Today we are kicking off a mini-series focusing on helping us make smarter player decisions at the draft table. It is not enough to know how a player performed in the previous season, but we need to try to determine whether or not that level of performance was reasonable or unsustainable. We will go division by division and highlight some players who might be poised to bounce back, and some players who it might be better to avoid. To start us off, we will be reviewing players from the Pacific Division.

In order to make this process a bit more concrete we are going to focus on three stats from the Dobber Reports; five on five team shooting percentage (5on5 S%), individual points percentage (IPP), and individual shooting percentage (S%). These are certainly not the end all be all of player evaluation but do tend to flag players who are likely to see a different point pace in the future.

Before jumping into the players, let's do a quick refresher on what these stats tell us. We use team shooting percentage to get an idea of how many points are being scored while a player is on the ice. We use five on five because that is the largest game state for players. Power-play points count just the same on the score sheet so we could look at that as well, but in the interest of cutting down our data points we are going to focus on even the strength number here. IPP, which we will sometimes refer to as a player's points participation number is how often a player is getting a point on a goal that is scored while they are on the ice. Finally, shooting percentage is just the standard: what percent of a player's shots are going into the net?

With all of these stats thought it is important to take them into context. Not just what would an average player do, but how does this number compare to their career numbers? In order to do that I grabbed the same data points for the 2023-24 season and am comparing them to each player's recent career average. Broadly speaking, and barring changes in the player's situation (changing teams, sudden promotion to a top line etc.) we would expect these numbers to return that career average.

For our first set of players, we are looking at players who performed better than their recent career averages in each of our three stats. A broad statement we can say about each of these players is that there were more goals scored while they were on the ice than usual, they got in on more of those goals than usual, and they themselves scored on a higher percentage of their shots than usual. In short all of these players could be in danger of less point production in 2024-25.

A few highlights from this list:

Dakota Joshua, Blake Coleman, and to some extent Mackenzie Weegar are on this list mostly because of shooting percentage. All of them saw pretty large shooting percentage increases over their recent history. If they are scoring more than expected it isn't surprising that a few more goals were scored while they were on the ice overall, and that they were getting in on more goals than usual (as they were the ones scoring them). All of them should see their shooting percentages drop back down, and therefore their point production. Weegar might be in a slightly different category as both his shooting percentage and his IPP numbers are a fair bit higher than his recent history. Weegar has shot above nine percent before, but I would expect that number to come down a bit. His IPP has bounced around in his career so it being slightly elevated isn't necessarily a surprise, but it does mean some of his point production is unlikely to continue into 24-25. One bright spot though is the departure of Noah Hanafin it seems possible that Weegar could take on even more of a workload, and therefore more opportunities for production.

And then we get to Tyler Myers. His IPP of 44 was 21 points higher than his career average. Almost double. That means the 31-point pace Myers put up included him getting in on almost twice as many points as we would have expected him to. Really not great news for him going forward. He has put up 30 plus point paces before, but he also used to shoot quite a bit more and just generally be more involved in the offense.

JT Miller is on the list here (and actually a lot of Vancouver players are honorable mentions), but it looks like he should still be generally fine, but maybe not quite as proficient in 24-25. The same should be true of Mason McTavish as well. He got in on more goals than expected, but with Anaheim continuing to grow, and growth from McTavish himself there is less concern of him falling off.

To switch gears now, let's focus on players who might be due for a bounce back. Again, in a similar analysis process we are looking at players who's shooting percentages and IPP were lower than expected. So basically we can say all of these players had fewer goals scored when they were on the ice and were getting in on fewer of those goals.

I am not going to show the full list here, but we need to spend a special segment here on the Seattle Kraken. When I first pulled up this list of potential bounce back players fully half of the list of 16 were Kraken players. It makes some sense. The Kraken went on a shooting tear in 22-23 with one of the highest team shooting percentages, and then in 23-24 had one of the worst. That swing in data is going to flag a lot of players in this kind of analysis. There are a lot of good contenders for bounce backs. For completion's sake the players who made the list are Andre Burakovsky, Yanni Gourde, Brandon Tanev, Matty Beniers, Jamie Oleksiak, Adam Larsson, Jordan Eberle, and new Kraken Brandon Montour. Burakovsky and Beniers were particular stand outs on the list and are worth extra attention on draft day.

Now that that is out of the way we can look at some other players.

We are not going to spend much time with Barclay Goodrow, his scoring is never the main attraction and who knows what the future holds for him in San Jose. Jonathan Huberdeau is worth a note though. His 53-point pace certainly makes that contract laughable, but it does look like he deserved a little bit better. 110 points better? Certainly not. But maybe something in the range of 60 points.

Trevor Zegras and Troy Terry could have been better for Anaheim. Zegras in particular missed a lot of time with injury and wasn't quite the same when he got back. His personal shooting percentage and dropping 12 IPP points certainly indicates he wasn't getting the bounces he is used to. Assuming deployment doesn't change for Anaheim these numbers indicate Zegras and Terry should perform a bit better in 24-25.

It is also worth highlighting Ryan Nugent-Hopkins here too. He had typically been bouncing around in the high 60's until exploding in 22-23 for a 104-point pace. His 69-point return to form 23-24 was certainly a reality check for folks expecting more 100-point seasons. Based on the numbers here, it looks like a 70-plus point pace is a pretty reasonable expectation, though a return to a 100 plus is not.

That is all for this week

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