End of Season Mega Review - 2024-25
Private Analytics, Special Teams Analysis, Hand-Tracked Deep Dives into Offensive Contributions and Lessons Learned During the Season
If you’ve been with me through all the way, it’s likely that nothing in a full season wrap-up will come as a surprise. Through the game-to-game breakdowns and bigger video work separately, I think we really acknowledged most of the strengths, weaknesses and storylines of the season.
This was a season of unprecedented success from the Blue Jackets, driven by star turns from very important players and a collective drive that saw the team vastly outperform expectations and chance-metrics. Ultimately, they fell short but achieved their primary objectives: play meaningful games and gather information about the young players.
All-Situations Private Models
Though most of this information has been steadily getting clarified through the season, but now is a good time to go through everything quickly and remind ourselves before getting into my proprietary data and the “lessons learned”.
Jack Fraser, or JFresh on twitter, has combed through the SportLoqic All-Situations xGoal Model, the “base” private model that is contracted to most NHL teams, and published it relative to actual goal differential.
The Thanksgiving Benchmark, often used to delineate early playoff contenders, turned out to be “surprisingly” accurate.
If the Blue Jackets continue to perform at this level, they should be in line to finish with just under 90 points though they are currently on pace for just over 80. That generally correlates with an around “.500” record and puts them about 20th place in the NHL. Room for different effects in either direction but this could mean the Blue Jackets are picking outside of the top ten.
Though there was plenty of fluctuation in all directions (November underlying surge with poor finishing, injuries to Monahan but great finishing), the Blue Jackets ended around where SportLogiq’s earliest viable sample predicted.
The Blue jackets were a bit of a mess all season. Their best stretch of play in the season came in November and second best stretch of underlying play in February where the Blue Jackets played great games against the Stars and Detroit but struggled against Utah.
In any case, their underlying performance post-TDL through the playoff stretch was miserable, redeemed only slightly by their competition in the east being just as bad. I believe there’s plenty of room for there to be Strength of Schedule or Quality of Competition effects, March was a difficult month filled with difficult matchups, but that doesn’t totally explain the performance either way.
Based on SportLogiq’s private model data, though the Blue Jackets overperformed this season and have a long way to go, they did indeed leap out of the basement. That first jump is critical but was borne mostly on extremely hot goalscoring. The next steps, though chance generation is the low hanging fruit, might be the harder ones to take. The goal isn’t to make the playoffs and be satisfied, it’s to be consistently capable of deep runs and a Stanley Cup.
The Blue Jackets had an even goal differential, a good sign that they were close to the playoff cutoff. In order to become a true contender, they’ll have to be nearer to Winnipeg (+85), Tampa (+76) or even a sleeping giant like Florida who had (+23). If the finishing remains, which you shouldn’t bet on happening, the Blue Jackets are close and could reasonably be an excellent team next season. If their “true” goal differential is more like SportLoqiq’s, they might have to find another 20 or so goals to be break-even and more to leap into contention.
Public Data
By returning to HockeyViz, we can dive into different situations that drive the sum-total of performance. Fortunately for the Blue Jackets, or for readers who crave more depth than “this team deserved to finish about where they did,” each of these metrics and be broken out separately and mined for potential in any direction. A team isn’t really a singular thing but a complex network of interacting elements
The Blue Jackets were near-average in terms of 5v5 chance generation, below average defensively at 5v5, incredible at finishing, poor goaltending, and below or near average at both special teams.
Each of these situtaions (aside from Finishing) has valid reasons to expect improvement, save perhaps the penalty kill, which could go in either direction depending on Waddell’s approach to veterans in the offseason.
5v5 Tracked Shots
Using hand tracked data and breaking it out by situation, we can hope to give some of the 5v5 xG numbers some more context. This doesn’t totally approach the quality of expected goals and doesn’t put it in context of the league but the data is good enough to see some trends offensively.
The Blue Jackets created most of their total volume of shot attempts in-zone. This makes sense, shots and recoveries are the only theoretically unlimited source of shooting. Once a shot is tracked as a rush shot, the rest become recovered shots from an in-zone offense context.
Still, a high volume of scoring came from rush and a proportionally small from forechecking. Now, there are some rush offense situations that are effectively results of forechecking but deliniating these situations perfectly is difficult.
The Blue Jackets, as a whole, tended to try to improve their in-zone shots away from the point and scored a whole lot off of tipping and putback attempts. I didn’t break rebounds out primarily because the scope of this breakdown is growing too large and those charts are perhaps better served for a tracking project specific debrief.
When looking at the data through the lens of efficiency only, we can see neat delineation in scoring % (these are not shooting% as it is scoring from all attempts and not just those on-net). Inner slot shots and tips have a tendency to be on-net the most and they have a tendency to go in the net most.
