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
Marcus Crawford reclaimed his place at the top of the player scored standings over the final weekend after leading for most of the first half of the season. It is noticeable though that behind him are six Sheffield Steelers highlighting their scoring power and how it was distributed across the team.
Goalie
For goalies Matt Greenfield was the clear choice to have in your team this year having played the majority of games for the treble winning Steelers. With Ben Bowns and Evan Weninger rounding out the top three it shows that you needed to find a goalie from a top half team who was playing the majority of his team’s games. Our values predicted that Greenfield and Bowns would split more games with their “back-ups” and that the Storm finished higher than expected.
Defence
Drydn Dow and Brady Norrish stand out as the only players to not play for a top half team this season with three Sheffield, three Cardiff and two Guildford players completing the top 10. Both were on the top powerplay units for their respective teams.
Forward
Again this is dominated by Sheffield players but lets mention Dundee duo Ryan Valentini and Spencer Naas who provided the bulk of their scoring, as well as Gary Haden who was the only consistent scorer for the Clan this year.
By Team
Play-off finalists Belfast had a large drop in scoring this year without the Scott Conway/David Goodwin duo. They didn’t have a player in our top 10 for both forwards and defenceman so didn’t really give much value for our GM’s this season.
The trio of Joey Martin, Cole Sanford and Trevor Cox were probably expected to be leading the league in points this year, and although each had good seasons perhaps more was expected.
Scoring was an issue for the Blaze this year with only Kobe Roth, who provided good value at 6.5M, and Ian McNulty breaking the 400 point barrier for forwards.
Defensive scoring was a problem for Dundee with only Drydn Dow in their top 10 scorers. Spencer Naas will feature later in our most valuable players after scoring 564 points with a 6.0M value.
Fife had a solid season with some scoring up front lead by Troy Lajeunesse who was 100 points clear of Kyle Osterberg in second. In defence though Sean Giles was the top scorer managing to get just over 200 points.
Goaltending was a problem for the Clan with no goalie in their top 10 scorers. Having two goalies split the playing time didn’t work as neither managed to stay hot and pick up the wins. Injuries for high priced Charlie Combs and Philippe Sanche meant they never scored as many points as predicted.
With Daniel Tedesco moving to Belfast the Flames shared the scoring out this year. They had a lot of players with good if not spectacular years meaning that they didn’t catch the eye of a lot of our GM’s.
With Evan Weninger leading the scoring for Manchester you can see that scoring was the problem for Storm this year. However the defensive style worked with a 4th place finish but didn’t give our GM’s many good options to bring in.
It was an understandably difficult season for Nottingham but Otto Nieminen lead the scoring breaking the 500 point barrier which is more than any Belfast, Coventry or Manchester player.
Not much more to say around the Sheffield scoring but a shout out to Dominic Cormier who was a mid-season signing and then scored 393 points.
Most Valuable
Our most valuable players are ranked by points per million to show who gave you the most points for the money spent. With a spending cap on your team you couldn’t pick a whole team a high priced players, therefore needed to round out your roster with those players who were valued slightly cheaper but outperformed their valuation.
Mitchell Balmas leads the way with 97.0 points per million and then it was two names who might have slid under the radar but should have been in your teams. Troy Lajeunesse and Spencer Naas had 96.3 and 94.0 points respectively as they were both valued at 6.0M.
If we narrow that down further we can see the most valuable players valued at 6.0M and under. Our top teams in the FHL UK league standings this year generally had one or two players in this category to allow then to have multiple high valued players. Bode Wilde and Joe Hazeldine were both signed mid-season so a full season with that production would have potentially took them into the top 10 valuable players. Alessio Luciani and Robert Lachowicz both provided good scoring options in your line-up at just 5.0M.
