5 NHL Players Set to Take a Step Back in 2023-24
There are always players who exceed expectations in the NHL, and 2022-23 was full of breakout performances and unexpectedly dominant showings that helped tell the tale of the season.
Sometimes those performances are a sign of things to come and a part of a player's upward trajectory toward stardom.
Other times they are an outlier or a peak season that is not likely to be duplicated.
Thus, we are looking at five players who are probably going to take a step backward during the 2023-24 season.
It is important to keep in mind that it does not mean these players are going to have bad years. They might still end up being very productive and very good. In most cases, they probably will still be very good. They simply might not be as good as they were a year ago.
Let's take a look at some of the candidates for that type of regression this season.
Linus Ullmark, Boston Bruins
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Everything clicked for the Boston Bruins during the 2022-23 regular season, resulting in a record-setting performance that saw the team win an incredible 65 games.
One of the biggest factors that contributed to that impressive win total was a sensational goalie duo led by Vezina Trophy winner Linus Ullmark and his partner in crime, Jeremy Swayman.
Ullmark was especially dominant with a league-leading .938 save percentage in his 49 appearances. While the 30-year-old has been a very productive goalie throughout his career, including in his first season with Boston in 2021-22, he has never at any point posted numbers quite like that.
And history says he is not likely to post those numbers again.
Especially not in back-to-back years.
Not only was his save percentage a .020-point jump from his normal career average, it was also the sort of number that almost no goalie in the modern era has had over a full season.
Between 2005-06 and 2021-22, there were only nine goalies who appeared in 40 games with a save percentage of .930 or higher. Eight of those goalies saw their save percentage drop the next season, with the only exception being Montreal's Carey Price, who saw a marginal .001-point drop the following season while playing in just 15 games.
Every other goalie on the list saw their save percentage drop the next season by an average of .015.
A .015-point drop would put Ullmark right back near his career average and what he did in his first year with the Bruins.
Nothing about that seems unreasonable or disrespectful to Ullmark. He might still be an outstanding goalie. But a step back seems like a given just based on statistical probability and normal regression. The concern for the Bruins is that could still lead to a significant increase in goals against, and when combined with their questions at center could lead to a dramatic drop in wins.
Jared McCann, Seattle Kraken
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Jared McCann has always been an intriguing player because he has incredible shooting talent and has flashed the potential to be a big-time goal-scorer.
Consistency and getting regular opportunities have been the two biggest factors holding him back in the early parts of his career. But there is no question that when he shoots the puck, it comes off his stick differently than it does for most players. He can flat-out rip it. He always seemed like the type of player who, if put into the right situation, with the right role and with the right amount of shooting luck, he could be a serious threat to score 30 or 40 goals.
During the 2022-23 season, all of that happened, as he produced a 40-goal season for a Seattle Kraken team that made its first playoff appearance and advanced to the second round.
While there were very encouraging signs for McCann with his underlying numbers, including the fact that he dramatically increased his shot volume, he also found some incredible puck luck by scoring on 19 percent of his shots in all situations, and more than 21 percent of his shots during five-on-five play.
Those numbers absolutely blew away everything he has ever done in his NHL career and are so obviously an outlier you can't help but anticipate a significant step backward this season.
Prior to last season, McCann had only once scored on more than 10 percent of his five-on-five shots, and never higher than 15 percent. Everything went his way.
Even if you take into account the increased role, increased shot volume and improved ability to generate chances, the likelihood of his hitting those percentages again seems like a big stretch. McCann will still probably be a good bet for at least 20, and probably 25, goals this season, but another 40-goal campaign?
Not ready to buy that one just yet.
Filip Gustavsson, Minnesota Wild
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Filip Gustavsson is in a very similar situation as Ullmark in Boston where you have what is almost certainly a very good goalie who simply played a little above what should be expected.
In Gustavsson's first year as a full-time goalie with the Wild, he posted a .931 save percentage in 37 starts and eventually took over the starting job from Marc-Andre Fleury going into the playoffs.
It was a great year, and his arrival in Minnesota also turned out to be one of the biggest trade steals of the year. The Wild acquired him in a one-for-one goalie swap with the Ottawa Senators in exchange for Cam Talbot.