This isn’t a surprising revelation but it doesn’t really take us across the finish line either. This isn’t an improvement in xG, partially because it’s not translated to anything actionable, but also because of the difference in so many type of tips that I have put into the same bin. Some are inherently on-net, like put-backs that are stuffed into pads, and some have plenty of difficult confounding variables like whether a point-shot that deflects off of a stick was a missed tip or a blocked point-shot.
I have a feeling that rigorous definitions of shot styles might be a remaining edge on xG models as the information I’ve seen from hand-tracking and comparing to NHL adjudications suggests there’s plenty of misinformation afoot. Not easy to define, especially with raw data from puck-tracking, but interesting nonetheless.
In any case, again there will be biases, it does appear that blocking out “Tips” and “Inner Slot Shots” has merit. The increase scoring percentage suggests that I am indeed tracking some sort of signal though I haven’t gone to the lengths to determine whether that’s poor binning (counting wraparounds and point shot deflections the same as clumsy rebound putbacks or stuff attempts) or something altogether subjective like Big Chance Effects.
What we can tell, at least subject to bias, is that big takeaway chances don’t appear to be altogether more valuable. Rush and forecheck chances have similar on-net and scoring probability. Perhaps the exclusive difference is that rush chances have easier access to the slot (despite fewer overall attempts, a higher proportion of rush attempts made it into the inner slot and especially homeplate area) with clearer sightlines and therefore make it on net the most.
In comparison, we can see that the Blue Jackets were dramatically outshot at the point and in the homeplate area in-zone. They pretty much ceded volume in every situation, only winning games because they outscored their situation. We already know that, on account of the HockeyViz, but it’s an interesting expression in this context.
The Blue Jackets, perhaps paradoxically, were the worst finishers on big forecheck chances. Perhaps that means their defense was just that bad when they gave the puck away. On the other end, they were much better at the more dangerous shots in both rush and in-zone situations, especially tipping in-zone.
From a very high-in-the-sky perspective, the Blue Jackets were the most prolific 5v5 scoring team in the league, were not so good at controlling possession or chances but were much more efficient at getting pucks on-net than they were attempting or threatening.
Dean Evason’s teams have historically all finished well, perhaps it’s his offensive strategy (collapse space, get the puck to the weakside and shoot) that helps pump those numbers. Maybe the finishing is stored within players put in areas that accentuate their strengths and he’s coaching well around that as well. We’ll have to save the deeper dive for player focused metrics.
Powerplay
Most top teams have a singular powerplay unit, only paying top flight powerplay contributors top money and thereby ensuring there’s no money wasted, and the performance of the second unit is really just running out the clock. That doesn’t mean that the performance of the second unit doesn’t matter, or that the overall PP performance wouldn’t be reflected appropriately in a sum-total context, but it’s worth mentioning specifically because the Blue Jackets aren’t a top flight team and therefore more specificity might be more accurate.
The Blue Jackets’ top-unit wasn’t consistently formed through this season. Unfortunate injuries to Kent Johnson and Sean Monahan obscured, at least statistically, the true quality of the Blue Jackets’ powerplay.
For now, we can only use Kent Johnson’s minutes as a proxy. When fully healthy, the unit was good. It was Kent Johnson’s first time truly possessing the keys of the powerplay but it was Sean Monahan’s diverse and intelligent middle-presence that really unlocked the unit and drove success.
Earlier in the season I wrote about the units’ diversity of approach to entries and they parlayed this diversity, and the skill of Kent Johnson, Kirill Marchenko and Zach Werenski, to become one of the best entry units in the NHL.
This metric only represents set-up post-entry and not necessarily volume of entries, which wouldn’t necessarily be a positive indicator of a quality powerplay by virtue of having to enter the zone often, but your capacity to get set into a formation is suggestive of the quality of entry. In any case, the three primary entry practitioners are very high quality and better at implementing a common system than some “higher skilled” or more effective 5v5 players.
The 2024-25 season’s powerplay wasn’t good enough but it very much was a platform that the team should be able to build on. Improvements from Kent Johnson and more reps with Sean Monahan should mean natural improvement.
Dmitri Voronkov was ultimately taken off the top-unit for Boone Jenner in the position that requires the most improvement. The Blue Jackets have some elite net-front play from both of those players but I think the whole units approach could be tweaked to open up diversity of attack options.
I think that tweaking can be done at the same time as addressing the other issue at play: Kirill Marchenko. Marchenko was the Blue Jackets’ top powerplay scorer in 2023-24 (he scored 9 goals in 24-24 and 7 in 22-23 in limited games) but fell to only 2 goals this past season. His work on the flanks transformed him into a playmaker, where he did show out well with 11 primary assists, but the whole approach left his skillset underutilized.
Both he and Kent Johnson must find ways to create more in the slot, and find dual-threat positions closer to the net, rather than staying so perimeter. Studying the top units of Vegas, Montreal and New Jersey might yeild insights into playing a more collapsed defensive tradeoff focused creation method that fits extremely well with the Blue Jackets’ primary personnel in Johnson, Marchenko, Monahan and Werenski.
