Cates 62

Jack Quinn 61.9

In the top group, we have a few frontrunners for the Calder (Beniers, McTavish, Maccelli), plus several other rookies (Pinto, Johnson, Cates, Quinn) who had excellent years for their respective teams. I dug into the top Calder candidates—including Wyatt Johnston (DAL), who I suspect is not included in this list because he did even not feature in EH's preseason projections—in this column last week, so I won't repeat myself here.

Also in this top group are a couple young players who had significant breakout campaigns: Dylan Cozens, 22, who put up a 70-point pace and currently sits at 201 games for his career, and Martin Necas, 24, who also put up 70 points but technically hit his BT in the second half of last year (321 career NHL games). Both Cozens and Necas are key parts of exciting young franchises in Buffalo and Carolina; pencil them in for similar levels of production moving forward. If you do not already own them, good luck prying them away from their owners now.

Noah Cates (PHI) is an interesting player who was more consistent than many of his peers and is still flying under the radar. At 24, the same age as Necas, he is a late bloomer in NHL terms: he was one of these high-scoring high school players who Philly took a swing on in the draft. Then he spent a year in the USHL (point per game) followed by a full four-year college career (99 in 139). Those are solid but not incredible offensive numbers, especially given his overager status.

Cates is particularly notable for his defensive impact on the game: he posted a 100% even-strength Defensive Wins Against Replacement (EV Defence WAR) score, meaning he was one of the best defensive forwards in the league. He was essentially thrown to the wolves this year in terms of deployment and held his own better than Liam Neeson in The Grey: he received the second-fewest offensive zone starts on the team and faced the second-highest quality of competition as a rookie yet still managed to post a very sustainable-looking 38 points in 82 games on top of 400 face-off wins, and just about two combined hits/blocks per game.

That statline makes him difficult to roster outside of deeper formats, especially because defensive forwards usually need to hit at least the 50-point range and put up better peripherals than that. But what might his stat profile look like in two years when he has a couple hundred games under his belt? It is too early for a grand pronouncement, but here goes anyway: this guy could be a Selke candidate if he continues his current trajectory.

Cole Perfetti 61.5

Ty Dellandrea 59.6

Tommy Novak 59.1

Morgan Frost 58.9

Calen Addison 57.7

Casey Mittelstadt 54.7

Juuso Valimaki 53.2

Matt Boldy 52.7

Cody Glass 52.7

Owen Power 51.8

Group two features another handful of top rookies (Perfetti, Novak, Addison, Power) as well as several young players (Frost, Mittelstadt, Valimaki, Glass) who posted significant post-hype breakout seasons. Those latter four players all had minimal value heading into 2022-23 and looked like they were going to be unable to live up to the promise they showed back in 2017, when they were all taken in the first round that year, 27th, 8th, 16th, and 6th respectively.

These guys feel like they have been around forever but only MIttelstadt has actually passed his BT. He sits at 277 career games, and his 60 points this year looks like a legitimate, on-schedule breakout. He has formed a potent one-two punch with Cozens down the middle for Buffalo and his advanced stats suggest his performance was very sustainable.

Frost (158), Valimaki (160), and Glass (146) should all hit their BTs in 2023-24. It has taken them this long to fully arrive because of a combination of trades, injuries, and a lack of opportunity, but the pedigree has always been there. Frost currently pencils in as Philly's top Center, and they don't have any top options down the middle coming up through the pipeline either. He has an opportunity here to be a perennial 60+-point threat moving forward for the retooling Flyers. His penchant for playmaking has gelled nicely with triggerman Owen Tippett, who also had a post-hype breakout this year after coming over from the Panthers.

I am most wary of Glass' opportunity here, even though it looks like he has earned his top-six role with the Predators. Doing the math, there is just too much young talent (Luke Evangelista, Juuso Parssinen, Philip Tomasino, Tommy Novak) jostling with the established offensive leaders (Ryan Johansen, Filip Forsberg, Matt Duchene) for everyone to get top-six minutes. Someone is going to lose out. The young Preds capitalized on injuries to veterans this year but if everyone is healthy, who gets bumped? It could easily be Glass, who stayed healthy this year but has a history of significant injuries dating back to junior.

