Buy or Sell Strong Starts for 6 NHL Players
We are already more than a month into the 2024-25 NHL season, and some players and teams are off to surprisingly strong starts.
The question that has to be asked is whether or not those starts are for real.
So let's take a look at six players around the league off to great starts and buy or sell whether they will maintain them over the remainder of the season.
We are focusing on players who might be exceeding their normal career levels and performing above what we normally see from them. So fast starts from players like Nathan MacKinnon and Kirill Kaprizov are not included, mostly because we expect them to produce and expect them to continue at their current paces.
We are looking at players who do not normally play at a level like what they've shown so far this season.
Martin Necas, Carolina Hurricanes
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The Carolina Hurricanes are off to one of the best starts in the NHL, and Martin Necas is one of their top players so far.
Through Saturday's action, he is already up to 23 points in his first 15 games, including eight goals.
The Hurricanes winning games and Necas being a productive part of that is nothing out of the ordinary. Carolina has been a Stanley Cup contender for more than six years, and Necas has been a solid contributor on those teams.
But he has never really produced at a rate quite like this.
If he were to maintain this same level of play over 82 games, he would be on a pace for 125 points and 50 goals. Those are not just strong numbers...those are Connor McDavid/MVP-level numbers.
That just does not seem like something that he will continue, especially when so much of his early production has been percentage-driven. For instance, he is scoring on more than 27 percent of his shots, and the Hurricanes are scoring on more than 17 percent of their total shots when he is on the ice.
It is unlikely those two percentages continue on those paces.
Necas is only a 12 percent shooter for himself in his career, while the Hurricanes have consistently scored on around 10 percent of their total shots when he is on the ice.
While the Hurricanes have hoped for players like Necas to break out and take a star turn offensively, and while he is right in the middle of what should be at a peak-age season, there seems to be room for a percentage regression to kick in at some point. The Hurricanes have always been a team that relies on shot volume rather than high percentages.
Sooner or later Necas is going to get closer to more normal numbers on an individual and team level. He will continue to be a good player, and he might even end up setting new career highs in goals and points (his current highs are 28 goals and 71 points), but do not expect him to continue on a 50-goal, 125-point pace. He is good. He is not quite that good.
Buy or sell: Buy him having a good year, but sell continuing on this pace
Nikolaj Ehlers, Winnipeg Jets
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Speaking of strong starts, no team in NHL history has ever been better through 15 games this year's Winnipeg Jets, as they improved to 14-1-0 after Saturday's win over the Dallas Stars.
Starting goalie Connor Hellebuyck has unsurprisingly been the driving force behind the start, and he's gotten great support from the Jets' core group of talented forwards as well as defenseman Joshua Morrissey.
Ehlers is one of those forwards.
If there is one thing you can say about Ehlers throughout his career, it is that you should have a pretty good idea of where his numbers are going to end up when each season is completed.
You can usually pencil him in for somewhere around 20-25 goals and between 55-65 points. He rarely goes above or below either number.
Entering play on Sunday, he is a little bit ahead of both paces, with nine goals and 18 total points in 15 games.
The goal-scoring pace is likely to drop a little bit as his shooting percentage goes from its current 20 percent mark down a little closer to his normal 11-12 percent mark. But while the goal-scoring pace is likely to cool off, it is not out of the question to imagine his playmaking numbers holding a little closer to where he is now, mostly because he has produced relatively closer to this level from a playmaking perspective in other previous seasons. While his 2.5 assists per 60 minutes would be a career-high, he has had at least five other seasons where that number has topped the 1.7 mark, including three years between 1.9 and 2.2 per 60 minutes.
He is currently scoring 2.2 goals per 60 minutes. He has only two times ever topped 1.3 goals per 60 minutes and has never been higher than 1.6.
His own personal history indicates the goal numbers will regress at some point, while the assist numbers may not have as far to slide the rest of the way. Especially if the rest of his teammates keep playing at a high level.
This is a perfectly timed career year for Ehlers, as he is in the middle of a contract and playing for a new deal—whether it be in Winnipeg or somewhere else.
Buy or sell: Buy the playmaking, sell the goal-scoring
Mikael Granlund, San Jose Sharks
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The Sharks have been one of the worst teams in the NHL since the start of the 2023-24 season—they haven't really even been competitive in that time.
One of the few bright spots has been the production of veteran forward Mikael Granlund.
After finishing with 60 points (12 goals, 48 assists) in 69 games a year ago, he has already recorded 16 points in 15 games to open this season. It is a nice resurgence for him after seeing his production bottom out in the couple of years prior to the 2023-24 season.
