With the NHL on break for over the next couple of weeks and the roster freeze in effect, there is an opportunity to free-wheel these Ramblings a bit. For today, I want to review two players that are having breakout seasons in Josh Doan and Darren Raddysh, and whether they are 'for real' or whether fantasy managers should prepare themselves for a downturn.

Individual player and/or team data is from Evolving Hockey and tracking data is from All Three Zones. All charts are my own, with the red and blue dotted lines showing the average of the specific stat being discussed.

Josh Doan (Buffalo Sabres)

With 18 goals and 21 assists to this point, Doan is a genuine threat for 25 goals, 30 assists, two shots per game, and one hit per outing. That would be an excellent multi-cat season, especially for someone who tallied just 12 goals and 16 assists for their entire career before this season. He has been rewarded with a seven-year extension from the Sabres, so he's going to be around for a while, and it's worth figuring out what the upside is here.

The problem, of course, is that Doan isn't a guy with a lot of NHL experience (119 games across three years and no season with at least 60 games played yet). Such is the nature of a breakout player, but it should give us a bit of pause before we over-estimate how good he can be. Just so we're clear, I was a fan of Doan's in Utah and thought he could be the biggest winner of the trade that sent him to Buffalo.

First, I wanted to see where Doan stands offensively looking at historical comps. To do that, we're going to use Evolving Hockey's Rate-Adjusted Plus/Minus. For anyone unfamiliar, it is a statistical method that tries to account for teammates, opponents, zone starts, and more, to see what a player's true contributions are to their team. In this instance, we're looking at expected goals-for (xGF) play-driving in prior seasons to find similar performances to Doan's across his age 22-23 campaigns. After that, we're looking for similar players by points per 60 minutes at 5-on-5. Going back to 2007, here are the comparable seasons to Doan's last two years:

The overlapped names up top are Jeff Carter (2007-09) and Michael Grabner (2010-12), and the overlapped names below them are Sean Couturier (2015-17) and Chris Kreider (2013-15). We then see Brendan Gallagher, Brandon Dubinsky, and Jesse Puljujarvi.

Among all those players, the most generous comp would be Carter, who had six seasons of at least 60 points, one season of 84 points, and four 30-goal efforts. However, Carter and Doan aren't really that similar by shot volume right now as Carter's rate of 5-on-5 shot attempts across his age-22 and age-23 seasons was 24% higher than Doan's. There is a difference between being a player who can threaten for 30 goals, which it seems Doan can/will, and being a player who can regularly score 30 goals, which is Carter's level. Doan playing in a higher-scoring environment than Carter did in the 2010s will help, but that also helps everyone else.

The other difference is in hit rates. Doan hits much more (3.7 hits/60) than Grabner, Couturier, and Carter did (all under 2.0 hits/60), and much less than Dubinsky, Kreider, and Puljujärvi (all between 5.5 and 8.5 hits/60) did.

Dubinsky, Carter, and Couturier were all centres, Doan has considerably different hit rates from Kreider and Grabner, and Puljujärvi's career was likely shortened due to injuries. Factoring performance, position, and shot/hit volume, Doan's closest comparable player on this list is Gallagher.

That may not seem like a great comp for Doan as Gallagher has never had a 55-point season and has surpassed 25 goals just twice (and never reached 35 goals). The difference here being that Gallagher never reached 17 minutes per game in any season. Doan, on the other hand, is at 16:07 this year with Buffalo and 16:34 per game since Christmas. At 6'2, Doan is much bigger than Gallagher and in a better position to skate 18-19 minutes a game as soon as next season.

The one thing to be cautious of here are Doan's assists. Of the wingers on that list – Grabner, Kreider, Gallagher, and Puljujärvi – there is just one season of at least 30 assists (Kreider in 2023-24). Doan is pushing for 30 this season in a higher scoring environment, but this is probably not a guy who will turn into a regular 30-goal, 50-assist threat like Brandon Hagel or Jason Robertson.

To reinforce that, let's review the playmaking data from All Three Zones. We are going to use scoring chance assists/60 at 5-on-5, or how often a player has a helper on a teammate's scoring chance, and high-danger passes/60 at 5-on-5, which are completed passes across the slot or from behind the net. Among forwards with at least 200 tracked minutes over the last two seasons, here are the comps for Doan:

To clarify, this is the list of names:

Removing the centres from that list, we are left with Koepke, Kolesar, Olofsson, Schwartz, Jarvis, and Heinen. Schwartz has several seasons with at least 30 assists but has never reached 40 assists. Jarvis is in his fifth season and could reach 30 assists this year for the third season in a row, but he has never had more than 35.

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Doan looks every bit the player who, starting next year, can be a regular 30-goal, 35-assist threat, and push for 200 shots and a hit per game. The list of comparable wingers mentioned with the first graphic all had (or are still having) lengthy, productive careers with the least among them being Grabner, and he had three seasons between 26-35 goals. At his best, Doan might push for an 80-point season – somewhere near 35 goals and 45 assists – but that's his best, not a season-to-season expectation. He should have a long, productive career, but he looks more 'Brendan Gallagher with 15% more ice time' rather than The Next Brandon Hagel.