There are a few in-house changes that might help slide players into different positions, but primarily pushing Marchenko to a rotating bumper/net-front position (with Sean Monahan) sounds like the highest ceiling potential. Marchenko doesn’t have the raw one-timer or wrist shot power to score reliably from range (in the way that a Laine, Tage Thompson, Steven Stamkos or even Mika Zibanejad do) but does have the quick release and clever handling to solve plenty of common problems with the man advantage.
This unit has extreme potential and a year of chemistry might just do the trick but a simple personnel adjustment to create more attack diversity, whether that’s integration of Adam Fantilli or offseason player addition, should do the trick. Perhaps more on that later in the offseason as we look at additions for holes.
Player Specific Performance
The tracking data, and all points in general, have a tendency to focus play a bit too much on the specific actions on the puck. That isn’t to say that scoring points or creating chances is bad but the real game is played away from the puck. Though watching for a players’ underlying approach to the game in all minutes with or without the puck is the theoretical most comprehensive way to understand a player, it’s cumbersome and still prone to missing some the context of the relative teams’ performance. If I was a team of scouts who could offer concise and precise reports, perhaps now would be the place to do that, but… how much time you got?
A player’s true value is not so much in this specific shot here or that specific goal here but in the context of continued performance and small victories that are built over time and this remains a different kind of invisible. The objective of the game is to score goals, yes, but also to score more goals than your opponent. To make your linemates better and increase the likelihood of winning.
It’s that spirit that defines the race to single metrics like WAR and why they are generally preferred to simply using points. We could use simple on-ice metrics like CF%, GF% or xGF% but those don’t necessarily factor in more meta influences like coaching deployment, quality of linemates or quality of competition.
There are some factors, like time on ice, that suggest a coach believes they do things correctly and are deserving of better matchups, which might mean things like “points per game” or “played against the best players” could be appeals to their expert opinions are more correct, but for now we can simply use tools that mathematically filter that information. This is called Regularized Adjusted Plus-Minus and it’s one of the best tools we have for evaluating a player while accounting for the quality of their teammates and competition and difficulty of situation.
The RAPM model has plenty of components, but it primarily tracks goal differential, xGoal differential and Corsi differential. Unfortunately, I only have two-ish dimensions to work with so I’ll start there. On this Blue Jackets team, I think driving xG differential, which I am not including here, is a critical differentiator but possession usually turns into chances which usually turn into goals, so we’ll bookend it. The odd times that it doesn’t are worth talking about.
This graph is interactive, so any dots that don’t have labels can be hovered for their name. Additionally, all defensemen are red, forwards are blue and size of the dot indicates total 5v5 TOI for the season. RAPM needs a bunch of data and moving pieces to get the best results, so small dots are “less trustworthy”.
So lets start with the good: Zach Werenski, Kirill Marchenko, Sean Monahan and Kent Johnson all grade out incredibly well from possession and goal differential perspectives. They stand out amongst Blue Jackets for their capacity to tilt the ice but also amongst NHLers, they are each a standard deviation above average in both categories (there are 42 players in the NHL that achieved this feat).
Kent Johnson, at least in my view, is perhaps the most impressive of the lot considering he did it with less relative ice-time on-ice with the others. I believe there’s room to be skeptical that he is truly that much of a play and possession driver, that perhaps he had some heavy lifting done by some timely net-front work of Boone Jenner or puck-moving intelligence of James van Riemsdyk, but they consistently performed better with him on the ice than they did away from him and that means something.
Now, quick hits at the bad end. Primarily, the horrific possession driving of Cole Sillinger and Adam Fantilli, two of the top centermen for the Blue Jackets all season. Sillinger was given primary matchups until his return from injury and Fantilli was sheltered until Monahan’s injury and still given offensive situations afterward (with a distasteful 35 xGF% through the first forty games).
If the Blue Jackets want to improve as possession-havers, shot suppressors and chance generators, the minutes of these two young centermen are the first place to start. Fantilli scored goals, that’s without a doubt, but it took him awhile to look like a coherent NHL player. A true franchise center can’t just score goals but must also tilt the ice. His run at the end of the season certainly suggested that aspect of his game in on the way but more on him for a bigger breakdown at another time.
Cole Sillinger continued to get the most difficult matchups against the top competition despite failing to make ground as an all around playdriver. Perhaps this was a mandate to “figure out what we have” from Don Waddell but he certainly didn’t pass the perhaps unfair to a 21 year old challenge. Worth mentioning that Dean Evason sort of always has a center he likes to give heavy competition minutes to, it was Justin Danforth while Sillinger was injured, so this might just be a deployment quirk that Waddell has to account for.
The second place, though it must be evaluated relative to the league, is the third pairing. Jack Johnson, Jordan Harris and Jake Christiansen really struggled to get anything going for the Blue Jackets. It should be no surprise, they were healthy scratched and rotated all season, but these numbers are tough to stomach.
