If you haven't picked up your copy of Dobber's 2023 Fantasy Hockey Prospects Report, there is no time like the present to rectify that. It covers every team's prospect pool, running at least a dozen players deep each, and how they're developing. It includes three-year projections and future roles. Of course, there is also a lot covering the 2023 Draft class. Everything fantasy hockey owners need to know about the future of the league in one place.

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A late goal in the first period from Alec Martinez gave Vegas a 2-0 lead in Game 2 against Florida, and it really felt like that would be the goal to give them the 2-0 lead in the series. Vegas had just killed a penalty, largely thanks to a couple of big saves from Adin Hill, and Martinez double-clutched a seam pass but managed to go shelf on goalie Sergei Bobrovsky. It felt like a huge swing in the game where it could have easily been 1-1 going into the second period, but it was 2-0 Golden Knights, and the jaws closed from there. Goals from Nicolas Roy and Brett Howden in the first seven minutes of period two while chased Bobrovsky from the net to be replaced by Alex Lyon. (Remember that it was Lyon that started the postseason, so it was a bit of a full circle moment.) It was cruise control from there for Vegas and a 7-2 win.  

The loss wasn't on Bobrovsky. Vegas scored an early power play goal, the Martinez tally was a tough, broken play, and the team was dominated from then on. He might need to steal them a game now, however.  

Things got chippy late in the second period and it involved Matthew Tkachuk and Jack Eichel. Tkachuk caught Eichel in the middle of the ice but Eichel tripped over his own feet a split-second before the hit. It looked bad but there was nothing to be done, really. Scrums ensued and the temperature sure has reached another level. Eichel did leave the game but returned for the third period.

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One of the big RFA dominoes fell as Montreal extended young sniper Cole Caufield:

8 years / $7.85M AAV for Cole Caufield @CanadiensMTL

— Renaud Lavoie (@renlavoietva) June 5, 2023

It might seem weird to hand out a near-$63M contract for a player that has 84 career points, but he does have one of the highest 5-on-5 goal rates for a player his age in modern NHL history. (Seriously, he's in company with guys like Steven Stamkos and Jack Hughes for ages 19-22.) He has developed tremendous offensive chemistry with Nick Suzuki, and he has 48 goals in 83 games under coach Martin St. Louis. It won't be long until he's a perennial 40-goal threat, and maybe as soon as this coming season.

For fantasy, it is worth wondering how well-rounded Caufield actually will be. He hasn't shown much playmaking penchant, though he's still in his development. But if that doesn't come around, his value will vary wildly depending on format because of his focus on goals and shots. Just beware that his prowess as a goal scorer may not necessarily be a 1:1 translation of his prowess as a fantasy option in multi-cat formats. It's hard to say "he'll be a 40-assist guy soon" when there isn't much indication just yet that he will be, unlike his 40-goal threat. More on Caufield later.

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Anaheim hired Greg Cronin to be the team’s new head coach after Dallas Eakins was let go at the end of the season. Dobber had his take on the hiring here.

This is where I’m honest and say that outside of what Dobber mentioned, I just don’t know much about his coaching style; being able to watch any meaningful number of AHL games during the NHL season isn’t realistic. There have been a couple of fine players come through Cronin’s teams like Logan O’Connor and Ryan Graves, but that Avalanche core went straight to the NHL, or were there before he was hired by the organization. He should be used to working with younger players, and the team needs a second wave of talent to fill out past (or even improve upon) Trevor Zegras, Troy Terry, Mason McTavish, Ryan Strome, Frank Vatrano, Jamie Drysdale, Cam Fowler, and John Gibson. Dobber mentions the defensive traits this team is likely to exhibit, which they need because that was an awful defensive team in 2022-23. That doesn’t necessarily mean good things in the fantasy game for the skaters, though.

All those prospects like Lukas Dostal, Nikita Nesterenko, Henry Thrun, Olen Zellweger, Nathan Gaucher, Pavel Mintyukov, and whomever they take second overall later this month need to start panning out. The team hit a late development with Terry, and McTavish certainly looks impressive, but they can't afford another four years of Sam Steel, Max Comtois, Isac Lundestrom, and Max Jones occur. No slight intended to those guys, but after a sizable disaster at the expansion draft with Shea Theodore, they couldn't afford to have a bunch of highly-touted prospects end up as bottom-half roster players. Three years ago, they needed impact players, and they got Terry and Trevor Zegras, who was a ninth overall pick anyway. The next crop needs to avoid repeating that history if the team wants to succeed anytime soon, and that will be on Cronin.

