Fantasy hockey breakout picks – Forwards ready to shine

We are looking for a forward that is 22 years and 331 days old, with 140 games of NHL experience under his belt.

Seems a little too specific and limiting, right? But keep that target in mind.

This is about finding breakout forwards you can draft to your fantasy team. Ones that we hope will suddenly start producing at a pace that will make you look like you had a crystal ball handy as you made your selections.

I’ve been a proponent of the age-curve breakout measure in the past, but with increasing amounts of data available to us, why limit ourselves to a single factor when prognosticating which players are ready to leap into the fantasy fray? If you want to understand the methodology, keep reading, if you want to jump ahead to see our top picks, click here.

Let’s add NHL experience into the mix as another ingredient to our fantasy stew.

When it comes to age, it’s 25 to 30 years of age that is the peak range for NHL fantasy production among forwards. A density plot of the top-100 NHL forwards for fantasy points for each season going back 15 years shows a smooth, unimodal distribution that peaks at around age 27, with the actual mean coming in at 27 years and 331 days.

That age range has been great to use in the past, and has been a good indicator of previous breakout seasons when we target to age range of around 21 to 24 among forwards.

We can go much deeper though.

Here is the exercise in a nutshell:

• Take all game logs from the past 15 seasons (from 2009-10 onward).

• Find all players who debuted in 2009-10 or afterward.

• Trim that list to players older than 24.7 as of today, with at least 100 games of NHL experience.

• Search the game logs for the first time a player manages to achieve a 30-game rolling average of at least 1.7 fantasy points (my traditional benchmark for broad relevance to most leagues).

• Use that list to determine the average age and average NHL experience for when each player managed to “break out” into fantasy relevance.

This exercise brings us a list of 96 players that are old enough, experienced enough and have achieved at least passing fantasy relevance. This ranges from the likes of Elias Pettersson or Brady…