These bottom defensemen also had a deleterious effect on Fantilli’s on-ice performance specifically as well.
So too must Ivan Provorov and Damon Severson be evaluated, especially considering their respective contract situations. Severson continued to drive play relative to the team but couldn’t convert it to goals because of his well known penchant for major mistakes.
Provorov, on the other hand, has an entirely unearned reputation as an all-situations play-driver. He was certainly weighed down by a rookie Mateychuk, though the habits and playstyle differences still represent a gulf in potential to improve, but I can’t say I see anything in his tape that suggests he was elevating the situation either. His general defensive wherewithall doesn’t appear to make up for his conservative yet mistake prone puckmoving and his inexcusable rush defending. If Don Waddell wants to give him a big contract, he better have some significant justification that explains this continued mediocrity.
In the middle area we have some highly complementary players. Dante Fabbro helps drive goals but doesn’t do much for possession, which is to be expected as he played mostly next to Zach Werenski. Dmitri Voronkov, likewise, helped convert goals as well. While there’s nothing that outwardly stands out, they helped the important Blue Jackets score a bit more in actual goals.
The fourth line, which got true fourth line deployment under Evason, tilted the ice in the Blue Jackets’ favor but their lack of finishing ability did not make up for their at times wandering defensive responsibility.
Using tracked stats without getting overly deep, here are the players’ shot contributions (shots and passes leading to shots) binned by their relative level of danger.
Immediate takeaways: Zach Werenski. Otherwise, significant that Adam Fantilli, Kirill Marchenko and Kent Johnson lead the way in terms of volume. Yegor Chinakhov, injured and absent he may have ended the season, was technically the highest volume forward as well.
In terms of danger, notice the contributions of Jenner, who really eschewed all shot contributions outside of the homeplate area, Monahan, Voronkov and James van Riemsdyk. Voronkov, Jenner and JvR especially all put up big volumes of high danger chances and tips demonstrating how important their physical stature and net-front games were to creating danger.
Defensively, there’s some more interesting conclusions. Firstly, Mateychuk and Severson stand out among the rest at accessing the interior. Also, Werenski, Severson, Mateychuk (and Jake Christiansen) stand out for their relative lack of point shooting. Exterior contributions aren’t all that much more dangerous but their tendencies might also explain the Blue Jackets relative volume differences versus their opposition in-zone.
It’s important to evaluate the Blue jackets by their scoring context as well. While their ultimate chance and danger generation is important (and usually carries over to the next year), it is unfortunately not translated to goals in any way that might inform us about whether they were hot or good or lucky, however you would like to describe the relationship between chances and actual goals.
That’s the most clear benefit of converting everything to xG, we know the difference between a historical average performance and the one we just observed. Unfortunately, hand-tracked data isn’t easily converted unless I associate my shots with the NHL PxP. Something I intend to do but something that also might lose it’s specialness by removing passing and subjective information.
In any case, I also recognize that this scoring data only rank-orders the players within the context of the team and doesn’t also provide context for the rest of the league. Is Monahan’s team leading 3.07 points/60 good? These aren’t obvious and comfortable numbers.
The reason we convert to rates is to normalize players for time on ice and games played. Monahan was injured, so saying he had 57 points might sound strange relative to Zach Werenski’s 82. Monahan also played 19:07 per game and Werenski 26:45, so even points/game might not really capture how much offense they created every time they stepped over the boards.
Really, this is the fairest way to see everything together and to compare them in the context of the rest of the league, but there is certainly valuable information being stripped away not the least the matchup, teammate, team and whatever other context you’d like. Sometimes, raw totals, and especially including powerplay scoring, is important to truly evaluate how much a player can contribute to a team winning.
Primary points are emphasized in red because they have been proven to have the most year over year stability. For forwards, secondary assists are often noise. For defensemen, goals are usually noisier than secondary assists (which have some signal), though I have a feeling that might be changing with the NHL increasing it’s appetite for aggressive defensemen.
In any case, allow me to provide some context. David Pastrňák, the top 5v5 rate scorer with at least 500 minutes, scored 3.13 points/60. Sean Monahan, in fact, was second best in the NHL. Monahan was also the top A1/60 player, .09 A1/60 above Pastrňák.
Total 5v5 points per 60 ranks among forwards with 500 minutes played:
Sean Monahan - 2
Kent Johnson - 22
James van Riemsdyk - 26
Kirill Marchenko - 33
Adam Fantilli - 48
Dmitri Voronkov - 111
Mathieu Olivier - 171
I won’t go into literally all of them, but suffice to say the Blue Jackets had 5 forwards who produced at “first line” caliber efficiency and two others who performed at a “second line” production rate. That isn’t exactly how this all works but I hope it illustrates why the Blue Jackets scored so many goals.
Adam Fantilli, Kent Johnson and Kirill Marchenko were the 6th, 10th and 12th highest 5v5 goals/60 scorers with at least 500 minutes in the NHL. Tage Thompson, scoring 1.83 goals/60, ranked first.
