Identifying breakout, rebound candidates for the 2022-23 NHL season

As we turn our attention to the open of training camps across the National Hockey League, front offices have begun dissecting their prospective lineups. Which players will make the cut? Which players need more time? And which players may offer a big offensive surprise to the upside entering the 2022-23 season?

The last question is one I find fascinating. It dominates pre-season conjecture, where all 32 franchises are bullish about their outlook. It’s impossible to blame teams for being optimistic, but the hype – particularly with younger players – can overwhelm at times. 

One quick analysis I like to dust off during the off-season is to identify players who may be primed for breakout or bounce-back seasons. The NHL can be volatile, and over smaller samples (even full seasons), strong and effective two-way hockey doesn’t correlate with scoring output.

But it tends to over time, which makes year-over-year analysis intriguing. If we can identify forwards who were aggressive and involved offensively without being rewarded on the stat sheet, we can reasonably only infer one of three things:

1. The player is a relatively poor shooter of the puck.
2. The player is being impacted by usage, which includes the quality of his teammates; or
3. The player is unlucky.

It’s simplistic, but it’s generally true. Sometimes, rebounds in scoring are inevitable – remember last season when Toronto’s Auston Matthews started the year in a slump? That was a pure lack of puck luck, as Matthews was generating heaps of offence without being rewarded. He ended the season with 60 goals. (We also wrote about Jeff Skinner being unlucky a few years ago; Skinner scored 33 goals on an otherwise middling Sabres team last season.)

There is no exact science, but we love forwards who aggressively shoot the puck, and, more specifically, take those shots from dangerous areas of the ice. It’s one thing to fill up the stat sheet with shots, but if they are coming from the perimeter, the likelihood of that puck finding the back of the net is small.

Let’s take a stab at finding some of these forwards. Quick and simple, we are looking for forwards who (a) generated shots at a first-liner rate, per 60 minutes of play; (b) generated expected goals at a first-liner rate, per 60 minutes of play; and (c) ended the year with bottom-six real goals scored.

That table is 18 players deep – here is what it looks like:

Of the 18 players we found, eight are also under the age of 25, where body and skill development can be rocket fuel for a breakout season – certainly more so than a 35-year-old player who may be in the twilight of his career.

If we assume these forwards will generally produce at similar rates in the offensive zone, we can see how many hidden goals may have existed from last season. For example: what if each of these forwards scored at their expected goal rate? Or, what if these players posted their career average shooting percentage from last season, rather than what we observed?

Let’s plot these out. The same 18 skaters shown below:

You will notice that when historical shooting percentages are brought in, the potential scoring upside is a touch more muted. That’s in part because you have some forwards in here who are historically weaker-than-average shooters, as well as a few skaters – namely Washington’s Connor McMichael and Vancouver’s Nils Hoglander – with very limited games played in such early parts of their career.

That said, there are clearly several players who deserved a better fate than last season. Based on shot volume adjusted for quality, Florida’s Patric Hornqvist (+12), Detroit’s Andrew Copp (+9), and Seattle’s Daniel Sprong (+8, and on a PTO for next season) were much more dangerous attackers last year than their scoring numbers would suggest.

If we look at shooting percentages, Hornqvist (+7) and Sprong (+6) again look like players who experienced a lack of puck luck last year. But Calgary’s Blake Coleman (+9) deserved a much better fate in the 2021-22 season, and I would argue he is the best bet of the established players to rebound sharply next year.

It’s the five younger players who may be more intriguing to follow, though. The aforementioned McMichael and Hoglander, as well as Detroit’s Filip Zadina, Filip Chytil of the Rangers, and Edmonton’s Jesse Puljujarvi put together very encouraging resumes last season. Our range of estimates for how talented each of these shooters are is wider than your established veteran – such is life when you are a young player with limited games played and still developing.

But if you are looking for a breakout candidate amongst younger skaters, one or more of the forwards in this group is who I would bet on entering the upcoming season.

Data via Natural Stat Trick, NHL.com, Evolving Hockey, Hockey Reference