Checking In on Last Season’s Breakout Players

Overtime Heroics Editorial

2069 days ago

Happy New Year! And holy crap, we are already halfway through the 2019-20 NHL season. With fifty-percent of the schedule in the rear-view, I wanted to check in some on of the breakout fantasy players from last season and see how they are fairing so far this year.

Morgan Rielly 2018-19 Breakout Player — PHOTO CREDIT: DAN HAMILTON-USA TODAY SPORTS

It is important to first define the criteria of the data used. For the purposes of this exercise, a “breakout” player was someone who outperformed their previous season’s point production by ten or more points or if they missed games they at least outpaced their previous season’s total by that much. I limited my sample to skaters to keep it simple.

2018-19 Breakout Player	18-19 Points	19-20 Pace	Difference
Mark Giordano	74	37	-37
Josh Anderson	47	13	-34
Erik Gustafsson	60	35	-25
Morgan Rielly	72	47	-25
Jonathan Toews	81	59	-22
Dylan Larkin	73	51	-22
Brayden Point	95	76	-19
Alex Debrincat	76	57	-19
Sean Monahan	82	63	-19
Elias Lindholm	78	60	-18
Kevin Labanc	56	39	-17
Timo Meier	66	52	-14
Sebastian Aho	83	72	-11
Matthew Tkachuk	77	69	-8
Alexander Barkov	96	88	-8
Thomas Chabot	55	49	-6
Tomas Hertl	74	68	-6
Mitch Marner	94	99	5
Tyler Bertuzzi	47	59	12
Jake Guenztel	76	90	14
Leon Draisaitl	105	120	15
Mika Zibanejad	74	91	17
Jonathan Huberdeau	92	111	19
Elias Petterson	66	86	20

Observations

As you can see, most of the players who “broke out” last season are straight-up broke this year. Well, not fully, but 72% are on pace to fall below where they were last season. Some of them by a lot.

The players with the largest difference have regressed back to their career paces from the heights of their breakout for various reasons.

For example, some were very high on Morgan Rielly in the offseason and rightly so. Unfortunately, with the acquisition of Tyson Barrie, Rielly’s PP1 deployment was in jeopardy and he ended up losing it altogether.

Of the 25 players listed, only six are on pace to exceed their point totals from last season. Leon Draisaitl is a special case considering his high shooting percentage (21.6%) suggested an impending regression. All he has done this season though is shoot 19% and outpace his total from last season (105) by 15 points.

In Conclusion

Though a full deep-dive on each player would be necessary to figure out exactly what is going wrong, the table above does a good job showing the perils of banking on a breakout. I will do a follow-up at the end of the season as well as some kind of a similarity exercise comparing these guys to the 2019-20 breakouts. Let this post serve as a mid-season warning: when taking a player coming off of a breakout, there’s a very good chance they will disappoint you.

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