Adam Fantilli⚡🙌Lightning Hands🙌⚡

Detailing the Unique Traits that Position Adam Fantilli For Future Success

Adam Fantilli’s Elite Dimension propelled him to scoring success in his sophomore season.

Listed above is the history of 5v5 scoring for U20 players in the NHL. Adam Fantilli’s 26 5v5 goals puts him at the 3rd best goalscoring season since the NHL started tracking more advanced stats in 2007-2008. If we look at all-situations his “32” according to Evolving Hockey (31 on NHL.com) grade his sophomore season as a firmly top twenty season in that same timeframe. Certain players like Steven Stamkos and Patrik Laine leap to the front with their worldclass powerplay scoring prowess.

I don’t think I have to say it, but this is absolutely elite company. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that his goalscoring reel is extremely impressive.

But what if I told you that Fantilli’s shot isn’t really what’s driving his success? What if I told you that he has another elite dimension that lies just underneath, and in support of, his actual “shooting” prowess and this dimension is a better sign of future performance than simply having a great shot?

Adam Fantilli Quick Twitch Power & Lightning Hands: Rush Offense and Scoring Mixtape

The above mixtape is really the quick and dirty but if you’d like to stick around, dive into the details, player comps, opportunities for growth, and what CBJ can do to optimize his roster impact in the coming years there’s plenty more to come.

As you might have guessed by the title of the article, within I will assert that it’s Adam Fantilli’s stickhandling ability that is truly elite and he leverages that puck-manipulation prowess to score goals at an extremely promising rate.

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Why Not Shooting?

Why do I feel comfortable asserting that, despite his incredible goalscoring at a young age, that Fantilli isn’t doing so with a special shot? Well first, I have to admit that I’m probably abusing some specific definitions a bit.

Colloquially, a good shooter and good goalscorer are interchangeable. In the NHL, usually the best shooters are the best goalscorers because the ones who can’t really do the rest get filtered out. In the case of this breakdown, I’d like to separate these two terms so that we can think about Adam Fantilli in a different way.

I think there’s plenty of nuance to goalscoring that doesn’t necessarily come down to the mechanical actions of shooting (the quickness of release, accuracy and power) and perhaps the other aspects are becoming increasingly more important.

There’s everything that happens prior to shooting, including passing, puck movement and screens but also in the preparation of the puck on the blade. There’s shooters disguising intentions or selling false information to goalies. Most critically, perhaps, is in choosing the appropriate points on the net, or on goaltenders, to shoot.

All of those critical factors can determine whether a player is a good goalscorer but don’t necessarily mean they’re good shooters. Sure, you can probably think of them as the same thing but I think I can demonstrate some of the value in this specificity.

If we believe that shot power is a good barometer for “how good a players’ shot is”, distinguished again from their deployment of said shot, we can utilize the NHL edge data to ascertain Fantilli’s qualities in this regard.

Adam Fantilli shoots pretty hard but his top end shooting speed isn’t otherwise remarkable. Perhaps this data not being distinguished between strength states (for some reason only Distance Skated has data options to distinguish between Season Totals, Game Totals and Per 60 rates as well as between Even-Strength, Powerplay and Penalty Kill) and Fantilli’s role on the powerplay not allowing for too many one-timers, means there’s some bias involved. If I could filter down to the hardest wrist or snap shots, perhaps Fantilli would be distinguished among NHLers.

It’s not like Fantilli is a bad shooter but he doesn’t have access to the velocity that the best in the league do. Tage Thompson is an elite shooter and an elite goalscorer who might serve as a good case study relative to Adam Fantilli.

Tage, in many cases, possesses many of the same attributes that I think Fantilli utilizes to be successful. Marvelous stickhandling, a big wingspan and a great release. He’s got better shot velocity on both a one-timer and wrist shot but there’s something that I think might Fantilli still might have an advantage on: quickness of release.

Fantilli’s Unique Traits

I believe, fundamentally, that each players’ on-ice identity, especially if they have a desire to reach superstardom, has to begin with their inherent athletic advantages. That doesn’t mean you have to be 1 of 1 in the NHL but if a player isn’t utilizing what’s unique to their body, they’re leaving too much value on the table to hit the upper echelon.

Adam Fantilli, in that way, has a unique combination of size and quick-twitch athleticism. He isn’t the most explosive player, Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar and perhaps Martin Necas certainly have an edge there, he isn’t the strongest, I think Nathan MacKinnon qualifies again but you can look at players like Aleksander Barkov, Matthew Knies or a litany of powerful defensemen, and he isn’t the shiftiest, think Artemi Panarin, Brayden Point and Jack Hughes.