The Sharks acquired him as part of a contract throw-in during the trade that sent defenseman Erik Karlsson to the Pittsburgh Penguins, and he arrived with relatively little expectation.
The production has certainly been a surprise, and it is a nice little positive for the Sharks as they will no doubt look to trade him and his expiring contract before this year's trade deadline.
But potentially interested teams should proceed with caution. The thing that often gets forgotten is that somebody has to lead the bad teams in scoring. Somebody is going to play top-line minutes, somebody is going to get top power play time, and somebody is going to have to get the points. Players like Granlund who tend to get heavy minutes on teams like this tend to rack up points just by default and being on the ice. It does not always translate to a different role on a better team.
Granlund has had a really nice career in the NHL, and he has provided some nice play in a bad situation for the Sharks, but it is not something they, or another NHL team, should count on continuing long-term at this point. Some point totals can be deceiving. This is one of them.
Buy or sell: Sell
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Casey Mittelstadt, Colorado Avalanche
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Finding a quality No. 2 center was high on the priority list for the Colorado Avalanche over the previous two seasons as they looked to fill the void left by Nazem Kadri's departure to the Calgary Flames.
At last year's trade deadline, they were finally able to fill that void by dealing from a position of strength (defense) by trading Bowen Byram to the Buffalo Sabres for Casey Mittelstadt.
After an up-and-down debut at the end of 2024, Mittelstadt has started to produce like the Avalanche might have hoped for him to produce when they acquired him.
Through Saturday he is up to 16 points (six goals, 10 assists) in 15 games and on track for what should be a career year.
There are a lot of reasons to believe he can maintain that over the course of a full 82-game season.
For one, while his individual shooting percentage would be a career-high at 17.1 percent, it is not so outrageously high or so far above his normal levels that he should be looking at a significant regression.
He is also getting an opportunity to not only play more minutes than he ever has before in the NHL (more than 20 minutes per game; he has never played more than 17 minutes per game prior to this season), but he is also getting an opportunity to do so on a team that has far more talent than he has ever played with. Those two factors should give him an opportunity to rack up career-high numbers.
Entering play on Sunday, he is on pace for 32 goals and 88 total points. Given what he has shown in his career, as well as the minutes he is going to get and the players he has alongside him, those seem like reasonably attainable numbers. They would definitely be career-high numbers, but they are also realistic for him.
Buy or sell: Buy
Anthony Stolarz, Toronto Maple Leafs
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While goaltending tends to always be a question mark for the Toronto Maple Leafs, Anthony Stolarz has been a pleasant surprise and major bright spot early this season thanks to his .930 save percentage through his first 10 starts with the team.
But is that a sustainable level of play for him?
The argument in Stolarz's favor is that he had a .925 save percentage a year ago as Sergei Bobrovsky's backup in Florida and has at least maintained a better-than-league average .916 save percentage for his career.
But those numbers also come in relatively small sample sizes.
He is 31 years old, has never played more than 28 games in a single season and has mostly been a career backup and journeyman. While it is not totally unheard of for goalies to be late-bloomers, it is not entirely common for a player at his age to just suddenly become a franchise-level goalie. Usually what happens is players like Stolarz get more action, opposing teams start to figure them out over time and their production ultimately declines.
Even if Stolarz regresses to his career-average levels, he is not likely to keep playing like this. He also does not have a team as good as last year's Panthers in front of him.
Nice story to start the season, but it's not likely Stolarz keeps it up for the duration of the season.
Buy or sell: Sell
Lukas Dostal, Anaheim Ducks
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The Anaheim Ducks look like they are on their way to another long rebuilding year that does not produce many wins or show much progress. One of the few bright spots so far has been goalie Lukas Dostal, who is probably the biggest reason they even have as many wins as they do.
In his first 11 starts, he has produced an outstanding .922 save percentage and has already produced seven games with a .918 mark or higher. That includes six games of .938 or better.
While goalies can be a little unpredictable and can put together wildly productive seasons out of nowhere, it seems a little unreasonable to expect Dostal to keep going at this level, especially while playing behind this team.
The Ducks have been by every objective measure one of the worst defensive teams in hockey, consistently giving up high-danger and high-quality chances at a rate that almost no other team in the league is matching. Dostal, to his credit, has done a great job managing that and giving his team at least a fighting chance.
At some point, however, you have to imagine that sort of workload and pressure is going to become too much and the dam might break. Dostal might very well have a long, productive career ahead of him as a No. 1 goalie. But it is hard to imagine him maintaining this sort of elite production behind this defense. He is good. He might not be this good. At least not yet.
Buy or sell: Sell, because he is not going to get any help
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