Leave The (Goal) Light On

I’ll start the bag defending (Badge defending?) of my Underdog Fantasy Best Puck Classic player exposures with a long-time friend of the show and offensive GOAT in Alex Ovechkin.

If you’re looking for additional strategy breakdowns of the Best Puck Classic contest over on Underdog, I suggest checking out my Best Puck Manifesto series on the newsletter, breaking down, among many topics, positional allocation, draft considerations, and stacking. In that clickthrough you’ll also find links to the podcast and the YouTube drafts DJ and I have done on a weekly basis since July, taking many questions a week and discussing our approach to each draft.

In 2024-25, I’m hitching my wagon to Ovi as he chases down Wayne Gretzky’s career Goals record of 894. Entering the year, Ovechkin needs just 42 goals to pass him, sitting at 853, with last year’s tally of 31 goals marking his lowest output of his career outside of the 2021 COVID-delayed season.

Going in the mid-3rd round for most of drafting season, my bags are packed full at-cost, with 34.8% Ovechkin across 46 drafts as-of this writing. Why, then, am I betting on a 39-year-old man, in an ever-evolving young man’s game, to rebound from a noted drop in production at an age where no player can overcome Father Time?

Today’s Primary Point: Alex Ovechkin is far from washed.

The basis of this argument hinges on three ideas:

1. Alex Ovechkin was made for Underdog Fantasy scoring; it heavily values Shots relative to point production and even allows for the Hits statistic to insulate player values. In fantasy, where goals are always king, these two factors serve as a nice boost to his fantasy outlook on an annual basis.

2. 2023-24’s struggles were no fault of Ovechkin’s - he was doing the same things he always does and not getting so much as a single result for it - and that regression plus his team investing around him will elevate him back to pre-2023 levels.

3. Alex Ovechkin was actually not that bad in 23-24, after many wrote him off after a miserable 2023 half of the season, 2024 looked much rosier and brought him back into alignment (and even above expectation) with where he needs to be to be worth a 3rd rounder in 2024-25!

Scoring:

You can put seventy supercomputers together to project the outcomes for this upcoming NHL season and not make any progress if you don’t define what actually influences fantasy points. While I can tell you that the scoring system is quite simple, Billy Jones, a fantastic follow on social media if you have yet to do so, took things one step further this offseason by connecting actual fantasy results to the categories that made up scores (and more importantly, spike weeks!).

Points are accumulated on a weekly basis, and the site automatically plugs in your best C, your two best Ws, your best D, your best G, and your highest scoring remaining skater (C/W/D):

Relative to most other scoring systems found in fantasy, this is a shot-heavy format. When applied to actual season results, here is what we get for a correlation matrix:

Goals and Shots drive scoring, plain and simple. No matter what you’re seeking, be it an Overall comparison (Scoring), or diving into Spikes (35+) or Super Spikes (50+), you’ll be hard-pressed to find an answer that isn’t to prioritize Goals and Shots.

Gee, if only I knew a guy who were literally about to pass the unbreakable Wayne Gretzky Goals record, perhaps as early as this season, who leads all active players in Shots on Goal by 2,600. No, not a typo. Since 2005, Ovi has 6,627 shots on goal, dwarfing every player in NHL history, with the next closest player being Sidney Crosby with just a shade over 4,000 career shots.

Preposterous. And he’s not slowing down as much as the haters would have you believe!

Revisiting 2023-24:

It is simply incredible that a 39-year-old’s down season is one where he finishes T36th in Goals, T19th in Shots, and 7th in Shot Attempts (iCorsi, or iCF). Tally up all the stats (minus PP pts, which I don’t want to export separately…), and Ovi finished 32nd among Skaters in total UDPts on the year, tied with one Jesper Bratt.

All that said… It’s pretty clear to me that October, November, and December was a stretch of time that historians will not be able to figure out for a long time.

On December 30th, Alex Ovechkin took the ice for his 34th game of the season on the second half of a back-to-back against Nashville. In that game, he scored his second 5v5 goal of the season. In 33 games prior to that, Ovechkin had attempted 139 shots, gotten 69 on net, and totaled nearly 7 expected goals, taking into account the quality of the shot attempt. He scored once. For a career 10-11% shooter at evens, this was more than a little bit ridiculous, as I noted at the time.

The next day, the very next fucking day, he scored a goal at 5v5 against Nashville (I’m rich!) and then proceeded to go yet another month, and 16 shots, without a 5v5 goal (Poor again!). I really know when to buy the bottom.

After the league-mandated bye week in late Jan/Early Feb, however, Ovi was back.

Here’s a tour of Ovechkin’s season in Rolling 15-Game form:

As a benchmark, I tend to think any player with an iCF/60 north of 16 (all situations) is Great, and 18+ is Elite. Ovechkin, across every stretch of a “miserable” 23-24 season, maintained a shot rate north of 20 per 60! For a career 12-13% shooter to go as cold as he did for half a season (the PP saved some of his output, as you can see, but not all of it), no wonder that the second half looked just as preposterous the other way.

In a game in which we are searching for ceiling while avoiding low floors, it is inarguable that Ovi brought both to the table in 23-24. However, I’m not sure it makes a ton of sense to assume that 24-25 Ovi will be subject to the same smattering of <15 point weeks we saw last year, as stretches where he shoots <5% for several weeks at a time are incredibly unlikely.

