Now that we are a couple of weeks into the season and we have some massive sample sizes to work with (notice the tongue firmly planted in cheek here), I want to turn our attention to players who have been seeing a change in deployment that could impact their fantasy value going forward.

This week on Frozen Tools Forensics: Rising Power Players.

As the title suggests, this week we are going to focus on power plays. The reason for this should be pretty self-explanatory. Power plays score goals at a much higher rate than five on five play, so a player getting a significant power-play role should be putting up points more effectively than one who is not.

At the start of the season we often see some new looks on the power plays. It could be new faces in new places, new roles opening up on teams, a new coach, or a coach just wanting to try something different. Whatever the reason it is worth keeping an eye out for players who are suddenly given a new opportunity.

This week we are going to track down players who are getting power-play deployment that did not have it in the past. In terms of literal process it means we are going to compare the first few weeks of this season to the last month or so of last season and see what has changed. There are actually several reports we could access for this information, but today I picked the ever useful, Big Board. As described above I ran the report twice, once for the current stats, and once for the last month of last season. I also put in a filter of five games to eliminate players with lower sample sizes. Additionally I ran these reports on Wednesday, so it will not include data from Wednesday or Thursday night. Once I exported the reports I was able to pull the necessary columns together to create the sheets below.

One additional note. I am using percent of power-play time as literal time on ice can fluctuate quite a bit during small sample sizes, and because it helps identify who is seeing 'top unit' time (usually more than 50 percent).

Our main event will be those players who are gaining in time, but let's take a quick detour and see who is losing out.

Our biggest loser in this case is Victor Rask. Dropping from 63 percent of his team's time to 1.2 is just brutal. The top unit in Minnesota has been Joel Eriksson Ek, Kevin Fiala, Mats Zuccarello, and Kirill Kaprizov so it looks like a swap for Eriksson Ek, which is bad news for Rask.

Duncan Keith and Joonas Donskoi aren't terrible shocks on this list as they changed teams so we were likely to see something change.

Jordan Staal (and Martin Necas) have lost out in Carolina with Vincent Trocheck healthy, while Roslovic is likely pushed further down the depth charts by the arrival of Jakub Voracek and the promotion of Boone Jenner.

And now on to the main event. (Full disclosure I also implemented a cut off for power-play percent here as we have some players going from zero to 30 percent, which still isn't that relevant for most fantasy purposes)

Color me intrigued by Lawson Crouse. His name has already made the rounds in some fantasy circles, but keep an eye on him if he is available in your league. His 2.5 shots per game are a nice boost with his hits. He is getting four additional minutes of ice time every game and more than two of it is on the power play. He has not cashed in to date with only two points over six games, but if this deployment can stick, and clicks even occasionally he is an interesting look in your multi-cat leagues.

As mentioned above Eriksson Ek is in prime position on that Minnesota power play. Like with Crouse, he has historically been a bit more of a peripheral/face off win kind of guy, but already has two power-play goals with his new deployment.

Pittsburgh Forwards: There are several others on this list in addition to Kasperi Kapanen and Evan Rodrigues (Jason Zucker, John Marino etc.). This makes sense, but if you haven't already been jumping on this bandwagon you are running out of time. The Pens have been missing some combination of Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang, Bryan Rust, Jeff Cater, and Jake Guentzel to start the season. Some of the above are back or on their way toward returning so it may be too late to do too much with the rest of the Pens lineup, but keep watching how they roll out those lines as folks start returning.

And finally, Alexis Lafreniere. He has been bumped up about two minutes of total time on ice thus far and has over three minutes of power-play time on average to start the season. He hasn't exactly blown the gates off with three points in seven games, but his shot rate is up and he is playing with Mika Zibanejad and Chris Kreider at even strength. As of 10/25 he was on a decidedly less exciting unit with Filip Chytil and Sammy Blais, but the situation definitely is worth watching. 

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