Talbot badly struggled in Ottawa while Gustavsson excelled with the Wild.
Had Ottawa simply held on to the goalie it had and played him in a regular role, it might have been enough to produce a postseason appearance for the Senators.
But a .930 save percentage in any era, and especially in this era where offense and goal scoring is making a big comeback over the past few years, is just not the type of number a goalie should be reasonably expected to reach on a yearly basis.
Not even the top-tier players like Igor Shesterkin, Ilya Sorokin or Andrei Vasilevskiy hit that number every season.
The Wild may have found their long-term goalie, and he may end up being an outstanding player, but his numbers will probably look a lot different this season.
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Bo Horvat, New York Islanders
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The New York Islanders desperately needed to add another impact scorer last season to help complement and take some pressure off Mathew Barzal and Brock Nelson. That resulted in them swinging a strong deal to land Horvat from the Vancouver Canucks.
They quickly signed him to a long-term contract extension to keep him on Long Island for the foreseeable future and hopefully duplicate the 38-goal performance he had split between the two teams.
But they might want to lower those expectations if they think he'll do that every year.
Or even again.
Horvat's 2022-23 season got off to an incredible start with 31 goals in 49 games for the Canucks prior to the trade, and it was largely driven by what was at the time a career-high 21 percent shooting percentage. That is eight points higher than his career average. Anytime you are dealing with a player who shoots that far above their career norms, you have to anticipate a regression at some point in the not-too-distant future.
For Horvat and the Islanders, that happened almost immediately after the trade.
In 36 games with New York (including playoffs), he scored just eight goals (an 18-goal pace over 82 games) and scored on just 8.5 percent of his shots on goal.
It is not just the percentage-based regression at play. There is also the fact that in going from Vancouver to the Islanders he was moving from two very different teams playing two very different systems with different talent around him.
All of those factors simply added up into a decrease in production, and while the shooting-percentage drop was a bit on the extreme side and probably has some room to bounce back up this season, he is still probably not going to approach the 20 percent mark he had early in the year with the Canucks.
He will be a good addition for the Islanders for a few years, and probably score around 25 goals, but he is not going to finish plays the way he did with Vancouver during the 2022-23 season.
Andrei Kuzmenko, Vancouver Canucks
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There might not have been a bigger surprise in the NHL last year than Andrei Kuzmenko's performance in Vancouver.
He burst onto the scene as a free agent from the KHL and immediately became an impact scorer, potting 39 goals and 74 total points in 81 games in his first year in North America.
Even if the Canucks had some reasonably high expectations for him to be a strong producer, nobody in their wildest dreams was expecting him to score that many goals or produce that many points.
The stunning performance resulted in him getting a two-year, $11 million contract extension during the season.
It is really difficult to figure out what a reasonable expectation should be for him because he is already 27 years old and has only played one full season in the NHL. But it was a great season! It was also probably an unsustainably good one.
Why?
Well, if you have been paying attention to the other entries here, it mostly comes down to the percentages. In Kuzmenko's case, those percentages were outrageous.
He scored on a league-leading 27(!) percent of his shots during the 2022-23 season, a number that was not only the highest mark in the league but also the highest mark of any player in a single season (minimum 40 games played) since the start of the 2005-06 campaign.
The other players at the top of that list with him are not exactly a who's who of the NHL's best and most consistent goal-scorers over that time. It is such a laughably high number that no reasonable person could conclude that he'll come close to matching that performance again.
The truly concerning thing is that he only averaged 1.77 shots on goal per game, so there was not a big shot volume happening there to help make up for any inevitable regression that might happen. Even if he shot at a 14 percent rate, which is still far above the league average, that would have only resulted in 20 goals given his shot rate.
A 10 percent rate would have resulted in 14 goals.
Of course, some players can maintain higher shooting percentages because of their skill, shot locations, the system they play in or who they play alongside. But every piece of recent NHL history suggests that nobody maintains that high of a rate.
Unless Kuzmenko does something to dramatically increase his shot volume this season, the Canucks and their fans should probably be looking at something closer to a 20- or maybe 25-goal season from him.
Advanced statistics via Natural Stat Trick.
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