Darren Raddysh (Tampa Bay Lightning)

Factoring draft position, has been no more valuable fantasy skater this season than Raddysh, who may not have even been drafted in some 12-team leagues with normal bench sizes but is a top-5 defenceman in a lot of formats. His 17 goals are third among blue liners and his 35 assists tie him for ninth. For a guy who wasn't an NHL regular until the age of 27 and is averaging over 20 minutes for the first time in his three seasons, it's been quite the story.

What stands out immediately is Raddysh shooting 13.2% where he had been a career 5.5% shooter across 176 games before this season. While that is an immediate red flag, we do need some context here, and it's that Raddysh has managed 0.48 individual expected goals per 60 minutes (ixG/60), tied for the fourth-highest rate. As we might expect, the higher the rate of ixG/60 among defencemen, the higher the shooting percentage we usually see:

It isn't one-size-fits-all, but there's a clear upward trend here. Also, of the nine other defencemen averaging at least 0.45 ixG/60 this season, none are shooting less than 7.3% and they average 9.7%. Raddysh is clearing those numbers by a good margin, but it also tells us that what he's done on the ice has earned him an improvement from the shooting percentages he managed up until this season.

What is a genuine red flag for his production is his Individual Points Percentage (IPP). That is simply the rate at which a player registers a point when their team scores a goal with them on the ice. So, if a defenceman is on the ice for 100 team goals, and puts up 30 points, his IPP is 30%.

At this point of the season, Raddysh's IPP is 59.8%, fifth among all defencemen. For reference, across the two seasons from 2023-2025, only one defenceman exceeded that rate, and it was Cale Makar at 60.5%. Others are the top of the leaderboard include Shea Theodore, Quinn Hughes, Adam Fox, and Zach Werenski all between 56-60%. For Raddysh to stay at this level of goal participation, he would need to be among the truly elite offensive defencemen in the league.

If we have to compare Raddysh to some top defencemen, it's worth investigating how he holds up in non-production categories. Let's go back to the tracking data to see where he measures by some key stats that we look at.

First, here are the comparable defencemen in 2025-26 by rate of assists on teammate scoring chances (SCA/60), and overall chance contributions (SCC/60, or assists plus individual chances):

It is nice to see Matthew Schaefer's name there, but he's an 18-year-old rookie whereas Raddysh turns 30 years old later this month, so it's not quite the same thing. Other than Schaefer, we see Matt Roy, Mike Matheson, Damon Severson, and Justin Faulk. Solid fantasy defencemen are included here, but none are among the elite in the NHL, and none have ever been elite at any point of their careers.

What about zone entries? Elite offensive defencemen often are responsible for a lot of zone entries – the top-20 this season includes Schaefer, Josi, Hughes, Werenski, and Makar – and the best carry the puck in often – those five defencemen who were just named are all carrying the puck into the offensive zone on at least 50% of their entries. Here is where Raddysh stacks up by zone entries and percentage of entries carried in:

We see a couple of names having good seasons offensively in Jake Sanderson (66-point pace) and Morgan Rielly (47-point pace) but the next-best among them is Darnell Nurse, who has 18 points. At best, it's a mixed bag, and again, none of the names here are among the absolute upper-tier of elite offensive defencemen (Sanderson may get there in a couple years, but he's not there yet).

There is one area where Raddysh stands out and it's the puck-work in the defensive zone. His percentage of botched defensive zone retrievals combined with percentage of zone exits failed is just 28.6%. The league average is almost 2x higher, and when we look at that, combined with how often he's responsible for any kind of zone exit, it is a pretty good list:

For some clarity, the reason we look at botch/fail percentages is those with high percentages often have a negative impact on their team's goal scoring. And for further clarity, here are the names listed:

That is the most impressive list we've seen, and bodes well for Raddysh, but it's not lost on me that we see a teammate here in D'Astous, where we also saw Emil Lilleberg in the graph on zone entries. Seeing one Tampa Bay teammate can easily be chalked up to small-sample coincidence. Seeing two Tampa Bay teammates gets my spidey senses tingling. The success for Raddysh may have a lot more to do with coaching/team environment than we're giving credit for.

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Overall, Raddysh is 1 of 6 defencemen with at least 800 minutes and shooting over 13%, he has an IPP rate that is reserved for the elite offensive defencemen in the league, and none of the tracking data so far this season shows him among the elite offensive defencemen. There is a lot among the very good blue liners, and maybe that's what Raddysh is: a very good offensive defenceman who can put up 60-70 points but is having what will end up as the best season of his career.

If Raddysh can be a guy who puts up 60-70 points, 200 shots, and a hit and a block per game, that is probably a top-12 fantasy defenceman, but I'd be very cautious about putting him in the same conversation as Quinn Hughes and Cale Makar.

One Comment

Doodler 2026-02-10 at 10:09Log in to Reply

A big factor in Raddysh’s success has been his shot. He leads the league with over 60 shots 90-100mph where the next guy, Bouchard, has around 40. That’s a huge gap.