Suffice to say, it’s unlikely that these three forwards finish in these same positions. Their scoring at 5v5 was almost unheard of. Yegor Chinakhov, the highest Blue Jackets in 2023-24 finished with 1.38 goals/60, which is perhaps a touch more unsustainable than these three.
Similarly, James van Riemsdyk, Mathieu Olivier and Sean Monahan ranked 61st, 75th and 82nd among forwards with at least 500 minutes at 5v5. The reason the Blue Jackets were the best 5v5 goal scoring team in the NHL has a lot with these six players scoring at tremendously efficient rates.
Mathieu Olivier, perhaps, feels the least sustainable considering the rest of his chance metrics are bottom among Blue Jackets, but he did score some quite greasy goals and take his chances well. His shooting% wasn’t even as high as the players above him so however you choose to predict this particular flavor of regression is your choice.
Here’s where I believe style might have an impact, especially within the context of CBJ’s performance in their different situations, on finishing and might provide a glimmer of hope that sustained hot finishing is possible. Kent Johnson, Adam Fantilli and Kirill Marchenko are all fantastic rush and middle-ice shooters. They have modern approaches driven not with overpowering shooting but extremely clean technique, complemented by elite puck handling and married with deception and intelligent shot placement. Their ultimate finishing might be a touch too high, but they will continue to be very good. Evason’s system askes them to defend and strip pucks and attack aggressively in the aftermath, they are aligned well with that ask.
On the other hand, the other top performers in terms of scoring, James van Riemsdyk, Boone Jenner, Mathieu Olivier and Dmitri Voronkov are all great in a similar back-wall to net-front domain. They’re excellent at pulling pucks off the back wall and working for rebounds in tight spaces. JvR and Jenner are skilled puck tippers and big body competitors. Where they don’t have the raw open-ice and shooting prowess they are also similarly aligned with Evason’s system asks.
As far as defensemen go, and really most of the Blue Jackets’ players, 5v5 points/60 isn’t the best way to go about it. Focus most on their total contributions as a gestalt, single number metrics are great here, but a lot on their capacity to drive play and win minutes.
Werenski was obviously elite, ranking 2nd at 5v5 only .04 points/60 behind Makar (once again those extra minutes might be working against Werenski from an efficiency POV), Mateychuk, Severson and Fabbro brought the most offense where Gudbranson, Provorov and the rest struggled to win minutes or create points. I think there’s plenty of role assignment here but I don’t think the D-pairs were arranged as “stay at home” and “aggressive” defensemen as much as it might seem.
Dean Evason demands active and involved defensemen who help tilt the ice and play a critical role in helping finish the most dangerous sorts of offense his system creates. From that perspective, Mateychuk, Werenski and Severson are absolutely fantastic offensive fits. That isn’t to say that players like Provorov and Gudbranson are inherently inferior, but their focus should be on keeping play alive and winning with their legs rather than shooting or offensive creation.
Lessons Learned
Offensive Has Plenty of Room to Improve, but Might Not Be This Good Again
The biggest takeaway of the bunch should be that the Blue Jackets don’t look likely to repeat this level of offensive prowess. Their 5v5 goal lead comes off the back of wicked powerful finishing rather than chance generation.
What’s encouraging, however, is that their youngest players drove a lot of the chances and still have a lot of room to grow. I covered, at length, the deficiencies in some of KJ and Fantilli’s rush decision making which can now be observed as runway for improvement and efficiency. Kirill Marchenko continually found ways to drive chance volume even away from his best matches in Sean Monahan and Dmitri Voronkov.
Early in the season, it was far too easy to win pucks and beat the young players out of the zone. With the return to health of Boone Jenner, Sean Monahan and Kirill Marchenko, and stellar growth of Kent Johnson, Adam Fantilli and Cole Sillinger in this regard specifically, there’s plenty of room to believe that this offensive and possessional improvement will start a bit of a feedback loop that could lead to defensive improvement quickly.
What should be mentioned is the expiring contract of James van Riemsdyk. It’s highly unlikely that the Blue Jackets find a replacement for his raw scoring efficiency. His veterancy and puck-moving really unlocked the playstyles of Fantilli and Kent Johnson when they were at their best. The benefit there is that while he did score often in few minutes (and was incredibly well aligned with the system asks on the back wall and net-front), he didn’t necessarily contribute to outscoring or outpossessing his opponents. There could be a simpler tradeoff at play that still puts the Blue Jackets in a better position next season.
Still, his efficiency has been a hallmark of his career and his impact should not be dismissed out of hand. His spot on the roster, next to Fantilli and Johnson, should perhaps be one of the more eager upgrades but there’s no reason he can’t be an excellent veteran presence and chip-in on a goalscoring fourth line should his spot be filled.
