Hello and welcome back to Geek of the Week! In this article, I will be taking a look at peripheral categories (shots, hits, blocks, and penalty minutes). I'll take a deep dive into how much value they actually bring to your fantasy team. Someone like Jeremy Lauzon may lead the league in hits, but he'll contribute just about nothing in offensive categories. Is it worth it to hold him on your team? I will highlight some league leaders in these peripheral categories and provide some insight on whether they should be rostered in most multicategory leagues.

Of the peripheral categories mentioned, shots on goal (SOG) is largely correlated with offensive success, and thus healthy stats in the offensive categories of your league. For this reason, I will focus mainly on hits, blocks, and penalty minutes in this article (the Bangers!), as they are uncorrelated to offensive production.

Let's first establish which leagues this is relevant for as this is an important caveat. This covers multicategory leagues, with some inclusion of hits, blocks, or penalty minutes. If you have all three in your league, great! If you have one or two, you can use some of the info in this article to apply it to your own league. The total number of skater categories in your league is also important to consider. If your league has six skater categories and three are hits, blocks, and penalty minutes, that's 50% of your success coming from just these "peripheral" stats. If you have 10 skater categories, with these three included, that is just 30% of your success coming from these stats. Format matters. Most leagues that include these categories hover around 7-9 total categories.

Z-Scores

A Z-score is a statistical tool to compare a player’s specific stat to all other players' stats in that category. It tells you just how much better or worse this player's performance is when taking account of the rest of the population (league). In math terms, it is a player's score – the average score / the standard deviation of the score. It allows us to standardize the raw numbers in each category to compare them.

An example right now is looking at points per game. Nathan MacKinnon is at 1.83, while the average in the league is 0.43. MacKinnon's Z-Score in this category is very high at 4.25. If we look at hits, Jeremy Lauzon's Z-Score in the category is 4.3. That means Lauzon is as elite in the hits category as MacKinnon is elite in accumulating points. This is useful information. One method of truly finding a player's value is taking their Z-Score in every category that's included in your league and adding them together. In a league that counts goals, assists, points, power-play points, shots on goal, hits, blocks, and penalty minutes, MacKinnon's Z-score totals add up to 17.3, while Lauzon's add up to 1.8. So as much as we can compare the player's individual category stats to each other, I am clearly not saying that Lauzon is comparable to MacKinnon overall.

Hits, Blocks, and Penalty Minutes

A strategy I currently employ to cover these categories is to focus my D slots on these categories. Defensemen tend to put up less offensive numbers than forwards and if someone could choose to roster a D or a F with no positional requirements, everyone would pick the forward for this reason. Yet, we have D slots that need to be filled to ensure we can maximize games played. Looking at some later-round defensemen or some waiver-wire guys, the ones who are picking up mostly offensive stats at around a 30-point pace are only picking up around 10 points more than the banger defensemen. If we focus our D slots on the peripheral stats, we can really shoot for the moon with our forwards and maximize offensive production from them. Banger defensemen also tend to accumulate all three of these categories, where banger forwards tend to only accumulate two (hits and penalty minutes).

Looking at hits, there are only four defensemen that stick out averaging at least three hits per game: Jeremy Lauzon (4.72), Luke Schenn (3.56), Moritz Seider (3.06), and Radko Gudas (3). These averages correspond to Z-scores ranging from 4.31, for Lauzon, to 2.22 for Gudas. The 4.31 is similar to a Nathan MacKinnon putting up 1.83 points per game, while the 2.22 is similar to a Jesper Bratt putting up 1.14 points per game. These are all elite numbers and put the players in the 99th percentiles of their respective stats.

Of these elite hitting defensemen, Gudas and Seider also are elite block producers, with 2.75 per game for Gudas and 2.24 per game for Seider. These correspond to z-scores of 3.07 and 2.24, both still elite. Lauzon and Schenn, the heavier hitters, don't contribute as much in blocks, with z-scores of 0.69 and 0.87 respectively.

All of the elite hitting defensemen contribute fine coverage in penalty minutes as well, with z-scores in this category ranging from 0.8 (for Seider) to 1.33 (for Lauzon).

Aside from defenseman, there are two heavy hitters that warrant discussion due to their elite hit coverage to go along with some nice offensive production. Kiefer Sherwood is leading the league in hits per game with 6.13. This corresponds to a huge z-score of 6. This is currently the highest z-score in any category! Sherwood doesn't provide penalty minutes or blocks, but has put up some nice offensive production, and actually has earned a top 6 role of late.

Will Cuylle is the other heavy hitter warranting discussion. He has put up 3.87 hits per game, which gives a z-score of 3.27. He picks up a few penalty minutes, but his offensive production makes him relevant in most multicategory leagues, moving around the middle-six of the lineup with great offensive talent.

Turning our attention to blocks, we find a few specialized defensemen who pick up loads of blocks, but don't do much in other categories. They include Chris Tanev, Alec Martinez, Kaiden Guhle, and David Savard. And with penalty minutes, there are a few guys who can win you that category in a given week (Nikita Zadorov, Tanner Jeannot, Patrick Maroon), but don't do much in other categories (aside from adding some hits). Are these specialty banger players worth holding to fill just one category? We can use z-scores to find out.

Using a method explained at the start of this article, we can sum all z-scores from each category to derive a total score that can represent a player's value in a category league. Here is each of the players mentioned ranks based on this total value:

Seider – 42

Sherwood – 74

Cuylle – 76

Zadorov – 113

Guhle – 168

Gudas – 180

Lauzon – 191

Schenn – 239

Jeannot – 249

Tanev – 353

Maroon – 368

Savard – 386

Martinez – 473

You can use your league's number of total players rostered to decide where a good cutoff is for rostering these players. If there's around 200 players rostered, Lauzon and above should all be rostered in multicategory leagues that include hits, blocks, and penalty minutes. If it is a shallower league, maybe Lauzon is best left on the waiver wire and you can stream hits.

If your league leaves out blocks and penalty minutes, but counts hits, the heavy hitting defenseman actually lose a lot of value and shouldn't be rostered. Lauzon's ranking in these leagues drops down to 285, with all others below him. As much as he can help you secure that one category win, it just isn't worth the roster spot with the lack of production on offense.

I hope this helped inform on the value of peripheral stats!

Hope you enjoyed this week’s breakdown!

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