The Monday night game between the Columbus Blue Jackets and Los Angeles Kings  Postponed was postponed due to the snowstorm that ran/is running through a good chunk of North America. It has been rescheduled for early March.

*

Pittsburgh winger Bryan Rust will have a hearing for his high hit on Brock Boeser over the weekend. That almost certainly means he will get at least a one-game suspension, so let's see what the Department of Player Safety has in mind.

Relatedly, the Canucks put both Boeser and Zeev Buium on the injured reserve. They have to miss at least seven days, and there are 10 left until the Olympic break. Given the nature of their injuries, my guess is we don't see them against until late February.

*

On Monday night, Ilya Sorokin managed his league-leading sixth shutout of the season (no one else has more than four) as he stopped all 21 shots the Philadelphia Flyers sent his way en route to a 4-0 New York Islanders win. Since November 1^st, he has 14 wins in 23 games, a .928 save percentage, and all six of his shutouts. Not a bad three-month stretch.

Jean-Gabriel Pageau scored twice as Tony DeAngelo also scored (PP), totaling seven shots and three blocks in the win.

Mathew Barzal managed a goal, a PP assist, and a block in the win. He is up to 25 points in his last 25 games.

*

Andrei Vasilevskiy, not to be outdone by Sorokin, also managed a shutout on Monday night, stopping 28 shots in Tampa Bay's home game against Utah as the Lightning won 2-0. That win puts Vasy at 23 for the year, two behind Karel Vejmelka (two goals against on 26 shots) for the league lead. Two more wins would give Vasilevskiy nine straight season of at least 25 wins, and that includes the shortened 2021 season.

Darren Raddysh and Brandon Hagel scored the goals, both on the power play. Raddysh now has eight power-play goals on the year, the same total as Nathan MacKinnon.

*

We are over 60% of the way through the NHL season and by the time the Olympic break hits next Thursday, we will have just 30% of the season left. At this point, any fantasy manager looking to make a push for head-to-head playoffs, or a league roto/points title, will need to take some swings. Some of those swings involve acquiring players who've gone through a rough stretch in the hopes they turn things around over the final eight weeks.

In that spirit, let's look at some of the 'unluckiest' players since December 1^st. We are looking at things like players with large expected goals-for rates (xGF) over actual goals-for rates (GF), low goal participation rates (Individual Points Percentage, or IPP), low shooting percentages (either from the individual or the team), and more. We are using data from Evolving Hockey, it is current as of the morning of Monday, January 26^th, and this is at all strengths.

New Jersey Devils

Sympathies to those who invested heavily in the Devils offence because since December 1^st, they are fighting with the Chicago Blackhawks for last in the league in goal scoring. It isn't as if they aren't creating, though, as Jesper Bratt has the largest difference between xGF per 60 minutes and GF per 60 minutes of all forwards in our sample, Timo Meier is fourth, and both are worse than league average by IPP in that span:

To be fair here, Meier is not someone who typically has a high IPP. He has had three straight seasons under 70% and his prior three-season average with New Jersey is under 65%. And the team has scored so little with him on the ice that being at that three-year average, rather than the 50% he's had since December 1^st, only adds two points.

The same can be said for Bratt. His three-year rate of goal participation is 67.4%, which is the rate of a low-end first liner. That he is sitting at 62.1% isn't a massive deviation from what he normally does.

With that behind us, it's the xGF over actual GF that sticks out. The necessary context here, as I wrote about in a Ramblings a few weeks ago, is that public xG models have been over-counting much more than normal. But the average over-count among forwards is about 0.46 per 60 minutes. Bratt's xGF rate since December 1^st is 2.94 higher than his GF rate, and Meier's is 2.32. Bratt's difference is over 6x higher than the average forward and Meier's is over 5x higher. It is a massive chasm.

The final note is Jack Hughes. Since returning from his hand injury, he has two goals in 17 games, shooting 3.8%, and Sunday's game was the first time he took any faceoffs (and he only took three). Maybe his hand is finally close to healthy, but it's clear it wasn't for a solid month, and with him going to the Olympics, it's not as if he'll get to rest it for a few weeks. If he plays hurt for the rest of the year and shoots like 5%, then a massive improvement for Meier and especially Bratt will be tough to achieve.

All the same, we have seen this Devils roster be above-average goals-wise over the prior couple of seasons and they are far too talented to be at the bottom of the league. Maybe this is just a season where everything goes wrong, but there are reasons to think why both Bratt and Meier will be much more productive over the final third of the season.

Elias Pettersson (Vancouver Canucks)

Since December 1^st, of the top four largest differences between rate of xGF and GF with a forward on the ice, three belong to the New Jersey Devils. The fourth belongs to the franchise centre from the Canucks and, relatedly, his line mates are shooting just 7.6% when he's on the ice, compared to the league average of 11.1% for all the forwards in our sample:

It probably isn't a coincidence that the huge gap in xGF and GF coupled with low teammate shooting percentage for Pettersson comes largely in the post-Quinn Hughes era, who played his last game for Vancouver on December 11^th. Even still, half the gap between xGF/60 and GF/60 would be about 1.2, or over 2.5x bigger than the league average, and just outside the top-50 rates in the league. At his regular IPP of about 63%, that would add five points to his total over the 18 games he played in that span. That matters a lot.

Anyone who reads my writing regularly knows I have not been a Pettersson proponent in any fantasy hockey format, at least since his knee issues that popped up a couple of years ago – knee issues that may or may not have since been resolved (I doubt it). But there is a difference between 'Should this guy be rostered in anything besides deep formats?' and 'This guy's recent stretch suggests 82-game pace of around 27 goals and 37 assists'. Surviving the post-Hughes era will be tough for Vancouver, but a healthy Filip Chytil and Marco Rossi after the Olympic break, plus his recent on-ice numbers, should help Pettersson's production rebound over the final third of the season.

Nino Niederreiter (Winnipeg Jets)

Winnipeg's depth being unable to score has been a massive problem for them this season. Consider that from 2023-2025, the Jets scored 2.38 goals per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 with Kyle Connor and Mark Scheifele off the ice, a number that has cratered to 1.79 this season (per Natural Stat Trick). That Niederreiter is among those struggling is not a surprise. But it's the degree to which his underlying numbers suggest a turnaround that is important here. Among the 325 forwards in our sample, he ranks 308^th by xGF/GF differential, 312^th by teammate shooting percentage, and 317^th by IPP. Put it all together and he's nearly in a league of his own:

There should be some doubts as to whether the Jets' depth can be productive as they've typically been the last few years (I wrote about Cole Perfetti's struggles last week) with the loss of Nikolaj Ehlers and below-normal season from Adam Lowry. Niederreiter turned 33 years old back in September, so age-related decline is a concern, and his per-game hit volume is currently a six-year low. However, we know how good he can be – even his slower years saw him average 18 goals, 19 assists, and 138 hits every 82 games – and there are many signs of positive regression here. The bonus is that the Jets are 1 of 9 teams to play at least 26 games after the Olympic break, and they are tied for the ninth-easiest schedule by opponent points percentage (per Frozen Tools). Anyone desperate for a depth winger in banger formats has to at least consider him, either as a streamer or as a straight roster addition, once the NHL returns in late February.