Potential for Massive Defensive/Possession Improvement with development from Adam Fantilli, Denton Mateychuk and Cole Sillinger
That feedback loop should also apply to some of the biggest possessional anchors on the team: Adam Fantilli and Cole Sillinger. These two young forwards, though certainly promising and improved through the season, were some of the biggest reasons for the poor underlying performance of the Blue Jackets. We can certainly blame the third pairing defensemen but they didn’t play in as many or as important of minutes, so their worse performance wasn’t quite as impactful.
Adam Fantilli, should his second half of the season hold true, should look instantly better as a playdriver. His defensive stick should soon be a weapon and his physicality quickly growing as he adapts to the NHL. Puck recoveries and forechecking takeaways went from nearly absent from his game to regular features alongside Kent Johnson late in the season. He’s ready to take a step and perhaps to help drive the Blue Jackets from “behind” Sean Monahan. The only real sticking point in his game is an inability to find loose pucks in the slot in second chance situations. It will come.
Similarly, though I loved everything I saw from Denton Mateychuk relative to his poise and decision making in times of pressure, he very much played like a somewhat undersized defenseman. His tremendous compete level often overcame those deficiencies, but he’s going to need more experience before he’s beating the top NHL players to the point of tilting the ice.
I think he’s going to be a great player in the NHL who could massively benefit from even small improvements to skating output (his technique is great). He showed promise with his vision and aggression in the offensive zone, especially as a playmaker who could unlock slot passing for dangerous shooters, but his RAPM data showed he wasn’t yet a strong playdriver.
These are young players who are hungry to learn and grow with great attitudes about the sport. Development will come but timelines to being that good are ultimately unclear. They could be there next season or it could take a few years.
This play-driving hiccup, mostly formed by some very poor showings early for Adam Fantilli, might be the hangup for a contract this offseason. Personally, I’d want him hungry for more and offer an extension around Thanksgiving should his play-driving take a step forward early next season (this was the pattern for Jack Hughes).
More to be said later, perhaps, but both Hughes and Stützle had defensive and possession focused growth in their sophomore seasons where Fantilli leaned into dominant even-strength scoring.
Your top center can’t just score points and, though the end of the season was wildly encouraging, a little bit more certainty could go a long way. You can always price that into an 8-year extension, paying his next few seasons lower but still hitting the peak of a 1C in his prime, but there’s some more risk of “overpaying” with Fantilli relative to his(points and minutes get paid but play driving wins games).
Still, neither Stützle or Hughes had the even-strength scoring dominance of Fantilli (Fantilli’s 1.66 to 1.85 P1/60 at 5v5 ranks the second highest in each year among Franchise centers in their first two season but his RAPM Corsi Differential is by far the worst). Perhaps locking him up before he figures out how to drive play is still value (there are dollar amounts that will always make riskier decisions make sense). There’s also the factor of Connor Bedard’s extension. Chicago seems desperate to make him happy and might set a market value that distorts Fantilli’s ask. No rigid ideas on when or how to sign, just modulations of risk and certainty and a factor I thought was worth mentioning.
Cole Sillinger Isn’t a Matchup Center (At Least Not Yet)
Though Adam Fantilli struggled early with easy matchups (and teammates who weren’t a good fit), Cole Sillinger struggled all season in tremendously difficult deployment. In the first few games of the season, he and Kent Johnson (alongside Mikael Pyyhtiä) took the most difficult matchup assignments, freeing up Sean Monahan, Kirill Marchenko and Yegor Chinakhov to really attack offensive minutes.
As the season wore on, Sillinger’s assignments were reduced by way of Monahan’s taking more, but on the aggregate he took the most difficult, defensive assignments. If his RAPM was any indication, he didn’t do well in these minutes and was very nearly one of the worst players in the NHL by these metrics.
Overall, he doesn’t really have the profile of a shot-suppressing, play-driving center in the way of some of the Selke candidates of the past or of “playoff contending” 3Cs like Mikael Backlund, Adam Lowry, Nick Paul, Yanni Gourde, William Karlsson or Anton Lundell.
Largely, that’s okay, he doesn’t exactly need to be those things right now but he’s been at give or take this play-driving level for the past few seasons. Based on the tracking data, however, he became one of the better rush playmakers on the team. His decision making and mistakes are erratic and that makes both defense and offense hard to play when you share the ice with him.
He may become a better player simply by being put in a better or more offensive role or having some of that matchup burden handed over to Sean Monahan or Adam Fantilli. Maybe, even, he hands the 3C role to Boone Jenner entirely and unleashes his aggression and forechecking as a wing. Maybe this season was just the learning experience he needed to grow into the role his wasn’t quite ready for this year.
What ultimately isn’t clear is how the management team feels about him. His has a fantastic attitude, is willing to eat bullets to get team wins and is still only 21 years old (turning 22 in May).