And what to make of Valimaki? The Finn has featured consistently in Journey articles for years now as he has teased fantasy managers with his potential, including a short, point-per-game stint in the Liiga a couple years back. When he flamed out of Calgary and went to line up behind Shayne Gostisbehere and Jakob Chychrun in the desert, his value was next to nothing in fantasy. But then both players were traded, Valimaki was handed the reins, and he put up 11 points over the following ten games. That pace slowed to three in his next 12 to end the year, so there is still some inconsistency here, but he has certainly flashed intriguing potential this year. The Coyotes wisely signed him to a one-year $1 million "show me" contract in 2023-24 to see what they have here.

What baffled and impressed me the most about Valimaki this year is that he faced a high quality of competition and drove play at an astounding rate. I had him pegged as a one-dimensional powerplay weapon, like Calen Addison (MIN) or Scott Perunovich (STL), but his profile has the look of a top-pairing, two-way threat who can both defend and score.

As long as his newfound defensive prowess does not mean that he gets leapfrogged by Janis Moser, Victor Soderstrom, or a new acquisition for power play time, Valimaki could be the most valuable Arizona defenceman moving forward. As this young, talented team continues to gel, that would be a valuable player to own in fantasy. Just imagine the special teams points he could rack up playing with Clayton Keller, Barrett Hayton, Dylan Guenther, and Logan Cooley.

One final curveball to chew on with Valimaki: his offensive and defensive WAR (top row, via JFresh) were both tremendous but his manually tracked microstats (bottom stats, via All Three Zones) were primarily poor. What to make of that disconnect? That is a question to dig into another day, perhaps over the summer, but hit me up on Twitter if you have thoughts on that.

JJ Peterka 51.2

Dawson Mercer 50.5

Pierre-Olivier Joseph 49.9

Owen Tippett 46.1

Fabian Zetterlund 46

Janis Moser 45

Paul Cotter 44.1

Jack McBain 44

Filip Chytil 43.4

Sean Durzi 43

Braden Schneider 39.2

The final group rounding out the young players in the top 100 overachievers include several young scoring stars-in-the-making who continued to progress well (Peterka, Mercer), a couple strong multi-cat options (Cotter, McBain), and a handful of players who either had post-hype breakouts (Tippett, Chytil) or continued to establish themselves as viable options in fantasy (Joseph, Zetterlund, Moser, Durzi, Schneider).

Many of the top players from this group face uncertainty in the coming years in terms of their opportunity: if I were a Joseph or Durzi owner, for instance, I would be worried about Ty Smith and Brandt Clarke. Similarly, Peterka and Mercer absolutely look like top-six talents for their teams but those top lines are looking awfully crowded in Buffalo and New Jersey these days. Peterka already faces an uphill battle for top-six minutes, and Noah Ostlund, Isak Rosen, and Jiri Kulich will only add further question marks to his outlook. For the Devils, Mercer had a piping-hot third quarter (17 in 18) and spent a great deal of time stapled to Nico Hischier, but Timo Meier is in the fold now and Alexander Holtz waiting in the wings could complicate things further.

Chytil took a clear step forward this year, which began in last year's playoffs on "The Kid Line," but I sense that fantasy owners are still taking a "wait and see" mentality with him. As in, his fantasy value is still in the gutter—at least in my experience—despite his 50-point pace and decent shot totals (2.4 per game). Hopefully he can continue his coming-out party in this year's postseason but with Patrick Kane and Vladimir Tarasenko now in the fold, there are very few prime offensive minutes left to fill up Chytil's plate. His four-year contract kicks in next year ($4.4 million per year), so it is unlikely we see him with a new team in the near future either.

Thanks for reading! Remember to tune in next Saturday to see who fell short of expectations in fantasy, what happened, and whether or not we can expect a bounce back in 2023-24. Follow me on Twitter @beegare for more prospect content and fantasy hockey analysis.