I do believe, however, he has an uncommon aptitude for making plays at a rapid pace. I believe there’s evidence that he has an absolutely fantastic processor with a brain-body link that can keep up. Typically, I think that word is used to mean someone who “thinks” the game well and is a sort of puppetmaster but I’m using it in a slightly different way. I think Fantilli has the capacity to perceive-and-act quickly, not necessarily that he quickly identifies the best play of available options. He makes decisions quickly and more importantly can leverage his rapidity and reach to move the puck uncommon distances in the blink of an eye.

The Goalscoring

It’s this ability that I think underpins the goalscoring. You see, Adam Fantilli isn’t really a masterful middle-distance shooter and he’s not overpowering goaltenders with one-timers from range either. He scored from a specific area and he did it better than anyone else in the NHL this season.

The problem for the Blue Jackets, as it relates to Fantilli, is that this level of finishing isn’t outwardly sustainable. The good thing, though, is that there’s tape evidence that he is doing something special.

Shoutout to WallyCBJ for compiling the very useful All Goals mix. In looking at exclusively goals scored, we have a good resource to ascertain goalscoring patterns in a digestible format.

The Interaction of Stickhandling and Shooting

With Auston Matthews’ rise as perhaps the best goalscorer of his generation and Connor Bedard’s exaltation as the next one has come an increased awareness of the relationship between stickhandling and puck skills and goalscoring prowess.

Much of the attention, at least in the mainstream, has been on their outrageous ability to change the angle of release before shooting. These two players leverage skill and stick technology to power pucks past goaltenders before there’s anything they can do about it. The puck simply explodes off of their stick.

Adam Fantilli doesn’t deploy his stick and shooting in exactly the same way as Auston Matthews but the foundations in puck skills are still very much there. Instead of worrying too much about changing angles, Fantilli focuses instead on getting the puck off of his blade as fast as possible.

In order to minimize the time between a puck catch and release, a player must be good at catching pucks. Sounds obvious, to be sure, but Fantilli still has a special skill to calm a puck and then teleport it off of his stick. Catching pucks and making them actionable is perhaps of understated importance when considering “puckhandling” as a skill and it’s even more important for shooters. “Dusting the puck off” is just giving more information to a goaltender for free.

In the case of Adam Fantilli he just doesn’t give goaltenders much time to process an incoming shot. Both his puck-catching and release, though this is certainly an actual point in his favor as a mechanical shooter, are wildly efficient in their motion which means they impart quickness at every step of the action.

Shout out Wally once again but notice how little information he’s giving that a shot will be incoming, let alone where. He takes a pass, shoots around the stick and into the net for his first ever NHL goal.

This clean catch-and-release, the calm cradle instead of multiple touches, are just one situation where Adam Fantilli displays a high level use of underhandling.

Coming into this season, though, Fantilli has started to leverage his puckhandling to take the goalscoring to the next level. As much as it’s fun to look at a single release or highlight goal and break it down, players become superstars when they leverage their skills on a regular basis. At the end of the day we’re looking for patterns, not just from players that have done it before but in how this specific player will do it better than anyone else.

The Fantilli Flick

In watching the above “All Goals” compilation and in cutting Fantilli tape all year, I noticed a couple of special trends and patterns. I’ll get into some of the other techniques or patterns shortly, and in more detail later, but here’s one of the first techniques that he abused on numerous occasions.

I don’t know if any other high level scorers already score goals like this, I am not that detailed on the entire league, but I will term it the Fantilli Flick because at the very least he uses it a lot.

Worth noting that most of these, but not all, are scored in counter attack breakaway situations. What Fantilli does to beat these goaltenders is hold the puck in a very neutral position in front of his triangle. In the blink of an eye, he moves the puck to his forehand and snaps it off his blade (usually) into the back of the net.

What I think is most impressive about his goalscoring with this technique is the variety of net positions he scores on. Most of the time, he’s going just over the leg pad. Some of the time, he’s going near the inside foot five-hole. That he can find both locations for goals means he can continually rely on the same “move”. It’s not inherently predicated on baiting a movement from a goaltender, which can sometimes lead to shooting into pads if they recognize the bait, but instead on taking what is already being given quickly enough that they can’t really take it away.

I’ve slowed down his goal against Ottawa to .1x speed so we can see the variety of actions taking place. If the game clock is to be believed, this entire clip happens within a single second.

He stores the puck on his backhand in a protected posture, brings it to his forehand and releases very quickly while pulling his left foot forward at the same time. I can’t say whether there’s some leveraging here but I’d guess that the forward foot helps to protect his release point from the backcheck as well.

