Hello and welcome to this week's edition of Frozen Tools Forensics. First and foremost, on a somber note our thoughts and prayers are with those impacted by the New Year’s Day tragedy in New Orleans.

My name is Chad Simpson and I have the honor of making my first appearance for Dobber Hockey filling in for the holiday week. I have been playing fantasy sports for the better part of two decades with a hard focus on dynasty in particular. I entered the content world in 2022 after briefly dabbling as a Twitter analyst in the early days of the platform, joining a great podcast known as the Pallazzo Podcast before moving into the written content world with jobs at Pitcherlist and FantasySixPack. Being able to go from a rookie to writing for Dobber in the span of two years brings me great pride.

With that let’s get into today's edition of Frozen Tools Forensics.

Recently the team here has focused on hot runs for Kirill Marchenko, Filip Forsberg, Jonathan Huberdeau, Owen Tippett, Sebastian Aho and Mikhail Sergachev, as well as consistent performances from Nikita Kucherov, Mark Stone, Brayden Point, Aleksander Barkov, Sam Reinhart and the sustainability that comes with those players. Knowing that, I want to go in the opposite direction and look at the players on the coldest of cold streaks and whether the tools suggest any hope of a turnaround.

(Stats are following Wednesday's games)

As we can see, the quintuplet of Miro Heiskanen, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Jeff Skinner, Juraj Slafkovsky, and Steven Stamkos are struggling to put even a top 150 pace together this year. Considering these players came with ADPs ranging from 36 (Stamkos) to 125 (Slafkovsky), this is not what fantasy owners want to see in 2024-25.

Let's look at their three-year stats and see where this current pace falls.

As we can see from this chart, there is a dramatic scoring drop off for four of these players and a slight uptick for the fifth. Slafkovsky has steadily improved, but not to the level people were expecting or hoping him to. Meanwhile, the veterans all see massive declines as Father Time seems to be creeping into the picture. In the case of Stamkos, adjusting to a new franchise after being a fixture in Tampa has proven to be especially difficult. 

Allow me to dig just a bit deeper and look only at the direct correlation scoring.

All five are taking fewer shots than their three-year average. In the case of Slafkovsky, this shows that there is more potential as he has improved despite the lack of shooting. On the flipside, the vets' volumes decrease. This means we can't handwave any of it away as bad luck or shooting mechanics that can be resolved. They've moved into accessory roles on their respective teams this season and barring injury, they aren't likely to overcome this sample size. This doesn't mean they can't provide value for your team, but barring a really fortunate turn of events, none of them are likely to crack the top 100. Forget about living up to their ADPs from months ago, save for Slafkovsky.

Final verdict (chance of significant improvement from current performance to ADP or beyond):

Miro Heiskanen: 35%

For Heiskanen, while he falls into that veteran grouping, he is still just 25 years old. We can hope that there is a psychological or line combination component that is contributing to this situation. With Tyler Seguin lost for the year, along with Roope Hintz, Jason Robertson, and Wyatt Johnston all failing to meet expectations, it might just take one of those players getting hot to give Heiskanen something to feed off of to boost his own performance.

Ryan Nugent-Hopkins 20%

Nugent-Hopkins is a historically inconsistent player to a maddening degree. 

Here are his point totals from the last 10 seasons:

56

56

34

43

48

69

61

35

50

104

67

It is anyone's guess what version of RNH we will get week to week. As time goes on, it gets that much harder to hope for him to rubber band back to the mean.

Jeff Skinner 1%

Skinner was on borrowed time dating back to the start of his Sabres tenure. While the stats don't specifically indicate it, the eye test tells me Skinner needs to consider retirement because he is just wasting time out there even though he's only 32.

Juraj Slafkovsky 75%

As we saw in the data, Slafkovsky is just scratching at the surface and has data that lends credence to improvement rather than struggle. That makes it fairly easy coupled with the modest ADP to consider Slafkovsky the most likely of the group to make some serious gains the rest of season to get to or beyond his ADP.

Steven Stamkos 30% 

Stamkos is a very tricky situation. On one hand, you have to factor the wear and tear of his otherworldly injury history. On the other hand, you have to give weight to his quality three-year averages. Then you need to grow a third hand to factor in the move from an elite Lightning lineup to the middling Predators lineup and all that goes into growing cohesion with a new group. I've traded away my shares of Stamkos, but I was mainly targeting quality buy lows like Owen Tippett rather than accepting pennies on the dollar for Stamkos because I just don't know which way the Sword of Damocles will swing.

That is all for this week. Thank you again to the Dobber team for inviting me to do this.  Check me out on social media @caochadttv on Twitter for hot takes, insight and news about the new podcast I'm debuting in 2025.