Fantasy hockey draft tips – Breakout defensemen picks for 2024-25

What is our target this time? Glad you asked!

We want a defender who is 24 years and 105 days old with about 132 NHL games to their name.

If you haven’t already read the breakout forwards piece, the introduction there will go into more detail about how we are defining and finding players for a potential fantasy breakout. The process for defense is much the same, with a few tweaks based on the statistics. If you want to see our methodology, keep reading on, but if you want to jump ahead to see our top picks, click here.

What makes a breakout candidate

The slope for fantasy production by age among defenders is gentler than it is for forwards. That is to say, they typically take a little longer to reach their fantasy prime and get to spend a little more time there.

Sure enough, when we take the top 60 defensemen in fantasy points from each of the past 15 NHL seasons, the average age is 28 years and 122 days old, which is half a year older than the forwards.

Using the same exercise as the forwards, if we take all defensemen who debuted in or after the 2009-10 season, are at least 25.7 years old (added a year compared to forwards) and have at least 100 games of NHL experience, we will find the average age and experience for when these players broke onto the fantasy scene.

Same as the forwards, we are using a 30-game rolling average of at least 1.7 fantasy points per game (FPPG) to determine a “breakout” occurred.

The range in this case is broader than it was with the forwards. As with the forwards, there are those players who “broke out” instantly, like Charlie McAvoy, Cale Makar and Zach Werenski. But the other end of the spectrum is more extreme, with Erik Gudbranson bringing up the rear having played 726 NHL games before he had a 30-game rolling average of 1.7 FPPG at almost 32 years old. There were 83 total defenders to use to find the averages.

And that’s how we got the target above: 24 years and 105 days old, and 132 NHL games.

So, same as the forwards, we’ll give leeway of a year for the age (so 25 years and 105 days is the cutoff) and a range of 40 games either side of the average of 132 (so 92 to 172).

The age cutoff…