One thing I agree with is that as far as deployment, usage, and roles are concerned, NHL coaches make the right choice like 90% of the time. I have seen that sentiment made over the last 4-5 years as newer stats become prevalent, and it does seem to ring true. However, if the vast majority of coaches make the correct decision 90% of the time, then their impact should be measured with the other 10%.

To that end, Ottawa lined up Ridly Greig on the fourth line last night. It is a curious decision when looking at the available evidence:

Greig among OTT forwards this season (5v50:
GF/60: 1st
GA/60: 1st
GF share: 1st
xGF impact: 3rd
xGA impact: 2nd
xG RAPM: 2nd
primary assists/60: 1st
and since Martin took over:
GF/60: 1st
GA/60: 2nd
GF share: 1st
xGF/60: 1st
xGA/60: 3rd
xG share: 1st
A1/60: 4th

— Michael Clifford (@SlimCliffy) January 29, 2024

I would love – absolutely love – to hear Martin explain what Greig has done to lose any meaningful role that is going to Josh Norris instead. I have a feeling we'll never get it, but this goes in that 10% bucket, and it's mind-boggling, to say the least.

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An update on St. Louis Blues defenceman Scott Perunovich:

Perunovich having an MRI today to determine severity of injury, out tomorrow. Bannister hopeful that break will be enough time but too early to tell. #stlblues

— Lou Korac (@lkorac10) January 29, 2024

Perunovich looked to injure his left leg in the team's win against Los Angeles on Sunday, leaving the game midway through the third period. The hope, obviously, is that it's not too serious but we should know soon enough.

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The Blue Jackets said rookie Adam Fantilli suffered a cut to his leg and he will not play on Tuesday night, requiring further tests. There are no further updates right now but they will be passed along as they become available.

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Buffalo announced a surgery for Jack Quinn and he’ll be out for eight weeks. Just an unbelievably brutal season for him.

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Ottawa completed a 3-0 comeback win at home last night to Nashville, taking a 4-3 overtime win into their final game before their bye week/All-Star break combination. Goals from Drake Batherson, Tim Stützle, and Brady Tkachuk helped get the team their first point, while Claude Giroux's overtime winner got the second one. Tkachuk finished with eight shots, added an assist, and had three hits while Stützle had two shots and a block. That makes 13 points for Stützle in his last nine games, and he'll go into the break no worse than a point-per-game player (more on him just below).

Philip Tomasino, Michael McCarron, and Yakov Trenin scored the goals for Nashville. McCarron had a block, four PIMs, and two hits in a very solid multi-cat night. Tomasino, meanwhile, has 10 points in his last 18 games while skating 18:33 a night. That stretch has him lead the Nashville forwards in both goals and points per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 by a wide margin (around 33%).

Joonas Korpisalo came into the game after the second period in relief of Mads Søgaard and saved all 17 shots he faced.

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The All-Star break is around the corner, so now is time to take stock across the league. If fantasy owners want a more complete break down of the second half, including projections, prospects to watch, rebound/decline candidates, and a whole lot more, head to the Dobber Shop and pick up a copy of the 2024 Dobber Hockey Midseason Guide!

Part of taking stock is looking through my own mistakes. Every year, there are players that I'm higher on than the consensus, and there are players I'm lower on. At the end of November, I wrote about four players pegged for a breakout that had failed to live up to expectations. Matt Boldy was one of them, and he has certainly turned things around under John Hynes, but the rest are still misses.

Let's go through some misses (injuries aside), what's gone wrong so far, and whether things can turn around over the next 30-some games as fantasy managers prepare for the stretch run. Data from Natural Stat Trick and Frozen Tools, unless otherwise indicated.

Tim Stützle

Heading into Monday night's game, Stützle was a point-per-game player, so it's hard to call him a full disappointment. However, in leagues counting hits, my preseason projection had the centre as a top-15 fantasy skater. It is safe to say that he's fallen well short of those expectations with just 10 goals and 2.8 shots/game, a decline from last season.

Ottawa's power play has been a big problem. Ottawa has scored just 5.3 goals/60 minutes with he and Brady Tkachuk on the ice for the man advantage. Last season, that number was 8.6/60 and the year before it was 9.1. It isn't just because of Thomas Chabot missing time, either, as they are actually scoring less often with Chabot than other defenceman on the ice. Not only is Stützle goalless on the man advantage, but his power play assists/60 are down nearly 16% from his two-year average.

The bigger problem is that even if the power play rebounds, some of those gains could be lost due to Stützle leading the league in secondary assists/60 at 5-on-5 by a wide margin. A regression there would partially eat into any PP improvement. No matter what happens, unless Ottawa's power play turns itself around, he will not be a high-end fantasy option the rest of the way.

Matty Beniers

That Seattle would regress as a whole seemed likely, given their team 5-on-5 shooting percentage in 2022-23 was the highest for an 82-game season since advanced stats started being tracked in 2007. But that Beniers would have an 82-game pace of 35 points as part of that regression was definitely not expected. Missing five games due to injury aside, it has been a brutal fantasy season for the second year forward (though he's played in parts of three seasons).

Last season, the tracking website AllThreeZones had Beniers second among nine Seattle forwards (min. 300 tracked minutes) by scoring chance assists/60 (SCA/60, or the rate he assists on a teammate's scoring chance). His rate of 4.11/60 was 20% higher than the league average among forwards, and his overall assists/60 at 5-on-5 was inside the top-third of forwards in the league.

