It is now less than a week until the 2024-25 Dobber Hockey Fantasy Guide is released! All the research is in, the articles have been written, and now the editing and graphics side are doing their thing. Help support what we do and pre-order your copy here. This is a digital-only guide and the upside of that is the guide will be updated until the season starts, reflecting injuries, trades or signings, line combinations, and whatever else comes along. It is less than two months until training camps, so get a head start on your league mates with the Guide.

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When looking ahead to the 2024-25 fantasy hockey season, it is important to know what our benchmarks are. Knowing the direction in which point production, shot, PIM, hit, and block totals are moving is important to knowing what fantasy owners should be looking for in drafts. I like to do this every offseason so that readers have an idea of what needs to be prioritized and what doesn't when fantasy drafts roll around, so let's get to it. Data will be from Natural Stat Trick or Frozen Tools. Today, we'll focus on peripherals while moving to goals, assists, and points in my next Ramblings.

Shots

The first thing that should be mentioned about total shots is there are fewer of them. In fact, there were 4.25% fewer shots in 2023-24 than there were just two seasons ago in 2021-22. As we know from high school economics courses, when things become rarer, value usually goes up, and that is certainly the case with shots on goal.

Let's look at this another way. The top 300 full-season shot totals in 2022-23 averaged 175.5 shots per player. Just last season, that number dropped, but just barely to 174.6 shots per played. That represents a drop of just a half-percent, so while there has been a sizable drop across the league in total shots on goal over the last couple of years, there really hasn't been change among the fantasy-relevant options that we would look to.

What is important is how those distributions have changed. Below is just a simple little chart to show how the very top of the league has performed, so we'll look at the top six shot performances in each of the past three seasons.

	2021-22	2022-23	2023-24
#1	348	407	405
#2	334	366	382
#3	326	352	371
#4	317	347	357
#5	315	336	347
#6	312	328	316

At the very, very top of the league, there were more four players that exceeded the top of the 2021-22 season. In fact, the top six shots performances in 2023-24 averaged 363 shots each while the top six shot performances in 2021-22 averaged 325. We may chalk that up to some players missing time with COVID or otherwise abnormal scheduling, but the 2022-23 season saw the top six performers averaged 356 shots each, so even in the first truly normal year, the elite shot performers shot less often per player than in 2023-24.

To summarize that: the top-300 shot-taking players saw a small decline in shots per player in 2023-24 when compared to 2021-22, but the absolutely elite shot-takers saw a rise. For those picking at the top of fantasy drafts, it's not as hard to find elite shot totals, but the job will get tougher the deeper we get into the first round and beyond.

That crystallizes when we look at the bottom of the top-300 leaderboard. Back in 2021-22, the very bottom of the list landed 117 shots on goal. In 2023-24, there were 27 players at the bottom of the top-300 leaderboard to land 117 shots or fewer.

So, the absolute top of the list two standard deviations above the average of the top-300 shot takers was landing more rubber on target, but the bottom of the list was landing less.

The interesting part is looking more towards the middle of the league. In 2022-23, the players in the top-300 that were one standard deviation above average landed at least 235 shots on goal. In 2023-24, that number was 229. In fact, 10/47 of those top shooters in 2023-24 landed 240 or fewer shots on goal, which was the 46^th-highest total in 2022-23.

Let's put all this in a simple list:

• The shot totals for the absolute elite shot-takers grew in 2023-24 when compared to either of the prior two seasons.
• The upper-middle class shot takers landed fewer shots on goal in 2023-24 than in 2022-23.
• The lower-class of fantasy-relevant shooters are shooting less. Not by a wide margin, but there is a small drop.

The other interesting part is that there has been a drop in shots from forwards, but the largest decline came from defencemen by a wide, wide margin. From 2021-22 to 2023-24, the total shots landed by forwards dropped about 2.2%, while the total shots landed by defencemen dropped a whopping 9.3%. Just from 2022-23 to 2023-24 blue liners landed 6% fewer shots on goal, in total.

