Some players start off hot and cool off. Some come into their own as the season goes on. And as a fantasy manager it’s your job to leap on the second kind of player, and discard the first kind as the useless parasites they are. Welcome to the second part of the Ice Garden’s Fantasy Hockey Holiday Special! Good will to all people except underperformers at hockey!

It’s getting better all the time

With a bit of Google Sheets manipulation, I was able to work out which date marked the halfway point of the first half of the season for each team, i.e. the point at which they’d played half of their games so far. This might be off by a game in one direction or the other: the sheet only stores the points at the end of a given week, so if the halfway game was the first game of a two-game weekend there was no easy way to correct for that.

Given that date, I could work out how many points a player had scored before and after that, and translate that into points per team game played in the second half of the first half of the season, and compare it to points per game in the entire first half of the season. This gives a sense of who’s playing better going into the break than they were coming off their summer vacation.

There are lots of caveats here, of course. The season is pretty short. A quarter season ranges from six games for Harvard to 11 games for Robert Morris, and even 11 games is short enough that a player could simply get lucky or unlucky over that whole stretch. So anything that looks like a trend could simply be noise. Having said that, it maybe gives us a sense of who might be flying a little under the radar and how we might expect them to do. So here are the expected points for the second half of the season, based on performance in the second half of the first half of the season.

Changes between the first and second half of the first half of the season

Five skaters and a goalie who might do better than you think

I’ve picked these based on some combination of: predicted high scoring in the rest of the season based on the second half of the season to date; significant second-half-on-first-half improvement; and not being picked by that many managers.

• Jesse Compher (BU, $47.3, 32.7 SP, 40.8 predicted second half points (P2HP), 7 picks). The computer just cannot get enough of Jesse Compher. Not only is she having a strong season, she’s getting stronger as she goes on — her second-half-of-the-first-half (2H1H) points per game are an amazing 2.55, up .5 from her whole first half (1H) points per game of 2.04. BU play a couple of games against teams with good goaltending in January — two against Providence, two against Merrimack — but in general their second-half opposition is less strong than their first half was, which is a thing the computer isn’t factoring in.
• Jaime Bourbonnais (Cornell, $33.3, 16 SP, 31.4 P2HP, 1 pick): Another D with a very high shooting percentage, like Princeton’s Claire Thompson who we mentioned last time. The sheet gives her the highest increase of all players when you change from projecting based on all of the first half to projecting based on the latter part of the first half. To an extent this reflects that defender scoring will always be more volatile due to the .5 point bonus for defender goals. But it’s also the case that Bourbonnais was away at Four Nations and her whole half-season record is artificially deflated by that. It seems very reasonable that she’ll outperform her first half in the second half, but will she really double her points?
• Jessie Eldridge (Colgate, $52.3, 26.2 SP, 9 picks): Eldridge has been steadily producing for several of our managers through the first half. The sheet doesn’t see her pace changing significantly, but even at her current rate of scoring she’s a solid pickup. Both Colgate and Cornell are coming off a weekend sweep of Clarkson and St. Lawrence that may have been due to the opposing teams’ struggles as much as due to Colgate and Cornell’s improvement: the first few weeks of the second half will give us a clue as to whether this performance from the Colgate and Cornell stars is likely to be sustained.
• Chloé Aurard (Northeastern, $30.2, 21.7 SP, 26.72 P2HP, 7 picks): Produced at nearly .5 fantasy points a game better in the second half than the first half, and from a pretty high base. That suggests that as a freshman she took a little while to find her feet, but now she’s beginning to hit her stride. The sheet really likes her.
• Claire Thompson (Princeton, $33.9, 19.1 SP, 23.8 P2HP, 3 picks): As I said last time, Thompson makes me nervous, but I’m not here to argue with the spreadsheet.
• Carly Jackson (Maine, G, $35.2, 15.1 SP, 19.84 P2HP, 1 pick): The spreadsheet has Jackson as likely to be the third highest scoring goalie in the second half, after known quantities Linsday Reed and Abigail Levy. What’s happening here is that Jackson played five of Maine’s first ten games, and then took over the starting position and played eight of Maine’s next nine. Despite the fact that her save percentage is a less than stellar .919, it’s true that a starting goalie will earn more points than one who splits starts, so it might be worth keeping an eye on whether this continues. One reason to think it mightn’t: goalie partner Loryn Porter is listed as “did not dress” for most of the last nine games, but as “did not play” for the last game before the break, suggesting that she was injured but is now back./

Five-and-a-bit skaters and one goalie who might do worse than you think

Let’s just say the sheet is a bit concerned about Clarkson.

• Ella Shelton (Clarkson, $45.3, 21.1 SP, 7.68 P2HP, 6 picks), T.T. Cianfarano (Clarkson, $40, 20.4 SP, 8 P2HP, 11 picks), Michaela Pejzlová (Clarkson, $59.8, 29.6 SP, 20.32 P2HP, 7 picks), Elizabeth Giguère (Clarkson, $73, 35.4 SP, 25.6 P2HP, 15 picks): All of Clarkson’s players are suffering from their questionable decision to squeeze three of their four losses into their last six games and all are projected to score considerably less in the rest of the season than they have to date. This is still not panic stations — even on this projection, Giguère is still the sixth-highest scoring skater of the second half — but a note that Clarkson have shown that they aren’t guaranteed points the way they were through late October and November.
• Carly Bullock (Princeton, $32.3, 18.5 SP, 12.04 P2HP, 6 picks): Bullock had some early-season explosions but has been quieter recently, and this is showing in the sheet downgrading her predicted score for the second half of the season. As I said in the other trade tips post, keep an eye on the Princeton-Merrimack series this Sunday and Monday to get a sense of where Princeton really stand.
• Maddie Rooney (Minnesota-Duluth, $43.9, 22.2 SP, 13.16 P2HP, 12 picks): The opposite case to Carly Jackson here. Rooney was sole starter for the first eight games, then started six of the next eight. Worse, in those six games her save percentage was .908, as opposed to .935 in the first eight. If she continues to start only 75% of the time there are probably other goalies you should be considering.
• Natalie Heising (Penn State, $29.2, 17.5 SP, 5.5 P2HP, 3 picks): Heising had a 5-5—10 line in the first nine games of the season, and a 5-4—9 line in the second nine. It’s not clear to me, though, why the sheet thinks her second half was so much worse than her first. She took almost all her penalties in the second half, maybe that was it? After a promising start to the season, Penn State is in the doldrums a bit: if they’re going to revive, Heising will lead the revival, and if she does that she’ll probably be worth considering picking up.
• Katelyn Rae (Merrimack, $35.1, 19.1 SP, 10.2 P2HP, 3 picks): Rae scored 8 goals and 4 assists in the first ten games, and then only 5 goals and 1 assist in the next 9. It’s too early to say she’s in a slump, but a few more assists wouldn’t hurt. If anyone at the Princeton / Merrimack series can confirm that they see her actually passing, that would be useful information./

That’s it!

That’s it! Trades to tigFantasyHockey@gmail.com by 11:59 pm Eastern on Thursday Dec. 27 please (AKA TODAY)

Remember, you have four buys and four sells as a one-time-only offer. Choose wisely!