A day after Florida was sent to the Cup Final thanks to a last-second power-play goal from Matthew Tkachuk, Dallas got an overtime power-play goal from Joe Pavelski to keep their own Cup hopes alive. With Vegas's Brayden McNabb in the penalty box, Pavelski slapped home a feed from Miro Heiskanen that got past Golden Knights goalie Adin Hill, and gave Dallas a 3-2 overtime win. It extends the series to Game 5 back in Vegas on Saturday night, though Vegas still holds a commanding 3-1 series lead.

It was a great game from Jake Oettinger, who was pulled early in Game 3, as he saved 37 of 39 shots he faced in the win. He made a few stellar saves to keep his team either close or tied, including a breakaway from Jack Eichel late in the second period. A minute after that save, Jason Robertson scored to tie the game, which eventually led to their overtime win. It was his second tally of the game, and an hot streak from him would be a welcome sight for the Stars right now; he has four goals and five points in the series as it is.

This was just a good game from start to finish and, selfishly, now that I've seen one of them, a couple more Dallas wins to extend the series would be fine by me.

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My offseason series of reviewing the fantasy campaigns of non-playoff teams starts winding down today as we reach the bottom of both the Western and Eastern Conferences. We have already been struggling to find successes/improvements as we've worked our way down the list, but we're covering Columbus today, and they're not a team that went into the season with similar expectations to Montreal or Chicago.  

As we have been doing, success and failures of individual players, as well as improvements and declines of the team, will be the focus here. At the end, a discussion on where the team goes from here. All of this, of course, is through a fantasy lens.

Our own Frozen Tools, as well as Natural Stat Trick, are going to be the primary data sources, unless otherwise indicated. All good? Great.

Successes

No one.

Sorry to sound flippant, but Johnny Gaudreau drastically under-performed his ADP on Yahoo! while Patrik Laine missed one-third of the season due to injury. No one else put up 50 points, Joonas Korpisalo barely finished as a top-25 Yahoo! goalie with his best stretch of the season being on another roster, and all the defencemen were injured. There are very good reasons why this team finished at the bottom of the East.

The one success we might be able to point to is Boone Jenner. His Yahoo! ADP was around 165^th overall and he finished the season around 170^th in their scoring system. Considering he missed 14 games, it seems likely he would have exceeded his ADP had he been healthy, and he was fine otherwise. All the same, the best we can say about his season as that he broke even fantasy-wise. If that's what qualifies as a success, the rest of this article isn't going to go well.

Guys like Erik Gudbranson and Andrew Peeke may have had value in deeper multi-cat formats, but not those that included plus/minus, as they combined to go minus-65. Ditto for Eric Robinson, so it's worth keeping those guys in mind if it looks like this team can turn itself around defensively with their offseason moves.

A special shout out to Kirill Marchenko. Not a fantasy success, per se, but he was up to three shots per game over the team's final five weeks. That is a good sign for a kid that was riding percentages earlier in the season. Corey Sznajder's tracking data also has him as the only Jackets forward outside the top line of Gaudreau-Jenner-Laine to be above the league average by scoring chance rate at 5-on-5:

His zone entries led to more scoring chances than anyone not named Gaudreau or Laine, too. He has more rounding to do to his game – namely playmaking – but there is a lot to like here for a rookie season on a very bad team.

Failures

If there were two marginal successes, fantasy-wise, well, we can imagine what this list might look like. Rather than just discuss all the failures, let's point to why some of the bigger ones happened. Laine will be excepted here due to injury.

Over Gaudreau's final two seasons in Calgary, when he was on the ice with Matthew Tkachuk at 5-on-5, the team scored nearly 5.0 goals per 60 minutes and controlled 62.3% of the expected goal share. When Gaudreau was on the ice without Tkachuk, those numbers dropped to 2.4 goals/60 minutes and 48.9% of the expected goal share. Tkachuk is an all-world winger and was a tremendous help here. (It should be said that it was mutually beneficial when they played together, but Tkachuk went to go play with Carter Verhaeghe in a high-tempo environment. There is a reason one kept succeeding where the other did not.)

The result of the move was Gaudreau seeing the fifth-largest decline in Scoring Chance Contributions per 60 minutes (SCC/60) at 5-on-5 from last year to this year. What SCC/60 measures is the player's individual scoring chances plus his assists on teammates' scoring chances, and it's all tracked by Corey Sznajder. Gaudreau's rate in 2021-22 was 13.5 SCC/60, which ranked just behind Nathan MacKinnon. He dropped a lot in 2022-23:

Combine that drop with the Columbus injuries in an environment that was already a downgrade from Calgary, and we get the season he just managed.

