Four of these eight Pacific players got hurt. William Karlsson played 14 games. Frank Vatrano, Kevin Fiala and Zach Hyman each missed at least 24, Fiala after fracturing his leg at the Olympics. The other four all played 74 games or more, and each is here for a different reason. Brendan Gallagher shot cold. Darnell Nurse is starting over in a new organisation for the first time in his career. Shane Wright is 22 and still working out what kind of player he is. Yegor Sharangovich has a 59-point season behind him and has not come close since.
The number we lean on hardest is the gap between the goals a player scored and what his chances were worth. It has a name, finishing, and it is generally made of things that do not repeat: a goalie's glove in exactly the right place, a rebound that does not sit down before the shooter arrives. Gallagher came up 8.5 goals short, the largest gap in the division by a distance and more than twice the next man's. He shot 5.8 percent against a career 9.8, so at his own normal rate that is five goals back.
Two others come out the same way. Sharangovich shot 10.6 percent against a career 13.5, Vatrano 6.3 against 10.4, which on the same shots at their own normal rates is four more goals for Sharangovich and three for Vatrano.
Edmonton Oilers: Zach Hyman
Hyman is the cleanest case on this page. He missed the first 19 games of the season recovering from surgery on a wrist he fractured on a hit in the previous spring's Western Conference Final, returned on December 1, and then scored 31 goals in 58 games. Read that again: 31 goals, in 58 games, at 33 years old, after not playing until December. His 52 points came at 0.90 a night against 0.60 the year before, and his team controlled 55.1 percent of the expected goals while he was on the ice, meaning the better chances went his way while he played.
The one thing to be careful about is how he scored. Those 31 goals came on 159 shots, a 19.5 percent conversion rate. He has only twice come near that, 19.8 percent across 51 games in 2019-20 and 18.6 percent in his 54-goal season. Our projection still likes his shot. It has him at 15.2 percent, against the 11.9 percent a typical skater with 100 shots managed last season, and it doubts only the 19.5, which ranked 16th in the NHL. It gets him to 68 anyway, because it wants 237 shots instead of 159, which is simply what a healthy Hyman takes: he put up 276 and 290 in the two seasons before his 2024-25 dip. He plays the first line beside Connor McDavid at $5.5M through 2028, which is the last argument you need about opportunity.
Los Angeles Kings: Kevin Fiala
Fiala's season ended on one shift at the Olympics. He got his legs tangled with Canada's Tom Wilson, fractured his left leg, was stretchered off the ice and never played another regular-season game. Before it he had 40 points in 56 games, 0.71 a night against the 0.74 he managed across a full season the year before. Nothing about him changed.
That is why our 63 comes in one of the tightest bands on this page, 58 to 68. There is no puck-luck argument to make. His finishing came out level across the season: 18 goals, on chances our model valued at 18.4. At 5-on-5 he scored 14 goals on chances worth 11.8, so he did better than expected at even strength, and everything he left behind was on the power play, where 4 goals came on chances worth 6.7.
The projection asks for 240 shots at 11.2 percent, a lower conversion rate than the 12.2 he just posted, so every point of the gain is volume and availability rather than a hot streak. His shot rate is the thing to watch: 2.62 a game last season against 3.01 the year before. He also just played the heaviest minutes of his career at 19:07. Erik Haula arrived from Nashville and Mats Zuccarello from Minnesota, and both line up with Fiala on the second line.
Anze Kopitar retired after twenty seasons, all of them in Los Angeles, and two Selke Trophies as the league's best defensive forward went with him. He played 19:07 a night last season, the same as Fiala. Those minutes are open now, and so is the trust that came with them. At $7.88M through 2029, Fiala is not just getting more ice time, he will be asked to do more with it.
Vegas Golden Knights: William Karlsson
Karlsson played more playoff games last season than regular-season games, fifteen against fourteen. He was hurt against Anaheim on November 8, had surgery around the turn of the year, and did not play for close to six months. He came back for Game 6 against Utah, played the rest of Vegas's run to the Cup Final, and put up 9 points in those 15 games, a 0.60 rate against 0.50 in his 14 regular-season games. Then he hurt his arm in Game 5 of the Final.
