2023-2024 Fantasy Hockey Top 5 Busts

Hopefully, all of your hard work and research paid off and right now you're staring at a glorious championship trophy while your leaguemates lick their wounds wondering what the hell happened. 

If you didn't win, there's a good chance you spent too much draft capital on a player who significantly underperformed. In other words, that player you really depended on to carry your fantasy team ended up being a big bust.

A bust is usually a player with an average draft position (ADP) of 100 or higher who fails to provide top-100 value at the end of the season. 

There are various reasons this happens. Maybe the player’s ice time has decreased or maybe he was bumped down the depth chart. Maybe it's neither, but the metrics underneath the hood just aren't looking very good. 

Whatever the reason, these players are the ones who have burned bridges with their fantasy managers. These busts are cast by the wayside, but keeping an eye on the busts can be a valuable tool for extracting value the following season. We need to be ready to pounce when the opportunity arises and they fall in their ADP. 

Let’s look at five players who didn’t come close to matching their draft-day value and also evaluate their potential for the 2024-25 fantasy hockey season.

(Advanced metrics courtesy naturalstattrick.com)

Brandon Montour, D, Panthers (Yahoo ADP: 87.5, Fantrax ADP: 188) 

After a 73-point season in 2022-2023 and a big playoff run, it appeared the Brantford, Ont. native was trending toward becoming one of the elite offense-minded D-men in the game. He still might reach that pinnacle, but the 2023-2024 season certainly wasn't the time. 

Off-season shoulder surgery and the signing and re-emergence of veteran Oliver Ekman-Larsson muted Montour’s early production. He limped out to nine points in the first 27 games and ended up finishing the year with 33 points in 66 games. 

When a player misses a significant portion of the off-season due to injury recovery, we need to take notice of that and bake that into our expectations of that player. At 5-on-5, Montour's numbers mostly held steady. 

His Shots/60 dipped a bit from 6.9 in 2022-23 to 6.11 in 2023-24, but his iSCF/60 (Individual Count of Scoring Chances) was a solid 4.3. Instead, his luck metrics (Individual Point Percentage and shooting percentage) were the real issues at even strength. 

Montour was extremely unlucky converting scoring chances and his teammates weren’t able to help him much, either. Still, this is clearly a player who generates a higher-than-average number of shots from the back end, and that makes Montour a coveted fantasy asset.

His production with the man advantage is where the real negatives came. He was the quarterback for the top unit last season and scored 33 power-play points (PPP). Unfortunately for Montour, the focal point of their power play in 2023-24 was Sam Reinhart. 

Reinhart went bananas, popping 27 power-play goals to pace the league, and it was clear the Panthers' power play had changed structurally, going from low-to-high plays with Montour as the shooter to a cycle game down low with Reinhart as the trigger man. Obviously, it worked well for the Panthers, but Montour found himself on the outside looking in when it came to point production. He finished with just 17 PPP.

The good news? 

On the year, he finished 18th among all D-men in Shots/60, 14th in iCF/60 and 15th in iSCF/60. Plus, the spot on the top power play still belongs to him, and that's unlikely to change. I am very comfortable drafting Montour next year and believe he is primed for a bounce back and finish somewhere in the 60-point range. A defenseman who generates shots and chances at this level consistently will almost always start producing.

Jeff Skinner, LW, Sabres (Yahoo ADP: 57.3, Fantrax ADP: 93)

Drafting Skinner at 57 in Yahoo fantasy always felt a little icky. 

Even though Skinner has proven he can generate shots and scoring chances throughout his career, he scored a career-high 82 points in 79 games in the 2022-23 season in his age-30 season, and that alone should have given us pause. 

Skinner found himself on one of the league's best lines last season when he joined forces with Tage Thompson and Alex Tuch. Fast forward to 2023-2024, and we may have to take off our rose-colored glasses. Skinner’s TOI plummeted from 17:24 the previous season to 16 minutes flat, and most of that diminished ice time occured in the last 20 games where he averaged a measly 13:30 TOI. 

The metrics under the hood were still reasonable, but he wasn’t getting the deployment and even found himself on the second power-play unit for long stretches. He finished with just 46 points in 74 games, which is extremely disappointing considering what he was able to accomplish previously. 

New bench boss Lindy Ruff will have his work cut out for him with an underachieving Sabres squad and he will need to extract every bit of value from Skinner. If Skinner gets top-six deployment and a role on the top power play, I could see Skinner returning to sixth to seventh round value, but that is a big if. It is more likely Skinner finds himself toiling away on the third line while the Sabres prioritize young bucks such as JJ Peterka, Zach Benson and Dylan Cozens.

Needless to say, if you drafted Skinner at his 57.3 ADP in fantasy, you were feeling the burn and his best seasons are likely behind him. Treat him as a late-round flier in drafts next season unless Ruff decides to feature him in the offense again.

Erik Karlsson, D, Penguins (Yahoo ADP: 38.6, Fantrax ADP: 31.4)

This was one of the easier busts to call after Karlsson went bananas last season, tallying 101 points in 82 games on his way to winning the Norris Trophy. However, Karlsson's advanced metrics that matter for fantasy were all flashing red. 