Zach Werenski Needs Help
Zach Werenski put up a Norris caliber season, dragged down late in the season by a points dry-spell, amongst one of the most competitive seasons for the trophy in recent memory. It ultimately looks like the trophy is Cale Makar’s but you have to wonder if things might have been different had Werenski not been playing nearly 29 minutes a night through March.
What’s clear, especially if you evaluate his deployment relative to Quinn Hughes, is that he needs some defensemen on the roster that can eat some of those defensive minutes. He’s good enough to play in all-situations and even to take the most difficult matchups but it’s in the best interest of the team to ease the minutes burden. I can’t help but think that some of his ultimate execution related issues, the missed passes the chances not finding the back of the net, have more to do with fatigue at the end of an overly long season for him.
Dante Fabbro, claimed off of waivers, was a great partner for him though not without ups and downs. The Blue Jackets system wants aggressive skating and Fabbro doesn’t always have the output to diffuse the situations that Werenski sometimes puts him in which sometimes leads to penalties and goals against. Still, he’s good enough to be a placeholder if the D Corps is strong elsewhere. Werenski is the play driver and primary point creator, Fabbro succeeds in diffusing some of the more dangerous situations that arise. He grades out as a positive xGA RAPM suppressor which is perhaps the most important complement to a high minute partner.
It’s unclear whether Denton Mateychuk is ready to alleviate the secondary matchups burden and it’s also unclear what Don Waddell’s intentions are with the rest of the roster. He’s professed to wanting Ivan Provorov signed, though the dollar amount might not make sense, but that would leave only the third pair as potential for improvement (should he also re-sign Fabbro) which works against his desire for major improvement defensively.
The low hanging fruit is there, in terms of moving away from the low-minute detractors, but you’d have to hope for more ambition. For my money, a Denton Mateychuk-Damon Severson third pair tasked with creating offense would be the most value-forward arrangement. Severson was terrible this season, but he might have the most potential to bounce back and his contract then might be highly palatable to the right team. Potential analytics forward replacements in Noah Dobson, Jordan Spence, Michael Kesselring and Kaeden Korczak might come with some of the same turnover risks as Severson. If you don’t believe Severson can turn it around and limit mistakes, which is reasonable, then finding a way to move him and taking a stab on a younger player is certainly the right call.
That deployment might require an entire second-pair airdropped onto the roster. Vladislav Gavrikov might be there in UFA but otherwise that might be too tall a task for a single off-season. If I were Don Waddell, I’d chase the single move that has the greatest potential for positive impact and then play out the season ready for a secondary move should it come.
Is Jet Greaves the Answer?
Elvis Merzlikins was up and down this season, delivering good minutes before falling apart under an intense workload, and some sub-optimal defending, down the stretch run. He redeemed himself as a teammate and isn’t he sole reason the Blue Jackets didn’t make the playoffs but there’s little point to carrying a poor goaltender for big money.
Jet Greaves, however, had a late season run that ignited the team and fanbase. He’s an excellent young goalie and, according to Kevin Woodley of InGoal Magazine, has a fantastic mindset and approach to learning. His glove hand is lightning and his puck-moving cutting edge.
That puck-moving might play an understated role in the Blue Jackets’ system. The team has a tendency to be aggressive in moving up-ice as a unit which means turnovers in the neutral zone that are simply dumped back into the zone force them to tread water at best and get tired and make retrieval mistakes (which all of the defensemen outside of Mateychuk and Werenski are likely to do). If Jet Greaves can command the puck on the back wall and start breakouts, that mitigates a weakness and enables their aggressiveness.
Near-shutouts every game would certainly be a bridge too far. I wouldn’t bet on him leaping into the Starters crease without growing pains, and wouldn’t go into the season without at least a veteran goalie and a Plan B, but it’s reasonable to be excited.
The offseason goalie market was shorn up quickly by teams anticipating a shortage amid the cap increase, so there might not be many options for concrete improvement. Does Jake Allen make it to free agency? Can Elvis and Jet find a platoon deployment that works for them behind a hopefully defensively improved team?
Star Turns for Young Players
Kent Johnson and Kirill Marchenko took dramatic leaps forward in their development trajectories this year. Least year, heading into the draft, I wrote the following:
Kent Johnson may be the single biggest beneficiary of a positive coaching change (provided the new coach believes he’s a part of the solution).
Turns out, that was entirely correct, but I wouldn’t have predicted it went forward this dramatically.
Kent Johnson put together one of the best seasons in the NHL according to EvolvingHockey’s GAR and xGAR models. Among forwards he ranks 30th with 18.9 xGAR, 82nd with 11.2 GAR. By this single number metric, he was a bona-fide first line player at a young age (among U22 players he ranks 3rd in xGAR and 13th in GAR).
I think there’s room to be skeptical of a repeat performance to this degree, especially with the team-wide incredible finishing, but it’s a wildly encouraging development for a player who was in the doghouse last season. Even if you don’t believe in these heights, he was the quarterback of the powerplay entries of one of the best units in the league. At the very least, he’s redeemed whatever value you think he may have lost and is looking like a pick worthy of 5th overall.
