Now that the Elite League regular season has finished we can now review who the top fantasy points scorers were across the season. We will also look at the best value players across the season based on their original values.
Overall
It’s no surprise that Scott Conway leads the overall standings by over 100 points after scoring over 50 goals across all competitions this season. As a comparison from last season, Conway scored 887 fantasy points which was second behind JJ Piccinich who had 964 points. Gabe Bast ends up clear in second after coming through the pack in the second half of the season. His 529 points in the second half were just three worse than Conway and nearly 100 clear of Anthony DeLuca in third. The rest of the top 10 is made up of players from Belfast, Sheffield, Guildford and Cardiff.
Goalie
In goal Matt Greenfield has been the clear leader for most of the season. The majority of the teams have either split time with their two goalies or had a change during the season. Greenfield and Shane Owen have been the ever presents in the league with both starting over 60 games, with Paavo Holsa and Anton Svensson being the only goalies to start over 50 games. It shows the key to picking up goalie points is finding those who are likely to start as many games as possible.
Defence
In defence we have the aforementioned Gabe Bast as well as two of his Belfast teammates in the top 10. Matt Petgrave and Marcus Crawford were consistent scorers across the whole season for Sheffield and Cardiff respectively, and they are followed by the Guildford pair of Ben O’Connor and Bradley Lalonde. O’Connor was second in scoring across the second half of the season. Drydn Dow and Brayden Sherbinin are representing the teams who finished in the bottom half of the Elite league table.
Forward
The top 10 forwards are made up from a couple of line combinations, which highlights how it can be a good option for your teams if you can pick up on those lines playing well. Conway and Goodwin were on the same line all year, with the third member of that line generally being a good pickup also. Daniel Tedesco, Ryan Tait and Brett Ferguson played on the same line for a good portion of the season, with Trevor Cox and Cole Sanford having played on the same line for a number of years. Interesting over the second half of the season there are five Belfast players in the top 10 to coincide with their push to the Elite League title. Also Anthony DeLuca was second scoring 431 points when he only scored 173 points in the first half of the season.
Based on our positional top 10’s we can see Dundee players appearing a few times even though they finished bottom of the league table. It shows that they were reliant on a small number of players for their scoring, so lacked enough depth. We also didn’t see any players Manchester or Glasgow in any of our top 10 tables even though both teams made the playoffs. This highlights have they did have some depth across the roster and shared out the scoring.
Best Value
We have goen through the top 10 in each position. however you can’t just pick the top players from each group as you won’t have enough budget or free positions with having a maximum of three players from each team. You therefore have to find those players who can put up points consistently who aren’t expensive. With our values of players increasing for the top performers this season finding those good value players early in the season is more beneficial.
Gabe Bast was easily the most valuable this year with 141 points per million. With a value of just 6.5M at the start of the season he was the top scoring defenceman and a must have for every team. Elijiah Barriga was tied for second with Matt Petgrave but Barriga was just 5.5M at the start of the season. His form did drop off in the second half as he scored 411 points in the first half against 206 points in the second half.
Some other cheaper alternatives this season were Brett Neumann at 7.0M who was generally on the top line at Sheffield, Steven Owre at 7.5M who spent a lot of the last few months playing with Conway and Goodwin, and Ben Sokay at just 6.0M who was a bit up and down during the season but had three weeks of 40+ points.