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A couple of months ago, and a few times in recent years, I wrote about 'market share'. In fantasy hockey terms, it's simply the percentage of anything that happens on the ice for a particular team that is attributable to a particular player. For example, if the Detroit Red Wings land 300 power play shots on goal in a season with Dylan Larkin on the ice, and Larkin lands 100 of those himself, then Larkin's market share of power play shots is 33.3% (100/300). Clear as a thick forest during the Hour of the Wolf? Great.

The utility of this is two-fold. First, it helps us find undervalued players either on bad teams, or on depth lines. There are players who perform well in an overlooked, or minimized, role and break out in the coming seasons. The obvious example is Tage Thompson, but Brendan Gallagher, Carter Verhaeghe, Brock Nelson, and Joel Eriksson Ek are players that ended up producing very good fantasy seasons after showing that promise earlier in their careers in lesser roles. One of the ways they showed that promise was by being over-involved in the play when they were on the ice, as demonstrated by market share. The more involved a player is, the better chance to rack up the things we need in fantasy hockey from goals to hits.

The Ramblings linked earlier discussed market share of expected goals and how that can be used as a proxy for physicality. We have also touched on shots by defencemen, but that was during the season without finalized stats. This will be a lot more straightforward: we just want to look for players who are taking a lot of their team's shots when they're on the ice. There will not be an extensive explainer for each player but rather what happened, and what it could mean for the future. Both forwards and defencemen will be covered, and we're looking at shot attempt rates for players with at least 600 minutes at 5-on-5 in 2022-23. Data is from Natural Stat Trick, unless otherwise indicated, and we'll start with the forwards.

We have 342 forwards in the sample, or nearly 11 per team. That gives us a good mix of superstars and role players. Of those 342 players, the average market share is 22%, one standard deviation above average is 26.2%, and the absolute elite are over 32%. Those are some of the benchmark numbers we're looking for. Let's talk about some names (with their 5-on-5 shot attempt market share in parentheses). Just for a reference, here are the top-10:

Judging by the wide range of those names, it's easy to see why this is worth a look.

Jordan Kyrou (34.6%)

The only forward in this sample that took a higher percentage of his team's 5-on-5 shot attempts than Kyrou was David Pastrnak. When we get to a place where a guy is in the same conversation, offensively, as Pastrnak, Evander Kane, and Timo Meier, we should be perking up. He is 17^th among forwards by goals/60 over the last two seasons and only two players ahead of him have lower shooting percentages. The problem is no full-time St. Louis winger skated more than 18 minutes a game from 2019-22, so Kyrou getting a lot more than the 18 minutes/game he got in 2022-23 is very uncertain.

Cole Caufield (33.9%)

There were 15 players with at least a 30% market share and Caufield was the youngest among them; next was Filip Chytil and we'll get to him in a minute. I am sure a lot will be discussed about Caufield this summer, so we'll stop short here (shout out Frank Costanza). Small Goals Boy Hive, unite.  

Daniel Sprong (33.3%)

There may not be a player in the NHL over the age of 25 that has zero 50-point seasons, and peaked at 66 games played in any single campaign, that has had more digital ink spilled over the last 5-6 years. Sprong's 21 goals in 66 contests this past season were a career-high, and it was because he was shooting so much at 5-on-5, even if the power play helped. In lesser roles, he has been a very productive 5-on-5 player for four years now, posting the same points/60 rate at 5-on-5 (2.21) as Mathew Barzal and Roope Hintz. He might finally be ready for a consistent top-6 role, but as a pending RFA, we have to wait and see where he lands.

Filip Chytil (31.5%)

The more I read and research Chytil's season, the more impressed I become. The fact that he's taking roughly as many of the team's shots as names like Auston Matthews and Alex Ovechkin should indicate to us that there could be something bubbling under the surface. The Rangers have an interesting summer ahead with just 14 players signed, excluding prospects, new contracts necessary for K'Andre Miller and Alexis Lafrenière, and less than $12M in cap space. Chytil is on a tremendous contract so it doesn't make sense to move him, but it would also make him one of the most appealing trade chips, too. If he stays (which is the most likely route), Chytil's fantasy upside hinges on a bigger role, particularly on the power play.