Watch the goaltender at the same time. It’s not like he’s completely caught off guard but that puck is pretty much past him, to his right, by the time his knees hit the ice.

Rush Counterattack

Part of the utility of these “All Goals” breakdowns is that we have the chance to see game situation patterns. Along with Fantilli’s exorbitant puck skills is a different expression of his unique athleticism and skills. He scored a ton of goals from the slot, still not top ten in the NHL, but he finished so well partially because not all of these chances should be counted the same. Many of his goals come from his ability to win races in open-ice.

Though Fantilli doesn’t have the absolute power and explosiveness of the true top skaters, his NHL edge data does not paint him in exactly the same bucket at premiere athletes like MacKinnon, McDavid, Necas, Point or even Quinton Byfield, he is still excellent. Part of his ability to process and make decisions quickly is expressed in his jump in counterattack situations.

Though NHL Edge and available public analytics don’t have data on the rest of the NHL, I thankfully tracked the game state and origin of all of Fantilli’s shot attempts this season. Something to consider, with respect to rush offense and counterattacking, is that the Blue Jackets were one of the top teams in the NHL at producing offense after turnovers. A trait that Florida has exploited repeatedly, though still differently, on their path to multiple Stanley Cups.

Adam Fantilli creates, or takes, a ton of shots off the rush, not all counterattack necessarily, but it’s a mode of offense where there is traditionally more space and more threat on goaltenders. A majority of his inner slot shot attempts, not to mention shots that actually made it on goal, came from these rush situations. 14 of 26 5v5 goals came off the rush. Adam Fantilli, to every degree, earned these opportunities.

The scary part, for the rest of the NHL, is that Adam Fantilli is very much just learning how to use his tools to the best of his ability. He’s already strong and fast, he’s already breaking down defensive with highlight reel runs through the neutral zone and he has minimal experience.

I won’t say he has the complete, natural game controlling of some of the true rush wizards but as he makes more mistakes, he’ll gain more experience. Through that experience will come better judgements of the capabilities of defenders, spacing of lanes and awareness of weakpoints in defensive structures. Through the judgements and awareness will emerge earlier skating bursts, better prepared puck position and therefore increased efficiency through these rush sequences.

He’ll know when he needs to use teammates to get through and when he can leverage his ability to get through to put his teammates in an advantaged position. His teammates, if they collaborate, will learn to work with him in that way too.

The Sicko Tape

The major analysis of Adam Fantilli’s goalscoring is now complete. From here, I’ll be getting into more details that drive my confidence that Fantilli’s cornerstone skills are driven by puckhandling. The purpose, from here, is to look into some of the special things that Fantilli does that drives his potential outside of merely goalscoring.

Quick Processing (Perception → Action) for Pace

Here, I am going to assert that Fantilli does have a good processor. Colloquially, I think a player’s “processor” is used to appeal to a brain as a computer and suggest that the process the play and, like a cyborg or something, calculate the optimal solution to the problem in front of them.

That makes sense, I won’t push back on it too much though I think it really does a disservice to just how special human brains are and how special athletes who can quickly discover solutions are. I think it suggests that players are “consciously” thinking as opposed to the more subconscious nature of feeling, instincts or reactions. Sports aren’t played in System 2 (From Thinking; Fast and Slow) with time to “think” they are played automatically.

In any case, I think there is evidence for Fantilli in having a “good brain” in the sense that I believe he can perceive an option quickly and turn it into action. I believe it’s a key aspect of his playing with exceptional pace (along with a certain fearlessness or recklessness) and one that I think is a predictor of increase future success as well.

There’s nuance to this as well. Perceiving quickly is great but awareness of a greater number of variables prior to an action is perhaps better. I think Fantilli scans well enough but whether his full mental map is as effective as some of the elite NHLers. In order to be a true superstar, Fantilli will have to not only identify an option quickly but quickly and intuitively weigh other potential options, perhaps sometimes choosing not to use an available option for anticipation/knowledge of a better one soon to come, but for now let’s get into the demonstration.

I noticed this quite early in Fantilli’s career especially when he gets puck touches lower in the zone. He can identify a teammate who has an advantage on the defense and he can get it to them quickly. He’s not overly precious about how the puck gets there but these chip outs are usually successful (he’s putting them in a difficult to defend place).

Usually, that’s simply chipping the puck out of the zone into space for that player to run onto. It’s not that he weights pucks perfectly or selects the best way to beat the defense, it’s that he does it quickly with limited processing time.