For Kirill Marchenko, I was a bit more conservative. It turns out, though, that my vision of only a specific style of play was far too limiting. I believed Marchenko to be a bit too inefficient in transition and slot passing, relying on winning possession in traffic rather than creating, and therefore him not the right player to be the primary puck carrier on a top line (I believed possessional play over thievery was the only true elite approach). I believed his growing wall-work and defensive zone play to outline him as better for being an extremely good “third man” or complementary player to other top players.
Instead, he converted this stick work, vision and competitiveness into a whole new identity and drove immense success at 5v5, being one of the best players in the entire league at his position. He credited Dean Evason for helping him formulate this new identity in-season at his exit interview. He, and Sean Monahan, look like they could form an ice-tilting, forechecking pair that could dominate teams where Fantilli and Johnson are lethal quick strike attackers. (He also has literally all the skills outside of net-front tipping to replace JvR alongside those two, though it perhaps wouldn’t be the best situation from an offensive balance due to his capacity to drive a line).
Kirill Marchenko ranked 31st with 18.6 xGAR, and 27th with 16.1 GAR. Both metrics grade him well which suggests it’s a more durable performance. Among players who played at least 500 minutes at 5v5, Kirill Marchenko ranked 4th in the NHL with a 66.37 GF% (75 goals for, 38 goals against, which also makes him the leagues best goal differential at + 37). He did that in minutes away from Sean Monahan as he helped springboard Fantilli’s emergence despite having a broken jaw for a period of time.
Again, I don’t know that expecting him to put forward this same performance, but if he does (and if Kent Johnson, Zach Werenski and Adam Fantilli continue forward) the Blue Jackets might have a tidy contending core wrapped up extremely quickly.
What’s the Plan, Don?
Don Waddell played it slow this season in terms of making deals. He stayed mostly pat at the deadline but has suggested he built some deal frameworks at the deadline that might play out into the offseason.
In recent interviews on exit-day, he suggested that the Blue Jackets’ two first round picks were totally in play in a bid to improve the team. In my opinion, depending on who is available at 13, that’s the right play. The players matter in each direction, any 22-25 year old who we project to be with the team for a long time would be a good choice but a 30 year old with 2 or 3 years remaining on the contract would feel like wasted assets.
Put simply, the Blue Jackets already have a good top end cohort of players in Zach Werenski, Kirill Marchenko and Sean Monahan. They have drafted their future 1C in Adam Fantilli, have a potential complementary wing in Kent Johnson with real elite PP1 chops, and even have Denton Mateychuk primed for growth and Cayden Lindstrom in the system. There’s no real reason to wait for these players to develop before becoming competitive. The second wave can always be built through savvy drafting and development while competitive.
That said, this is an offseason fraught with peril. If the NBA’s cap explosion is anything to go by, or Jakob Chychrun’s expensive new deal the first domino in contract inflation, new contracts signed this offseason might be goofy. Not only that, but the end of the flat-cap has plenty of teams believing they could turn things around sooner rather than later.
Danny Briere in Philadelphia has expressed a desire to move picks for competitiveness, Kyle Dubas in Pittsburgh has said they’re exiting the asset accumulation phase and ready to push forward, Kevyn Adams of Buffalo has said they’re not messing around looking for futures anymore and have no cap spending restrictions. Pressure grows on Kyle Davidson in Chicago to build a good team around a frustrated Connor Bedard.
GMs are liable to say anything, of course, but this suggests this is going to be a wildly competitive offseason. Prices, such as they were this last deadline, might be outrageous. That might mean the Blue Jackets are best served standing pat and making good picks, there are players to be excited about at either end of the first round, but it also might mean winning what feels like an expensive auction early pays significant dividends as prices continue to explode.
The Blue Jackets have the second most available cap in the league (prior to potential Fabbro, Provorov or Voronkov extensions) and nowhere to spend it until Adam Fantilli needs a new deal next offseason, and Kent Johnson and Kirill Marchenko get raises on their short term RFA deals.
Short term, high dollar deals like Waddell has done with Dmitry Orlov or the offer sheet for Kotkaniemi (with a promise for a more palatable extension as soon as eligible) might be the way to build and utilize a cap advantage for the Blue Jackets.
Though those other teams have equivalent capital to spend, especially Carolina with their return from the Rantanen deal, the Blue Jackets also have a “stable of young players” to deal from. Could Cole Sillinger, Luca Del Bel Belluz, Gavin Brindley, Yegor Chinakhov, Stanislav Svozil and maybe Dmitri Voronkov be on the move for bona-fide star powered long-term fits? Could they be part of Waddell’s next Lindholm + Hanifin for Hamilton + Ferland + Fox deal?
We’ve been waiting (not quite so) patiently for the aggressive and astute moves that push the Blue Jackets forward, the question is whether Don can find the deal to do it amidst an exploding cap and impatient teams.