Karlsson is the one man here who scored more goals than his chances were worth, 4 on chances our model valued at 3.1, so his case is availability and nothing else. The sample is tiny and our model says so out loud: 42 points in a band of 31 to 53.
What is not in doubt is the job. He opens as the second-line centre with Mitch Marner on his wing, and Vegas has thinned out around him: Pavel Dorofeyev, Colton Sissons and Keegan Kolesar all signed elsewhere, and Reilly Smith and Brandon Saad are still unsigned. The projection is conservative about how he gets there, asking 187 shots at 9.1 percent when he just shot 13.3, so it is buying minutes rather than a hot hand. He is 33, on $5.9M through this season, and a free agent after it. The reason to be interested is that the last time anyone watched him play meaningful hockey he was producing at a second-line rate in a Cup Final.
Seattle Kraken: Shane Wright
Wright is the youngest player in this article and the one whose underlying play was best. Seattle controlled 55.5 percent of the expected goals with him on the ice, the highest share of these eight, and he still went from 44 points to 27. He is 22, he was the fourth overall pick in 2022, and he is on the last year of an entry-level deal at $887K before he becomes a restricted free agent.
Here is the part most people will miss. His shot rate went up while his points fell: 1.31 a game against 1.15. What collapsed was his conversion, from 20.9 percent to 12.4, and his power-play production, from 13 points to 6. A 20.9 percent shooting season is not a skill level anybody holds, so his 44-point year was flattered, and our 39 has the same weakness in the other direction: it asks for 18 goals on 103 shots, a 17.5 percent rate. This is a projection built on conversion rather than volume, and 103 shots is a very small platform to build anything on.
What genuinely helps is the room around him. He centres the second line between Jared McCann, who scored 20 goals in a 52-game season, and Berkly Catton, who is 20. He was 21 turning 22 and shot cold for a year on a team that finished 34-37-11, and his ice time barely moved through all of it, 13:48 against 14:04.
Calgary Flames: Yegor Sharangovich
Sharangovich has the most misleading baseline in this article. The number people will quote is his 59-point season in 2023-24, and that season was built on 17.3 percent shooting, a rate he has never come close to before or since. He has shot 13.3 and 10.6 percent since, scoring 32 and then 29. It was also the only year anyone ever gave him a power play: 17 power-play points that season against 20 in the other five seasons of his career combined. Treating 59 as the thing he is bouncing back to is how you talk yourself into a player who does not exist.
What is real is smaller and more defensible. He scored 15 goals on chances worth 16.4, so he came up 1.4 short, and his shot rate went up rather than down, 1.82 a game against 1.75, with no injury involved. Our model projects 36, which asks for 150 shots at 12.0 percent, right in the middle of what he has actually done. That is the honest version of this player: a middle-six scorer whose results ran slightly behind his chances, not a 59-point winger in hiding.
Two things never show up in his point total. He is one of the most available players in this article, five straight seasons of 73 games or more, and he kills penalties well enough to score while doing it, with 10 shorthanded goals in 438 career games. That trust is a good part of why a 29-point season still came with 16:03 a night, and Calgary has just traded Blake Coleman, who tied for the team lead with 4 shorthanded goals, to Minnesota.
Calgary controlled just 43.6 percent of the expected goals with him on the ice, the worst mark of these eight, though the club itself sat at 46.3 and ranked 30th of 32, so this is a bad team he is a bad part of rather than one man dragging it down. He opens on the third line with Ryan Strome and 20-year-old Matvei Gridin, signed at $5.75M through 2029-30, which is three more years after this one.
Vancouver Canucks: Brendan Gallagher
Gallagher owns the single most extreme number in this article. He scored 7 goals last season. Our model valued his chances at 15.5. That is a gap of 8.5 goals, more than five worse than anyone else here, and at 5-on-5 alone it was 7.9. He shot 5.8 percent. If you believe a shooting percentage that low is mostly noise, he is the best buy in the division at any price.