I think this clip demonstrates so many of those concepts. The next section I’ll demonstrate a component of Fantilli’s special handling ability, but I simply don’t think many players in the NHL could link this sequence together as quickly as Fantilli could.

Fantilli reaches with an extended stick, changes the angle of his blade to serve as a sort of hook, pulls it back to him and chips a soft puck to space for Voronkov. He does it preternaturally fast. He catches the Canucks sleeping and nearly puts a goal away in the dying seconds of the period.

This clip is special too. Fantilli finds himself at the net-front and jumps, believing he’s acting as a screen for Marchenko’s shot. Marchenko has a different idea and plays a soft pass to Fantilli who mid-jump reacts, darts his stick out to catch the pass and puts the puck in the net.

If my hypothesis is correct and Adam Fantilli is a special perceiver of the game, that has significant positive implications on goalscoring. While reading goaltenders and anticipating their movement will come from experience, it’s possible for him to leverage this skill to find holes incredibly well.

Integrated Skill Through the Ends of Range of Motion

Adam Fantilli has a wide puckhandling base. He is adept at manipulating the puck when it’s both far away from his body and in tight as well. This gives him a certain amount of gravity but also is adaptable to a wide variety of situations.

In the above clips, including some in the previous section, we can see just how well Fantilli plays with the puck when it’s far away from his body. These soft catches at distance are special. The stick-as-a-hook action to peel the puck off the wall straight into a space pass isn’t something done if you aren’t skilled in that initial touch away from your body.

It’s not just that Fantilli can catch pucks far away from his body but also that he can catch them in his feet in an actionable position. His route from close to Fabbro to the middle is interesting, and a great way to create a clear passing lane, but it’s his puck catch into full strides that really make this goal possible.

He doesn’t have to do much to catch the puck here but he threatens the Vancouver defender wide and still has the capacity to pull the puck through his feet. Given his long reach, this means he can threaten either side of a defender extremely quickly and take whichever is more actionable.

This clip has plenty of impressive actions from Fantilli, and gives you a good look at his tentative backing-into-hits issue, but what’s most impressive is his puck recovery in the corner. He peels the puck off the wall quickly but corrects the puck trajectory with his feet as well.

Emergent Problem Solving with Puck Manipulation

Some of the following clips are going to be a bit dubious. I will not say for sure that Adam Fantilli is fully intending all of these outcomes but I think there’s evidence here for significant growth.

All skills in the NHL, or really any sport, only function insofar as they solve problems that you’ll encounter in game. The most critical problem, or the last one you need to solve, is that there’s a goaltender stopping the puck from going in the net. The rest of the problems, like other players in the way, serve to move you further away from solving that specific problem.

The game should, and is, broken down into small problems to be solved, like get possession in the offensive zone, and it’s for this reason that we should be excited about Adam Fantilli. In many ways, having an excellent shot only solves one problem. Being an excellent puckhandler can solve many more. It’s not a panacea but it’s expressed everywhere on the ice.

It’s at this juncture, between his perception→action skills and his integrated puck handling, that I think we can see that Adam Fantilli is, confidently, an elite puckhandler. Any time a player can deploy a skill to creatively solve problems they haven’t exactly seen before, you can be confident that said player is close to mastery.

There’s still plenty of room for Fantilli to grow, don’t get me wrong, but he’s already reached some advanced states that many players won’t ever achieve.

Check this play. This is now the second time we’re seeing Adam Fantilli use his stick, rotating it to form a hook, to corrall a puck extremely far from his body. Instead of pulling it into a puckhandle, he swipes the puck toward a teammate and gets offense started.

He didn’t come into this situation with this action as a pre-planned process but discovered it in flow. This is a demonstration of a good brain and great training.

This skill is a bit more dubious. While I can’t say for sure that Adam Fantilli intended this specific consequence, his calm demeanor and readiness for what came next suggest there’s a possibility. Frankly I think Marchenko’s reaction is perhaps more impressive but there’s something to be said about Fantilli deploying his skills in non-traditional ways to still get great results.

Underhandling to Prepare to Move - Leveraging Extended Reach

Part of the reason I think it’s okay for us to be positive about the perhaps unintended outcome of the last is in some of the following clips. Adam Fantilli has excellent reactions in transition and his puckhandling, and specifically his underhandling of the puck, both serve to leverage his stellar ability to manipulate the puck away from his body. Even if he didn’t intend to kick the puck directly to Marchenko, and instead meant to kick the puck to a spot he could corral with his own stick and failed, it was still an idea that played to his own strengths. For a 20 year old, that’s a great sign.