Andreas Athanasiou (30.2%)

Fantasy owners have reasons to be wary of Athanasiou. After scoring 30 goals in 2018-19, he has managed just 52 over his last 211 outings. He did manage 20 goals this past campaign, though, on an extremely awful Chicago team. He is a pending unrestricted free agent and that hopefully gets him far away from that dumpster franchise. The question is if he can repeat anything close to what he just did, or if it was just an echo of his 2018-19 season. Something to look more into once we find out where he signs.

Michael Eyssimont (29.9%)

Over on my personal blog, I wrote a long piece about Eyssimont's road to the NHL and how he performed in his first full-ish season. In short, it seems he might be a very good bottom-6 player. He is also in the right franchise to flourish in a bottom-6 role. With how much he likes to shoot and hit, he doesn't need a high TOI rate to be productive in banger leagues. He also might just be straight-up better than Tanner Jeannot, one of the guys Eyssimont will be competing with for ice time. Eyssimont is absolutely a name to remember for deeper banger leagues.   

Nazem Kadri (28%)

A weird thing about Kadri: his career 5-on-5 shooting percentages are all over the place. Over his last eight seasons, he has averaged 8.7% shooting at 5-on-5, but three of those seasons are 7.1% or lower and three of those seasons are 10.3% or higher. If he were to put up 180 shots in a season, the difference between 7% and 10.5% is somewhere between 7-8 goals. Over his three seasons in Colorado, he registered a point on 72.9% of the goals scored with him on the ice; that fell to 69.8% with Calgary. There are a lot of signs of positive regression, and hopefully a new coach will find him regaining his 30-goal, 80-point potential.

Cole Sillinger (26.7%)

Here's a name we don't hear of much anymore, unless it was about his demotion to the AHL at the end of the 2022-23 season. After a promising rookie outing, he posted just three goals and 11 points in 64 games. His per-minute production rate from 2022-23 rates among the worst of any regular forward from any season since 2007, with his performance being somewhere around the 1^st percentile. I will reiterate that this team was beyond awful, beyond injured, and he spent a grand total of 75 minutes with at least one of Johnny Gaudreau or Patrik Laine out of his 734+ total minutes. When you're on one of the worst teams in the league as a non-elite 19-year-old and are almost entirely kept away from their few stars, you're going to look bad. At least he was shooting a lot, and there's still lots of development to come.

Alright, let's touch on three defencemen quickly. These market share rates will naturally be lower with the average around 17.3% with one standard deviation being anything over 20.4% and the super-elite being over 24.5%. This is the top-10:

Oh yes, it is quite interesting.

Arber Xhekaj (24.9%)

For a rookie defenceman playing 15 minutes a game on a lottery team, the fact that Xhekaj's 82-game paces were for 20+ points, 120+ shots, 160+ PIMs, and 250+ hits should indicate the kind of fantasy upside he has. His problem is Montreal still has a quartet of veteran defencemen that will get ice-time priority, plus young guys like Jordan Harris, Jonathan Kovacevic, Justin Barron, and Kaiden Guhle. It is far from a certainty that, even if he's healthy, Xhekaj plays 80 games at even 17 minutes a night. A couple years from now is a different story.

Filip Hronek (21.9%)

Hronek saw a jump in shot attempt rate (10.8/60) from his prior seasons, but it wasn't far off his rookie campaign (10.3) when he found his way to our fantasy radars. Landing in Vancouver is pretty brutal for his fantasy value because unless Quinn Hughes is hurt, or they go to a 3F/2D power play, Hronek's power-play minutes will be very limited. (The team did try a 3F/2D immediately upon acquiring Hronek and abandoned it almost as quickly, so, not a great start for him there.) Vancouver does need to be able to generate more offence from the blue line, and Hronek will help, but I'm not sure his fantasy value rises in his new locale.

Nick Perbix (19.9%)

Not quite to the first standard deviation mark, but not a bad effort from the rookie, and not that far behind Victor Hedman (21.6%). Both Perbix and Darren Raddysh looked good for Tampa Bay at different times, but their problem is the same as Xhekaj and Hronek: there are other players ahead of them on the depth chart that they will not surpass in 2023-24 without injury. I do think Perbix is a good defensive defenceman, but I worry about his offensive upside, even with that shot market share. He could very well end up one of those blue liners that is more valuable in real life than in fantasy.