The Montreal Canadiens re-signed forward Sean Monahan to a one-year deal a couple days ago. Though he played just 25 games with the Habs, he actually managed a four-year high in points per minute aat 5-on-5. He had also been earning some top PP time, so maybe there's fantasy value to be had as a late dart in fantasy drafts.

As a Habs fan, I'll never grow tired of seeing these quotes from Montreal players about coach Martin St. Louis:

#Habs Sean Monahan on head coach Martin St-Louis: "Marty really helped me love the game more and more…"

— Priyanta Emrith (@HabsInHighHeels) June 21, 2023

One of my grand theories is that a big (the biggest?) part of coaching at the professional level is just ensuring your players are happy and confident. A lot of tactics are from the assistant coaches and video coaches anyway. If the players don't enjoy coming to the rink/stadium/field, and/or don't believe they can do what you're asking of them, nothing else really matters. Monahan is far from the first Hab to say something similar.

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The Hockey Hall of Fame selection committee made its inductees announcement on Wednesday and they include a lot of NHL goalies: Henrik Lundqvist, Mike Vernon, and Tom Barrasso. The inclusion of Pierre Turgeon finally happened, as did Canadian women’s hockey legend Caroline Ouellette. In the builder category, they are adding Pierre Lacroix and Ken Hitchcock.

I’m not here to gripe about one of the biggest moments possible in the life of a hockey player/coach/manager. I am here to say: when is Alex Mogilny getting in?

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Adam Gaudette was re-signed by St. Louis:

We've signed Adam Gaudette to a one-year, two-way contract. #stlblues https://t.co/OYceEeNpRa

— St. Louis Blues (@StLouisBlues) June 21, 2023

Gaudette always interested me because it seemed as if he had a scoring touch in Vancouver; his shooting percentage from 2017-2020 was around the 65^th percentile and similar to names like Joe Pavelski, Jeff Skinner, and Nikolaj Ehlers. Then he had health issues and never really got on track. He will have another chance in St. Louis but has to make the team so the fantasy value is nil until he shows signs of life.

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There are a lot of statistical indicators to look at when trying to predict point production. Ice time at even strength or power play are certainly among them, as are both individual and team shot rates. Those are all publicly available and are well-known to fantasy hockey fans by now.

There are other indicators. I talk about varying sources all the time and one of them is the tracking data from Corey Sznajder. Not only does he track hundreds of games every season, but he also tracks a lot of things that aren't available publicly, and that matters for us. His tracked 5-on-5 scoring chance contributions – individual chances plus assists on teammate scoring chances – correlated much, much better to points than the rate of shots a team took with a player on the ice, the player’s individual shot rate, the team’s expected goals-for, or the player’s individual play-driving. That is part of the reason why I stress them.

There are other indicators to look for, though. One is shooting or passing off the rush. While 5-on-5 rush shots/passes don't correlate as strongly as scoring chance contributions, they're still better than some of the public data. Being able to catch a team on their heels is advantageous to the offence, and it's why coaches focus on creating such situations.

Let's look at some forwards who contributed a lot to their team's rush plays. It will be like scoring chance contributions in that we are looking for an individual's rush shots and their assists on a teammate's rush shots. Those rush contributions will be tallied for 5-on-5 only, and on a 60-minute basis (RC/60). We will limit the sample to forwards with at least 200 tracked minutes.

For benchmarks, the average RC/60 rate was a shade over 10.0, the high-end players are over 12.50, and the super-elite are over 15.80.

Here is the top half of the high-end list, or the top 22 forwards in the sample by RC/60:

Looking at that list, and the list of top fantasy performers, well, it's pretty close. Let's talk about some of the names.

Artemi Panarin

Peter Laviolette was hired recently as the new bench boss for the New York Rangers and one thing I mentioned upon his hiring was his penchant for focusing more on forechecking than playing off the rush. Whether he forces that upon the Rangers, most of whose stars do not play that way, remains to be seen. But Panarin has 341 points in 268 games with the Rangers – 104 points every 82 games – playing a lot off the rush. If he does have to change that, it's fair to wonder what it does to his 100-point potential.

Viktor Arvidsson

Not that Arvidsson playing off the rush is surprising – he did that a lot last year, too – but his shot rate crashed despite similar rush-shot rates. At 5-on-5, the fewer shots led to a drop in goals per minute for Arvidsson, a rate that was his second- lowest in his last five seasons. The big reason for his 26 goals was having 10 on the power play – as many as his previous three seasons combined – and generating the same number of shots off the rush per 60 minutes, but dropping your overall shot rate, isn't what we want to see.

