Today on Frozen Tool Forensics we are going to look at some potential free agent adds to help round out your roster going into the playoffs. We won't be doing an in-depth schedule analysis but looking at production from less rostered players.

To do this I ran a report on the Dobber Reports page called 'Percent Rostered'. This report gives us basic player stats for the year so far (the timeframe I ran the report for) and then percent rostered numbers across Yahoo, Fantrax, and ESPN. For the purposes of this article, we are going to focus mainly on Yahoo and Fantrax. The goal is to find a few players who are available in a high percentage of leagues who might be an upgrade over the bottom of your current roster.

The following tables contain some basic player information (name, position, and team), and then includes two data points about rostered percentage. Yahoo tends to be a place where there are more managers and leagues, but also more leagues that may have gone inactive or are not super deep. Fantrax is essentially the opposite, catering more to invested, deep, potentially dynasty leagues so the rostered percent number is almost always higher. Together they give an interesting picture of a player's likely availability. Finally, we have a few data points about a player's production to date (games played, points per game, and shots per game). The list is sorted by points per game, so a threshold of 20 games played is also applied.

Data is as of Thursday, March 12^th.

The first group is going to be less than 50 percent rostered in Yahoo.

Troy Terry has not played since February 25th which may be why he is showing relatively low rostered percent numbers in Yahoo, but as we can see, he is still highly rostered in Fantrax. There isn't that much to say here because he is on an 80-point/82-game pace, has been getting solid deployment when healthy. Given that Fantrax number he is likely rostered in most active leagues but definitely double check as he is hopefully going to be returning soon and should be good going forward.

Same essentially goes for Jared McCann. He started the season on the shelf, not playing consistently until the end of December. He has been excellent since then though. His coldest stretch has been his most recent, with three points in his last seven games, but prior to that he had 25 points in 25 games. He is getting top deployment in Seattle (as much as anyone does) and is clearly their top offensive threat.

Matz Zuccarello, at 38, clearly comes with some question marks but his 69-point/82-game pace should be putting some of those to rest. At 26 percent rostered in Yahoo and 61 percent rostered in Fantrax he is certainly more likely to be available than McCann and Terry. Zuccarello is still getting top line and top power-play deployment with Kirill Kaprizov and almost 19 minutes on average over his last five games. 

Charlie Coyle has been something of a revelation in recent weeks. He has 21 points in his last 14 games in Columbus. He is a third line player without a ton of history of strong point production so this one might not entirely last, but while it does you should definitely be on board. It all started when he got moved up to the top power play in Columbus so as long as that sticks some amount of production will likely continue. Most of the damage he has done though has been at even strength with only six of those 21 points coming on the man advantage.

Moving on now to players who are less than 25 percent rostered in Yahoo.

Managers seem skeptical of Josh Norris, and with good reason. He has spent most of his career injured. The thing is though when he hasn't been injured he has been pretty good. He is on a 70-point pace in his 27 games so far with Buffalo. He does have two pointless games recently, but overall has six points in his last healthy stretch of seven games. This could all end at any moment, which is probably why his numbers are low, but might as well have him for the good stretches.

Jason Zucker's 64-point pace sort of masks the streakiness of his season so far. He has six points in his last three games, but prior to that only three points in his last 11 (but seven in six before that). He has consistently gotten top power play in Buffalo, while bouncing around the middle six. While he has been worth rostering most of the season in slightly deeper formats there has certainly been no guarantee which Zucker you are going to get in a given week.

And for our third Sabre, Ryan McLeod is on a pretty solid 62-point pace. He is currently playing with Zucker at even strength and on the second power play. He seems to be a slightly more consistent version of Zucker, but without the added benefit of that top power-play time.

Alex Newhook has spent most of the season injured but is also on a 62-point pace. Unfortunately, it is hard to recommend him here. He hasn't gotten a sniff of top line or top power play, only very recently getting a trial on the second line. He isn't shooting very much but has eight goals on 32 shots, for a 25 percent shooting percentage. He has had a very small sample size of games to date, and it doesn't really look like this pace is going to be sustainable going forward.

That is all for this week.

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