In the above compilation, Fantilli demonstrates his ability to use underhandles to exploit the moment of turnovers and puck wins and put his team ahead in transition. While plenty of his defensive zone counter offense comes purely from other players and him joining, he owns a ton of responsiblity for his own rush offense creation.

It’s specifically this habit or skill, of extremely quickly putting the puck up ice, that allows him to get an advantage. Without confidence in his ability to corral those pucks at distance, these underhandle moves would be dramatically more risky. While some didn’t work out, it’s great to see Fantilli taking decisive action in an area that eventually he will have a significant advantage.

Use of Strength and Handling to Find Middle Ice

Though most of high level offense was created using his stickhandling as the foremost weapon, there was increasing evidence of his body integration through the year. While he still has a long way to go, especially in impactful physicality on the forecheck, he has already put down tape of him using his strength and skating for puck protection through the neutral zone.

Through the season, he found increasingly more attacked the middle of the ice and has the puck placement habits that means a stronger frame and more experience taking contact will scale upwards quite quickly.

Evidence for his ability to play bodies and make plays in tight areas through traffic is already on tape.

Similar how he creates advantages on the counterattack, much of Fantilli’s success through traffic, and in puck protection, comes from his puck placement and readiness to act through the various positions. The above clip is only of a good number where Fantilli maintained composure because he was proactive with the puck.

What’s best about how he drives success in attaining and playing through traffic in these tight areas is that they’re skill driven. He’s clearly trained and has great habits. Adam Fantilli will, eventually, have no issue dominating the interior of the ice because he’s got a wide variety of options when it comes to solving that pressure. If he simply adds strength, quick step explosiveness or gets just that much better at beating sticks there are no bottlenecks from improvement.

That versatility will require growing pains to develop. Right now, Fantilli simply has more options without experience. In effect, he has fewer constraints on his play. It sounds like a good thing but it means making the correct decisions is more difficult because he’s afforded more options. If any situation has a range of decisions or skills that could solve the problem posed, Fantilli has to select from perhaps two or three. A “more limited” player might only have to find the one that works for them.

Should he get there, a seven game series will be Fantilli’s best environment. You might be able to gameplan to take away his speed or rush offense but he should have the counter to any sort of tactics with his outright power.

Growth Through the Year

At this point, I think I’ve detailed the selection of skills that are already driving Fantilli’s success. From here, it’s time to look at Fantilli’s growth trajectory, where he still has room to improve and how the Blue Jackets can help him get there.

Analyzing Fantilli’s season is two-fold. There’s the first half of the season where he really struggled to find confidence and chemistry. That part of the season was so bad, it colored any of the publicly available analytics and grades him out as a terrible player. To be honest, rightfully so. He was hardly playable owning somewhere below 40% in most on-ice metrics.

The above chart is an attempt to ascertain which situations Fantilli created from throughout the year. What it also shows us is that his season is almost a three part split. There’s the obvious jump around game 42, which just happens to be when Sean Monahan was injured and Fantilli elevated to the top line, but there’s also another specific change around game 60 which coincides with Boone Jenner’s return from injury and the trade deadline.

Adam Fantilli found excellent confidence and scored an outrageous amount of points through the back half of the year. It’s clear that he found incredible consistency in shot production, especially when played with Marchenko and Voronkov. What this handy little bar chart doesn’t show is ice-time.

Fantilli, on average, only played around 2 minutes more per game at 5v5. From 13:46 per game, 2nd most deployed forward, to 15:26 per game the most deployed forward. While Fantilli was obviously better in the second half, we can’t overstate the importance of teammates on his shot totals.

Over the year, Fantilli’s involvement in the forecheck grew by leaps and bounds. Perhaps this was comfort with the system, necessity, or simply playing with Kent Johnson and Kirill Marchenko through the second half. I can say that Fantilli was much better but he found more improvement through a sort of maniacal approach as F1 than he did plugging his leakiness as F3. That might have important implications for Fantilli’s role going forward.

What’s important to consider, however, is that though Fantilli’s production and goalscoring surged, his on-ice impacts still weren’t stellar.

Though Fantilli had a much improved second half, and I haven’t filtered that out in this chart, he still had a dragging effect on each of his most common teammates. Each of them was better away from Fantilli than Fantilli was away from him save for Cole Sillinger.

There’s still plenty of room to go for Fantilli as a play-driver and those steps could have critical implications on the burning question of this offseason.

Is A Breakout Coming? Is Fantilli on Track to be A Franchise Center?