It has been a different story this season. His SCA/60 rate has dropped to 3.66/60, which is still above average, but a drop from last season. His assists/60 have declined nearly 40% and that, on top of his own shooting percentage drop, has crushed his fantasy value. For a guy I thought could get to 70 points, and had projected for well over 60, this is a massive disappointment.

There is definite bad luck going on as the team is shooting just 5.6% with him on the ice, a mark that is in the bottom-10 of the league. Even just 9% would see the team score over a full goal more per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 than his current rate.

At the same time, this is the chance to highlight the problem with relying on Kraken forwards for fantasy production. Alex Wennberg leads the group in ice time per game but is under 19 minutes – no Kraken forward is among the top-60 of the league's forwards in TOI/game this season. Frozen Tools also has no Kraken forwards earning 51% of the team's PP ice time. This approach can help the team win games, but it certainly won't help fantasy managers, and Beniers's season shows how little margin for bad luck there is with this kind of deployment.  

Cole Perfetti

This is a bit of a good news/bad news situation.

The bad news is that Perfetti's 82-game paces are for 24-25 goals and around 28 assists. There is good power play production, but little in the way of shots (2.2/game) or hits (nine in 47 games). Flirting with 50 points and low peripherals is not great fantasy value, with or without 20 power play points. His last 10 games have seen him average 14:14 in TOI and he really didn't get much of a TOI bump when Gabriel Vilardi and Kyle Connor were injured. The fantasy draft investment wasn't high, so 25 goals, 50-some points, and 20 PPPs would be a good season, but expectations were higher.

The good news is there are genuine improvements. His SCA/60 rate has jumped 13.5% and though it's still below average, the rise is good to see. The 5-on-5 shot attempt rate has improved by 18.5% and he's now easily in the top half of the league's forwards. There has been a commensurate rise by individual expected goals/60, and Evolving Hockey has him with improved impacts by both expected goals for and against. Just watching Winnipeg, he looks like a player on the cusp of offensive stardom with how quickly he can make high-end plays in the offensive zone. He also has just one secondary assist at 5-on-5, so he's being short-changed by a few points there.

Perfetti's long-term outlook is very strong even if this season won't be a fantasy success story. Patience, keeper/dynasty owners.

Tyler Bertuzzi

The transition to Toronto's top-6 hasn't been easy for Bertuzzi. His 1.57 points/60 at 5-on-5 are a career-low for him, and his 6.8 shots/60 at 5-on-5 are a three-year low. He was never getting to Toronto's top PP unit without injury, but Michael Bunting showed the path forward as a winger on this roster having fantasy relevance even without that role. Needless to say, Bertuzzi's 82-game pace of 36 points is not fantasy relevant.

Here is a big reason why Bertuzzi isn't finding success: when he's on the ice with John Tavares at 5-on-5, Bertuzzi is shooting 6.8%. From 2018-2022, he shot 14.3%. Now, he also had a poor shooting percentage last season, but this is worth noting because Tavares is also not finishing anywhere near his usual rates, having three straight seasons of at least 9.5% but sitting under 5% this season. Nylander has been fine, clearly, but the rest of the line hasn't.

There may be bad luck with his shooting, but Bertuzzi's SCA/60 rate across the 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons was 7.24/60, a number that has cratered to 3.1/60 this season. Toronto is also generating a scoring chance on just 10.8% of his entries, numbers that are closer to (or over) 30% for both Nylander and Tavares. He isn't finishing, his playmaking has tailed off, and offence is dying on his entries. It isn't great.

Bertuzzi should be better, but the problem is that even a 50% increase in his points/game would mean 25 points in the 35 remaining games; that isn't even a 60-point pace. There is a long way to go to being relevant in most fantasy leagues, and the runway is getting short.

Bowen Byram

After posting 41 points in 72 games across two seasons, Byram seemed primed for a 40-point season in 2023-24, even if he missed 8-10 games (my 82-game projection was for 47 points). That has certainly not been the case as he sits with 12 points in 41 games, having missed eight games. Pacing for a 24-point season is not what was expected. At all.

It is hard to point to bad luck here. In over 500 tracked minutes in the 2021-2023 stretch, he averaged 2.12 SCA/60. In over 220 tracked minutes this season alone, that number is 0.54, so his playmaking has collapsed. He's carrying the puck into the zone on just 31.7% of his zone entries where the prior two seasons saw Byram carry the puck into the zone on 37.8% and 41.4% of the time. Of the entries, he is passing off less than 5% of the time, where he was between 12-16% the prior two seasons. Last season, he passed or carried the puck into the offensive zone over 53% of the time, but he's under 37% this season. Combine the loss of controlled zone entries with a complete disappearance of playmaking, and it's not hard to figure out why he has precisely one (1) primary assist at 5-on-5 in 41 games. (He had six of those assists in 42 games last season, and five the year before in 30 games.)

The final note is that he's not playing much with Colorado's top stars. On the season, he's spent just 26.9% of his 5-on-5 time with Nathan MacKinnon on the ice. Comparatively, over 70% of Cale Makar's 5-on-5 time has been with MacKinnon on the ice. That Makar has been healthy has been great for his fantasy managers and the team in general, but it's certainly not helping Byram's fantasy value. With the team's lack of scoring depth, it'll be hard for Byram to rack up points the rest of the way.

Setting aside the disappointing fantasy season, there are declines in a lot of areas that made Byram successful in recent seasons. It isn't a long-term issue, but a better second half in some of the tracking areas – even if it doesn't lead to much fantasy relevance in the next two months – would help alleviate concerns that would surely pop up in the offseason.