At 5-on-5 in San Jose, he recorded a career-highs with a 67 percent IPP (which is ludicrous for a D-man) and a 10.53 shooting percentage. In short, Karlsson couldn't miss and he was driving offense at an unsustainable level. We knew there would be regression, but the question was how much and where should he be drafted? 

With a 38.6 ADP on Yahoo, it just felt too rich with so many other variables that come with joining a new team. Pair that with the fact that he massively overachieved, and this was all but a foregone conclusion.

Even though he likely won't touch 100 points again in his career, 70 points still seemed reachable if things went well in Pittsburgh. What we didn’t expect was how bad the Penguins power play would be. They finished with the third-worst conversion rate and never really got off the ground, and their underperformance cost them a spot in the Stanley Cup playoffs. 

After eviscerating the league for 27 PPP with the Sharks, Karlsson underwhelmed with 17 PPP with the Penguins. He managed to play 82 games, which is not something people might have expected a few years back, and put up a respectable 56 points. Unfortunately, more was expected from a player with an ADP of 38.6; players such as Evan Bouchard, Roman Josi and Quinn Hughes were all still on the board.

Karlsson will still be valuable in fantasy and he's a fine pick in the 80-100 overall range next season, but he's a good example of why we look at more than one season's worth of production when we are valuing players, and also why we don’t chase performances. We need to look at what is sustainable and what isn’t.

Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, C/LW, Oilers (Yahoo ADP: 32, Fantrax ADP: 48) 

'RNH' is very similar to Karlsson in the sense that he put up statistics in 2022-2023 that were wholly unsustainable. 

Let’s start with the 53 PPP that he racked up as part of one of the best units to ever play in the NHL, which inflated his fantasy value going into drafts. His on-ice shooting percentage of 15.87 percent at all strengths in 2022-2023 was one of the highest numbers we’ve seen in the past decade. On-ice shooting percentage is "a measure of how successful a team is at converting its shots with a certain player on the ice, whether or not the player is the one doing the shooting." Nugent-Hopkins was the best by a long shot, which means he was going to regress. But the question was, by how much?

Nugent-Hopkins' 67 points in 2023-2024 represents the third-highest total of his career, so it is not like he fell off a cliff in offensive output, but he had no chance of repeating of his career season. His floor will always be rock-solid because of his inclusion on that top power play unit in Edmonton, but after 53 PPP last season, he accrued just 26 PPP this season. 

We are very spoiled when it comes to the Oilers because 26 PPP feels low, but it really shouldn’t, and 'RNH' is a better player in real life than he is in fantasy. He still doesn’t shoot a lot and doesn’t generate a lot of chances on his own. The way the 2023-24 season played out is what happens when luck dries up and those pucks eventually stop going in. 

We end up having a player who isn’t getting shots or chances, and also converting at a lower rate. He should be valued as a 70-point player moving forward and drafted as such. Drafting him anywhere before pick 60 makes no sense, and we must manage our expectations.

Tage Thompson, C/RW, Sabres (Yahoo ADP: 12.2. Fantrax ADP: 15.2) 

Oof! 

This one stings because of the promise Thompson showed last season. Former head coach Don Granato had some interesting ideas when it came to Thompson's deployment, and none of them made any sense. At times, Thompson found himself on the third line and the second power play unit, while players such as Jordan Greenway moved up the lineup. 

Was there an injury he was dealing with? Was there a dressing room issue? 

These are questions I was asking myself all year because, despite amazing metrics under the hood and a 47-goal, 94-point season under his belt, Thompson still couldn’t see his ice time increase. It actually went down from 18:35 TOI/GP during his big season to just 18:00 TOI/GP, resulting in a disappointing total of 56 points in 71 games. It's a far cry from the massive numbers he posted in the previous season.

For the season, Thompson was 21st in the league in Shots/60 and 16th in iCF/60 at all strengths. His iSCF/60 regressed, but that is likely due to his performance on the power play. After a dominant performance in 2022-2023 with 20 power-play goals, he fizzled with only nine in 2023-2024. There were personnel changes on the Sabres’ top unit and the consistency wasn’t there; what worked last season did not work this season and Thompson's scoring chances suffered.

He did finish strong with 21 points in his final 19 games and I believe that will carry into the following season. Fantasy GM’s were burned by Thompson's poor performance and they may be gun shy in drafting him again, which is where we pounce. Their loss is our gain and Thompson is a player that I will be looking to draft in all spots next year. He possesses 100-point upside, elite shot and scoring chance generation, not to mention he is surrounded by young, offensive players who will all take a step in their own development.

If Thompson falls into the late-third or even the fourth round in fantasy drafts, that is a smash because I believe he could be a potential league winner with his upside. As long as Ruff gets the memo to play Thompson like the first-line player he is, it’s going to be aces up!

Blake Creamer is a host of the Apples and Ginos Fantasy Hockey Podcast. You can follow him on X (formerly known as Twitter) @BlakeCreamerAG.