Dylan Cozens and JJ Peterka (13.48 RC/60)

Cozens is on the list above and JJ Peterka is further down, though still easily above the 12.5 RC/60 benchmark outlined earlier. We have them together because they played so much together during the regular season, so the plays where one is assisting on the other's rush chance would double-count. I wanted to point it out because it was Peterka that seemed to mesh so well with Cozens, and not Jack Quinn. It isn't a slight on Quinn or anything of the sort; I think Quinn is a top-line scoring winger in the making. It is just to say that maybe Peterka/Cozens have developed chemistry faster, and that matters for fantasy players. The young German winger is becoming a favourite here among the Dobber writers/editors.

Roope Hintz

Jason Robertson is flat-out one of the best forwards in hockey, let alone wingers, but his success isn't all his own thanks to an excellent Dallas top line, including Roope Hintz. His rush contributions exceeded those of Robertson by 22%, which should let us know that these are two high-end guys playing extremely well with each other. Hintz has always played more off the rush, but it really came to the forefront in 2022-23 as he led the Stars by a mile in rush shots per minute. Perhaps there's a reason that Hintz has shot 14.9% at 5-on-5 over the last four years, a 96^th percentile mark in the NHL.

Troy Terry

There had to be an inclusion of Troy Terry for this reason: his RC/60 was 61% higher (!) than Trevor Zegras. For a visual representation of how far ahead Terry was over the rest of the Anaheim forwards in rush shots per minute, well:

Get that man a friend, he seems lonely.

It'll take some time to assess what the Ducks will look like in 2023-24, but a new coach coming and Terry not being far from free agency is something I keep coming back to. It seems as if he wants to play in a much different way from everyone else. Let's see what the new coach thinks.

Nazem Kadri (14.1 RC/60)

On the topic of new coaches, I am really interested to see how the Flames stars adapt to a non-Darryl Sutter coach, and how much Kadri can rebound. He and Mikael Backlund led Calgary in RC/60, which is a good sign to have two different centres driving high-percentage plays. The problem comes in the team having no cap space and guys like Backlund and Elias Lindholm potentially being on the trade block because of it. Whatever this team looks like in October, Kadri figures to be featured at all offensive strengths, and that he basically maintained his style after coming from Colorado is a good thing, even if he had a dip in fantasy value. More minutes under a new coach would really revive his fantasy upside.

Travis Konecny (13.8 RC/60)

While not as extreme as Terry's situation in Anaheim, Konecny was easily Philadelphia's top producer off the rush. That isn't a surprise, really, when we see his production, but it was also the same thing in 2021-22 when Claude Giroux was still around, and Sean Couturier at least managed a half-season. I wrote about Owen Tippett's improvements recently and it sure seems as if he and Konecny are forming a formidable pair of top-6 wingers, with Konecny being a true top-line scorer. New management could mean a lot of changes for the Flyers, but I'd be very interested to see what a Konecny-Couturier-Tippett line could do, handedness be damned.

Andreas Athanasiou (13.1 RC/60)

The inclusion of Athanasiou is a must because of just how impressive his season was compared to how bad his team was. There were Ramblings recently covering how much of Chicago's shot volume went to Athanasiou and just how good his playmaking was, relatively speaking. His name keeps popping up over and over among players that improved greatly on prior seasons or succeeded in a poor environment. That persists here as his RC/60 rate was virtually identical to both Mitch Marner and Johnny Gaudreau. Athanasiou's contract extension is not good for fantasy because of how much skill the Blackhawks are missing, even with Connor Bedard, and there's no guarantee he will spend the season with the young star.  

I'm not going to go into the guys who didn't play well off the rush because the bottom of the list is mostly players you'd expect: aging veterans who were good five years ago and fourth liners. There was one name that stood out, though, and it was Barrett Hayton. His RC/60 was 4.77, which ranked near the bottom of the league, and sandwiched between Nick Foligno and Matt Martin. It's not a shock that he's low because even Clayton Keller, easily the team's best offensive player, is only above average and not even among the high-end guys. But it does give me pause in declaring Hayton's season, particularly the post-Christmas portion when he had 38 points in 50 games, a surefire sign of things to come without further investigation.