Given that Jenner was fine in many fantasy formats, and Laine and Zach Werenski were injured, that's about it for the true failures. Perhaps people were expecting a big year from rookie Kent Johnson, and he did have a good rookie campaign, but take Gaudreau's problems and magnify it for a 20-year-old getting acclimated to the NHL.

Improvements

There was a lot of bad for Columbus, but there was a bright spot: the power play. Compared to 2021-22, the team saw their goals/60 climb nearly 5% from a year ago. Gaudreau helped, of course, but when we factor that Werenski, Jake Bean, and Adam Boqvist played just 73 games between them, and Laine missed one-third of the season, a rise in goals on the power play seems like a resounding success.

The key here is true improvement, too. The team was dead last in the league in goals/60 on the power play through their first 25 games, half of them with Werenski in the lineup. They were generating under 50 shots per 60 minutes, which was a bottom-5 mark league-wide.

From Game 26 through the end of the season, Columbus climbed from dead last in goals/60 at 5-on-4 to 10^th. They out-scored teams like Boston, New Jersey, Colorado, and Buffalo over the final four months of the season. The team's PP shot rate climbed 16% in that span, so it wasn't just a percentage binge. It just so happens that the 25-game cut-off was December 9^th, and Kirill Marchenko's call-up came on December 6^th. Something to keep in mind at the September draft tables when people are overlooking Columbus skaters.

Declines

Everywhere else. Literally. At even strength and on the penalty kill, all metrics declined.

This is where I bring up the injuries. Here are the games missed for some of the key players:

• Zach Werenski – 69 games
• Jakub Voracek – 71 games
• Jake Bean – 68 games
• Nick Blankenburg – 46 games
• Adam Boqvist – 36 games
• Patrik Laine – 27 games

That is one-third of the lineup, including four defencemen, missing at least one-third of the season, with three of the four defencemen missing over half the campaign. It was a lot to overcome.

The thing is this: they weren't good even when healthy. Werenski's final full game of the season was November 11^th. Columbus had played 13 games and were 4-9-0, last in the league by points percentage. That stretch saw their expected goal share rank 28^th in the league and behind teams like Montreal and San Jose. Their expected goals against at 5-on-5 ranked 27^th in the league and worse than teams like Montreal and Chicago. They saw some tough matchups in there – Colorado twice, Boston, New Jersey, Carolina, and Tampa Bay – but also played St. Louis, Nashville, Arizona, Vancouver, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. To pick out a win and a loss to those latter teams, they went into St. Louis in mid-October and lost 5-2 while gaining less than 40% of the expected goal share. Four weeks later they hosted Philadelphia and won 5-2 but lost the 5-on-5 battle by managing just 37% of the expected goals. A great goaltending performance from Korpisalo was the real difference.

We can't judge an entire season from 13 games, but Columbus was not off to a good start, in nearly any respect, before the injuries hit. The injuries put the final nail in the coffin, but that coffin was being lowered into the ground by the middle of November.  

Where To Go From Here

This should be another interesting offseason from the Blue Jackets. There are no meaningful unrestricted free agents – depending on your view of Gavin Bayreuther – and they are eligible to extend a lot of their young RFAs like Johnson and Marchenko because the former burned his first year signing in 2021-22 while the latter has just a two-year ELC. If they want, they can lock up a few of their young pieces this summer to give the future some shape.

But the team has a lot of cap space. In fact, CapFriendly has them over $17M in cap space and none of those RFAs need a new contract right now (outside of Tim Berni, who will be cheap if they keep him). Columbus also has Gaudreau, Laine, Jenner, and Werenski locked up long-term-ish (at least three more seasons). In short, they can give themselves long-term cost certainty while also adding significant pieces to the lineup, this very offseason, without shipping draft picks/prospects or strangling their future cap space. Given that the team has made significant investments in players like Gaudreau, Laine, and Werenski, and they have the third overall pick in 2023, that seems likely.

The immediate future isn't as bleak here as it might be for other franchises like Chicago or San Jose. Even without landing Connor Bedard in the lottery, just a healthy season from their regulars, plus some growth from the young stars to go with a very high pick, might be enough to make them a much better team in 2023-24. If Marchenko really was a key to unlocking the top PP unit, and the team goes and gets legitimate middle-6 forward help, this looks like a brand-new roster come October. Perhaps not necessarily a playoff threat, but certainly not battling for last in the league. Columbus is a team whose players could bring a lot of draft value in September if the market fails to realize the likely improvements to come (and ones already made).