Though this isn’t the burning question, perhaps, it’s highly related to it. Currently, I’m of two minds on the answer to the question. Adam Fantilli’s underlying numbers and analytics do not suggest a breakout is imminent.

Compared to the last Franchise Centers that have come into the league, Fantilli is far behind as a play-driver. Usually, winning possession and increasing offense volume comes before the points breakout.

At the same time, I have often observed that significant growth in-season usually results in a breakout the following season. Learning and adapting in-season is difficult but growth breeds confidence.

For Adam Fantilli especially, who will now have his first full off-season and will have no injury recovery to hold him back, this offseason could be tremendous. He’s well integrated with Zach Werenski in off-season training and that exposure to some of the best NHLers for months at a time can only serve as an explosive catalyst for growth.

The positive for Adam Fantilli, if you want to think about it this way, is that Connor Bedard and Leo Carlsson also suffered dramatic drops in play-driving. Perhaps the NHL is now a different context than we have previously observed. That didn’t stop Macklin Celebrini from looking like a readymade superstar, so perhaps that’s a point against.

Though it’s not supported by underlying possession, Adam Fantilli’s impact on actual goals was actually quite good relative to this cohort. I think we’ve seen enough above to have a good idea of why that could be, he drives rush offense and is a special scorer, but until he does both the Blue Jackets might have a hard time winning. Maybe this is the Dean Evason takeaway offense in action and that an added possession driving dimension is all Fantilli needs to take a dramatic leap forward.

The strange thing, then, is that Fantilli has already graded out as one of the top rate scorers at 5v5 among the cohort. He’s so wildly opportunistic, and has been graced with good chunks of ice-time alongside Johnny Gaudreau, Kirill Marchenko and Kent Johnson in his young career, that he’s found a way to put pucks in the net.

Adam Fantilli has not found his powerplay impact which also goes two ways. Firstly, a big impact on powerplay scoring is one of the most repeatable ways to create offense. Winning at 5v5 is critical but the best teams in the NHL usually also have the best powerplays. There’s reason here, points equal contract dollars so might as well have that bundled into your highest paid contracts.

Fundamentally, that’s the concern with Fantilli too. Play-driving, possession in the offensive zone greater than your opponents, is what ultimately drives wins on a consistent basis. The risk in Adam Fantilli’s game, at least as it stands now, is that he could top out as an empty-calorie scorer. Someone who might score points and earn a lot of money but who might always come up a little short when it comes time to winning.

Personally, I think it’s a valid concern. There’s a risk that Fantilli’s skating and loose-decision making mean he tops out as a player like a Chandler Stephenson or Sam Bennett or even Mika Zibanejad, rather than an Aleksander Barkov, Jack Eichel, Sidney Crosby, Brayden Point or whatever cup winning 1C the Blue Jackets need him to be.

That risk, though it’s real, is heavily mitigated by the rising cap. While I might have advocated for patience in signing his contract coming into this offseason, an exploding cap means the risk that Fantilli is overpaid is relatively insignificant compared to the risk that he isn’t good enough in the first place.

I don’t know where exactly the line of his salary is, and Don Waddell should indeed be trying to create all of the cap efficiency he possibly can be, but there are easy numbers that are no-doubt trigger pulls. If Fantilli signs a deal that starts with an 8, as was speculated by Shayna Goldman, that will be 2C money quite quickly.

It’s hard to know what Fantilli’s contract mindset is, for all we know he’ll recognize the exploding cap and bet on himself, but many hockey players take the security as soon as it’s offered.

Finding Comparable Players And Optimal Deployment

I have mentioned a couple of players who could be stylistic comparables already but I think it’s really only worth thinking about as it relates to making lines and crafting comfortable deployment. At the end of the day, Adam Fantilli is going to have to come up with his own unique ways of impacting the game different from many of the players who have come before.

At first blush, at least based off of shooting, skating and finishing from NHLEdge, Adam Fantilli grades out a lot like Brayden Point. There are similarities with Roope Hintz, Auston Matthews and even Sam Bennett.

Compared to Brayden Point, Adam Fantilli is a much bigger player. Where Point has a breezy and shifty skating style that compliments his relative lightness, Adam Fantilli skates more like Nathan MacKinnon where it looks like he’s sometimes trying to injure the ice.

There’s plenty of time for Fantilli to reach the same degree of the “mid-high” range 20-22 mph bursts volume as Brayden Point especially as he recognizes situations earlier.

As shooters, Fantilli grades out as having a harder shot but he didn’t score quite as much as Brayden Point. I think there might be a couple of confounds there but we’ll save that for later.

Otherwise, at least stylistically, it’s easy to evaluate Adam Fantilli relative to Auston Matthews as well.

