Fantasy hockey’s most consistent players

While you’ve missed a lot of fun in the first two months of the NHL season, there is still some time to get a league going. The vast majority of fantasy players choose head-to-head points leagues. And while you won’t get to enjoy the nearly 30 games from most teams already on the books, you can learn from them before you draft.

The rest-of-season fantasy hockey rankings are available every Monday here on ESPN.com, but there is more you can glean from this season when digging a bit deeper — especially for the most popular format of head-to-head points. We do an offseason piece here looking at consistency by comparing the weekly output of each player over the course of multiple seasons to see how much they stray from their average output. And we can do that during a current season by diving down another level in measurement.

Instead of weekly fantasy points per game, as we do in the offseason, let’s look at the weekly fantasy points per 60 minutes during the current campaign. We have nine weeks of data to look at, so let’s re-work the consistency numbers for the league over these nine weeks of action.

You can hop over to the preseason consistency piece for a primer, but I’ll try to sum it here quickly. After taking each player’s weekly fantasy points per 60 minutes (FPP60), we can find their standard deviation from the mean quite easily. Which is, succinctly, how much they stray up or down from their average output of fantasy scoring in any given week. But that total also needs to be compared back to their overall FPP60 for the season to find the coefficient of variation, which normalizes the data for every player so they can be compared apples to apples. A low coefficient of variation means a player strays only a little from their average and gives you close to consistent scoring each week. A high coefficient of variation means a player can have wild swings in production, winning you your matchup in one week and ghosting you the next.

It’s not quite as simple as that, as some players build on their fantasy profile over time, which creates larger deviations, but is also a positive and growth can hardly be considered as equal to inconsistency. So you need to still take the coefficient of variation in context with what you know about the player. We’ll touch on that when highlighting the individuals below.