Of course, ‘23-24 Revisited’ requires us to revisit the team, too. Using Dec. 30th as our cut off here, too, WSH was holding onto a Wild Card spot on that day, 17-11-6 despite a -18 Goal Differential, worse than both the Sabres and Flames. Despite Ovi’s personal struggles, the team played OK defense and managed to survive a lack of goal-scoring prowess to win hockey games. Of note, their PP was simply not clicking, with a 11.5% success rate (3rd worst). Despite the 7th-best xG/60 generation on the PP, they scored less than half of the rate of their expecteds, again 3rd-worst in the league.

Deeper process note: Some teams can “hack” xG, particularly on the PP, in one way or another, and to combat this I often like to assume that teams are largely generating the types of chances they want. Allowing for this, I like to use shot attempts per 60, or CF/60, to gauge PP success in that I am filtering out noisy goals while rewarding teams who are consistently getting pucks to the net, on the assumption that they are doing what they want with the puck in the lead up.

Come to find out that Washington was not one of these gamers, ranking comfortably in the top half of CF/60 with the man advantage.

From then on, it was night and day on the PP as Washington needed every goal to ultimately make the playoffs on the final day of the regular season, and boy did they deliver. In the second part of the season (~50 games), Washington had the 4th most goals/60 off the back of the 10th best xG creation and a still-middling shot rate.

When you have the fourth-best PP in the NHL and your map looks like this, I think Ovi is gonna be alright:

Capturing 30% of the shot share, honestly, is low for Ovi historically. But it’s hard to argue with the results, as Dylan Strome had a magnificent season orchestrating the WSH PP in a way that hadn’t been seen since the peak Backstrom/Kuzy era.

In 2024-25, the Caps front office is not content with falling into a rebuild, as they reinforced the team around Ovechkin to support him in his pursuit of 895. Make no mistake, this team exists for Ovechkin to reach 900 goals first, second, and third. Ensuring that the team is competitive, taking chances on talent like Pierre-Luc Dubois and Andrew Mangiapane at low prices and acquiring defensive help in Matt Roy and Jakub Chychrun, is not in the long-term best interest of the franchise. But damn, is it ever fun. We should all get to reap the benefits.

Shifting the 2023-24 narrative

Yes, 31 goals last year is scary, as it’s not good enough for a player who doesn’t offer much by way of point production. But substitute even a “normal” amount of goals in that front half of the year, 40 goals is not crazy considering how torrid a pace Ovechkin was on to end the season.

I think it’s reasonable to consider that part of the “age cliff” comes at the end of a long, grinding season. Think Joe Pavelski’s unceremonious end in Dallas, visibly struggling through the playoffs. That Ovechkin took the bye week, seemingly recharged and then scored 22 goals in 35 games is wildly bullish. Even if that number is more like 17 goals per 35, that’s knocking on the doorstep of Gretzky this year, health-permitting.

Yes, Ovechkin struggled in the playoffs, too, but that Rangers team was on another plane of existence vs. the husk of the Capitals team that managed to survive into the playoffs (Vinny Iorio played meaningful playoff minutes!).

Poking through some Best Puck data supports the narrative that Ovechkin last year was one of the more powerful performers when the points really matter - the playoffs.

Of the 67 Ws drafted in (nearly) every UD draft last year, Ovechkin advanced to the playoffs at the 52nd best rate. This is not a surprise, considering his struggles throughout the early part of the year and that his ADP was 14.5, meaning we simply couldn’t pair him with a MacKinnon or Matthews, two primary drivers of advancement along with Kucherov (who was attainable as a pair partner at his ADP of ~12).

Of course, those 22 goals came in the 35 games that largely consisted of the Best Puck playoffs, giving us an interesting wrinkle. With playoffs starting in late-February, a run of games stretching from February to April largely influences playoff results. And this is exactly what we see, where once the calendar flipped, Ovi had the 10th most Playoff EV added of these 67 Ws, a process that is agnostic to when these spike weeks occurred and simulating all teams against all possible playoff weeks (a process similar to how Mike Leone modeled NFL results to create some of the most prominent strategies in the NFL Best Ball space), which I limited to the second-half for our purposes to account for known injuries and slightly back-weighted prospect projection, both of which I believe are perfectly fine approaches that should not be punished in my estimation process.

All in all, despite a “miserable” season that means Ovechkin is “washed”, Ovi drafted at 14.5 ADP was worth $8.00 to 23-24 drafters when you consider his regular season impact and playoff impact, by my approach at quantifying such an unknowable value. Considering that post-rake (and some payout shenanigans that had to go to non-advancing teams after I pointed out the discrepancy to UD), the average team was worth ~$8.10, this is.. right about what you should expect.

No player analysis would be complete without mentioning that almost no Ovechkin teams had access to the ~$38 worth of equity that Nathan MacKinnon teams took up in each draft lobby.

And this was a BAD season!

Adding it all up... He shoots, he scores, he even hits. His team might as well sell tickets that read “Come watch our Fantasy Points guy collect Fantasy Points!” At a cheaper price than ever, with a better supporting cast… How Sweet Is This?

It’s Alex Ovechkin, the best show in town, and the greatest goal scorer in NHL history.

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