This is Auston Matthews’ scoring chart from 2023-2024. Critically, it’s important to mention that it includes powerplay time. Auston Matthews, by pretty much every degree, is a harder and better shooter than Fantilli. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, Matthews is a nearly 1 of 1 scorer. Alex Ovechkin has the record but Matthews is doing absolutely outrageous things so far in his career.

Though Fantilli hasn’t reached the same scoring ceiling as early in his career as Auston Matthews, and I wouldn’t really expect him to be the same caliber player, Fantilli’s 5v5 scoring has been above the rest of the group through the first two seasons.

As a skater, Fantilli has significantly more output potential than Auston Matthews. Through Matthews career, he’s never been bent particularly toward smashing through defenses to create rush offense. He does have an incredible defensive acumen and is a uniquely integrated playmaker as well.

Roope Hintz is one of the last remaining great comps from skating and shooting data. Hintz has probably the most similar skating profile to Fantilli. They’re both great skaters and both are probably faster than they are particularly breezy or brilliant on their edges.

As shooters, they’re also pretty similar. Fantilli outscored Hintz from the slot, though we’ve already looked at his outrageous shooting percentage, but Hintz has a collection of harder shooting attempts. Given Fantilli’s few one-timer attempts, I believe this makes sense. I can’t say I am particularly dialed in on Hintz’ shot profile, so maybe he’s the same.

I mentioned Sam Bennett, partially because I think he and Fantilli share a bunch of commonalities. I saw Bennett as a sort of worst case scenario for Fantilli, though Chandler Stephenson I suppose is much worse and a theoretically similar comp, but that is put in new light given Bennett’s Conn Smythe.

Free Agency Frenzy: Sam Bennett

Go ahead and read this breakdown of Bennett and I encourage you to not the similarities with Adam Fantilli. Bennett serves as a sort of counterpunch to Florida’s more methodical and possession based style. If things don’t go well, Adam Fantilli could certainly bring the same element.

Worth noting that Adam Fantilli’s current regular season production would be Sam Bennett’s career high. Fantilli is a fundamentally different and better player in many ways. Bennett isn’t particularly defensively stout but does have a physicality dimension that Fantilli hasn’t unlocked quite yet.

If you’re a betting person, I think you’d take the over on Fantilli.

The reason I mention all of these players is because they are more or less stylistic fits for Fantilli’s biggest archetype. He’s a puck-dominant neutral zone carrier whose primary motivation is shooting and scoring goals.

That positions him differently than say Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, Jack Hughes or Jack Eichel who are some of the best puck transporters but also high danger passers in the sport. It’s different than Auston Matthews or Sidney Crosby who don’t look to dominate as many touches but might also be some of the best enablers as well.

So what do Brayden Point, Roope Hintz, Sam Bennett and even Auston Matthews have in common? They all play next to the pinnacle of play-building, “puppetmaster” type wings. Point has Kucherov, Hintz has Robertson, Bennett has Tkachuk and Matthews had Marner.

Growth Objectives For Player and Team

If the Blue Jackets want to get the best out of Fantilli, they’ll have to find a similar running mate for him or he’ll have to grow in a few directions to amplify his dual-threat ability. In the mixtape above, you can quite clearly see he has the potential to be a wildly interesting playmaker as well as scorer.

If you’re going to be puck-dominant, you can’t only be a shooter as well. Fantilli does have a special release but many of his goals came off clever middle routes, opportunistic timing and shooting off the pass.

If we compare Fantilli to some of the above archetypal forwards, but also to young stars in Connor Bedard and Macklin Celebrini, we’ll notice he’s quite behind the curve as a passing contributor.

It’s not just passing the puck to high danger areas or setting up shots, but involvement in build-up as well. Notice that even Sam Bennett, who doesn’t come to mind as a particularly good playmaker, still grades out very well in his Passing Importance.

The reasons to believe in Adam Fantilli are already on the tape. His above give-and-go combinations with Kirill Marchenko were incredible and his late season neutral zone playmaking with Kent Johnson perhaps just as inspiring.

The primary key, which may go hand in hand with playmaking improvement if the above graph is any indication, is growth as a play-driver. That’s where his forechecking growth and better neutral zone navigation from this past season also provide room for hope.

Adam Fantilli now has a year of experience in Dean Evason’s system. For a young player dealing with a return from injury, it’s hard to be overstated how much that experience means. This wasn’t a veteran who had seen the system before, it was likely something entirely new.