It would take a lot more study, but my guess at what is happening is two-fold: it's harder to get shots through to the net, and when defencemen are looking to put the puck on target, they're looking for tips or deflections rather than trying to score. Regardless of the reason(s), there were just eight defencemen to land 200 shots on goal last season, a stark drop from the 13 rearguards who landed at least 200 shots back in 2021-22, and the 11 who reached that mark in 2022-23. Guys like Rasmus Dahlin and Roman Josi are becoming more infrequent, and their shot contributions are becoming more valuable.

Blocks

The growth in shot blocking has been something to behold (and is absolutely important to keep in mind when talking shots on goal). All of it can be explained in one simple table of total blocks, and blocks by position, in each of the last three seasons:

	Total Blocks	Forward Blocks	Defence Blocks
2021-22	30483	11925	18558
2022-23	30686	12086	18600
2023-24	41287	16341	24957

That is an absolutely absurd jump in shot blocking in 2023-24. Just compared to the year before, it represents a 34.5% jump. The interesting part is that it's a relatively equal jump, percentage-wise, between forwards and defencemen as the former grew by 35% while the latter leapt by a margin of 34.2%. (There is a slight miscount as the total forward and defence blocks from 2023-24 is 41 298, but that's likely due to how some players like Kurtis MacDermid are designated positionally. The difference is not enough to matter, though.)

The changes for the forwards are huge. Just in 2022-23, there were only two players with at least 80 blocks, and just 13 with at least 60 blocks. One season later, there were eight players with at least 80 blocks, 48 with at least 60 blocks, and three cracked 90 blocks. Forwards are getting in front of pucks a lot more often and that matters when looking at multi-cat formats. It also applies to players of varying levels of fantasy performance as Auston Matthews is over one block per game across the last two seasons while Elias Pettersson is just a shade under. There also block considerations for more mid-range options like Frank Vatrano, Boone Jenner, and Alex Tuch.

Of course, this also brings additional blocks to additional defencemen. In 2023-24, six blue liners reached at least 200 blocks, while there was just one (1) with more than 175 blocks one season prior. The number of blue liners with at least 150 blocks exploded almost four-fold from 11 in 2022-23 to an absurd 40 in 2023-24. That is something we need to keep in mind for fantasy drafts: we don't need to chase after Radko Gudas or Colton Parayko for huge block totals. They are more prevalent than ever, and that means those high totals are less valuable than they once were. There are literally dozens of such players where there wasn't even a dozen this time a year ago.

Hits

Going in the other direction are hits. In 2022-23, there were 59 070 hits registered in the NHL among all players to appear in a game, a number that dropped to 53 679 just one year later. That is a drop of 9.1% in just one year, and that makes the huge banger options more valuable. Whatever value Gudas may have lost because of the prevalence of blocks, some of it is being mitigated by the rise in importance of hits.

Interestingly, like blocks, the drop is relatively even when looking at forwards and defencemen:

	Forward Hits	Defence Hits
2021-22	37949	22229
2022-23	37069	22001
2023-24	34319	19437

The drop in hits by forwards from 2022-23 to 2023-24 was 7.4%, while defencemen saw a drop of 11.7%. That difference is larger than blocks, to be sure, but it's not as if the entire decline in hit rates is coming from one position or the other. Both are responsible, though with hits drying up from blue liners, guys like Gudas, Neal Pionk, and Moritz Seider can provide a bit more value in this area.  

One last note: penalty minutes are up slightly. From two seasons ago to last year, the rise was 1.1%. Nothing major like the rise in blocks or drop in hits, but something to note regardless.

The NHL is a game that evolves every season, so what those totals look like a year from now isn't certain, but it does seem there's a clear trend in some peripheral stats. That is something we need to factor when we look at the upcoming campaign and which multi-cat monsters are exactly that, or perhaps just an option that has cheaper, comparable options later in drafts.