The caution is that he has done this before. He shot 5.3 percent in 2016-17 and 4.9 percent in 2021-22, so a cold year is not unprecedented for him, and he is 34 with a shot rate that has fallen every season since 2021-22, from 2.54 a game to 1.57. Our 30-point projection lands in a tight band of 25 to 35 and asks for 15 goals on 142 shots, a 10.6 percent rate that is slightly better than his 9.8 percent career mark, so it is not lowballing his finishing at all.
The other caution is the role. Vancouver acquired him from Montreal for future considerations with half his salary retained, an effective $3.25M through 2026-27, and he opens on the fourth line beside Paul Cotter and Aatu Räty at 12:21 a night, the lightest workload of his career. His numbers last season were earned elsewhere, on a team whose play tilted his way at 53.2 percent of the expected goals, and a fourth-line assignment is not where 8.5 goals of bad luck gets repaid. He needs both the pucks and the minutes.
San Jose Sharks: Darnell Nurse
Nurse is the hardest case on this page. He played all 82 games. He scored 7 goals on chances worth 7.1, as close to even as this gets, so there is nothing to reclaim there. He simply scored 24 points after 33, 32 and 43 in the three years before, on 2.00 shots a game against 2.47, at 20:58 a night, which is his lightest workload in nine seasons.
His power play is where the case for him lives, and the zero he put up there is less mysterious than it looks. Edmonton's power play belongs to Evan Bouchard, who had 33 power-play points last season while no other Oilers defenceman managed more than 3. Nurse was not being judged. He was queuing, and he has had 9 power-play points in a season when the job was his. He had played all 12 of his NHL seasons in Edmonton before this summer, when he was traded to San Jose for Shakir Mukhamadullin and the rights to Zachary Sharp with no salary retained. He opens on the second pair with Dmitry Orlov, behind a first pair of 20-year-old Sam Dickinson and Jacob Trouba, on a team fronted by Macklin Celebrini, coming off 115 points.
Our projection is 28 points, in a band of 24 to 32, and it gives him nothing back on his shot: it asks for the same 4.3 percent conversion he just posted. It is buying 20 assists and 3 power-play points, which on this depth chart may be light. Dmitry Orlov ran San Jose's blue line on the man advantage with 18 power-play points and is now his defence partner, and John Klingberg, who had 9, is off the roster.
He will not play to $9.25M, and that deal runs through 2029-30. The more useful question is whether twelve years in one building was part of the problem. He arrives as the veteran on a team whose best players are 19, 20 and 21, with minutes to give and none of his own history to carry. The bounce-back worth buying here is not that he becomes worth the money. It is that he is better in San Jose than he was at the end in Edmonton.
Anaheim Ducks: Frank Vatrano
Vatrano is the biggest collapse in the division and the widest band in this article, and both come from the same place. He scored 60 points in 2023-24, including 37 goals on 272 shots. He was down to 45 the year after. Last season he scored 9 points on 79 shots. Not nine goals, nine points, in 50 games, at 11:49 a night. His shot rate nearly halved, from 2.89 a game to 1.58, and he shot 6.3 percent against a career average of 10.4.
Three things went wrong at once and they need separating, because only two of them come back. He hurt his shoulder and was out from December 27, which cost him 22 of the 32 games he missed. Anaheim changed head coaches, and under Joel Quenneville his role shrank and then largely disappeared down the stretch. And the puck did not go in when he shot it: he scored 5 goals on chances worth 8.2, so he came up 3.2 short. The injury and the finishing are recoverable. The role is not his to decide, and he was named as a trade candidate in July.
Our model's 28 comes in a band of 13 to 43. He is the wildcard of this group, and where he lands in that range is mostly a question of ice time. It asks for 201 shots, more than double last season's 79, so the whole projection rests on him getting his volume back. He opens on the third line with Cutter Gauthier, who scored 69 points, and Ryan Poehling, which is a better address than he had in March. He is 32 and signed at $4.57M through 2028 with a seven-team no-trade list. Anaheim's obvious bounce-back candidate is Troy Terry, and Terry had hip surgery on June 9 with a five-to-six month recovery that runs into November. Vatrano is the one you can get late.
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