Now, there are two major aspects of becoming a uniform play-driver. Puck transportation is, more or less, already in the bag for Adam Fantilli. He’s not yet elite by any means but I think the in-season progression gives enough of an idea that he’ll have some improvement momentum coming into next year. Where he’ll have to improve the most is in recovering pucks and preventing exits. Most of all, though he did also improve in this area, he’ll have to work to break down defenses better prior to making an attacking decision.

I’d love to say that coverage breakout prevention forechecking is an area of growth for Fantilli, in terms of winning back possession before it can really exit the zone, but Evason’s sytem tends to coinflip these interactions as well. It’s not guaranteed that the Blue Jackets become possession dominators, perhaps taking a some forechecking cues from Florida could help turn the team into a better neutral zone killing club, but any growth would pay huge dividends for Adam Fantilli’s game. He took steps, perhaps those can be the platform for leaps.

The other aspect, play-driving, shot suppression would have a positive feedback loop on offense as well. Though I think Fantilli has a long way to go in the defensive zone, most of his drawbacks stem from being too eager to leave the zone. We can forgive him for those trangressions but I don’t want to be overly focused on exclusively the defensive aspects of his game. He’s still only 20 and I think becoming a top level creator is the primary focus.

Fantilli already scores a tremendous amount of primary points, increased possession means more shooting opportunities and more puck touches. Though Fantilli wasn’t a particularly prolific in-zone creator, doing most of his scoring and threat from the rush and otherwise preferring instead to simply get lost in the slot, perhaps that’s a huge opportunity for growth. If he’s going to continue to be primarily an inner slot shooter, he’ll have to bring a net-front dimension to his efforts.

I think there’s plenty of personnel decisions, and perhaps one critical tweak, that could really set Fantilli up for success. To be honest, some of this will happen automatically despite Waddell not finding major additions. Fantilli’s worst linemates were Mathieu Olivier, Zach Aston-Reese and Cole Sillinger. Based on the addition of Charlie Coyle and re-signing of Dmitri Voronkov, there’s really no reason for him to share too much ice with them.

Defensively, Fantilli was incredibly weak with Jake Christiansen, Jordan Harris and Jack Johnson. He was excellent offensively with very specific players like Denton Mateychuk and Damon Severson. If either of those players come back better, Fantilli could be primed for a special season especially if they link their neutral zone killing potential with his neutral zone re-entry game (a hallmark of Sam Bennett’s dominance alongside Matthew Tkachuk).

The above chart is the danger distribution of the Adam Fantilli’s shots based on which player passed to him. It is not adjusted by ice-time but you can consult the crude NST-based table above if you’d like to see shared 5v5 TOI.

As far as forward linemates, it’s pretty clear that one or two of Kirill Marchenko, Kent Johnson or Dmitri Voronkov should be paired with Fantilli as much as possible. In the above clips, Voronkov’s soft-passing to Fantilli in the slot was a massive boon to his in-zone scoring.

If everything goes well for the Blue Jackets, perhaps Sean Monahan can reprise his role as a bona-fide 1C and one of the best 5v5 players in the NHL. Perhaps then Adam Fantilli’s similarities to Sam Bennett can be actualized in the short term and he can play a strong role as an offensive leaning 2C on a contender hopeful. Hopefully the playoff experience buys him the knowledge he needs to take the steps forward to being the true 1C dominator that buys the Blue Jackets a long run of contention.

Wrap Up

If you stayed for the sicko breakdown, I appreciate you and I hope it was informative. It was expansive so I think it would be fruitful to clarify some of the key points in a more digestible takeaway:

Adam Fantilli’s Unique Dimensions:

• Stickhandling

• Uncommonly Rapid Action Selection

He Leverages Them To:

• Increase Pace Through the Neutral Zone

• Break Defensive Structure

• Score Goals in the Inner Slot

Next Season I Expect Him To:

• Score Fewer Goals in the Slot

• Score More Goals From Mid-Range and Flanks

• Get More Assists

• Become an NHL Average Play-Driver

In Order to Be A Franchise C He’ll Need To:

• Improve as a Play Driver

  • More Efficient Transition

  • Better Integration in Forechecking and Stronger Stick Takeaways

  • Build Plays with his Teammates

• Find a PP1 Role

• Increase Strength

• Leverage Physicality

• Dominate on Forecheck

Don Waddell Should:

• Sign Him This Offseason

Dean Evason Can Help By:

• Playing him with:

  • Dmitri Voronkov

  • Kirill Marchenko or Kent Johnson

  • Denton Mateychuk or Damon Severson

• More Aggressive Space Taking and Forward Tracking (Instead of Back Skating) on Forecheck