What does Marco Kasper need to do this year to get his career back on track?

I may have peaked when I was a freshman in high school. I was the homecoming prince for my class. I won the election for class president, and I was the MVP on my junior varsity baseball team. Then, I moved to a new city where I didn’t know anyone. I tried to dye my hair brown with some store-bought product, and it turned out purple. I corrected it to red, and whenever I met somebody new at school, they would ask if I was Irish.

Why do I tell you this? Because that’s what I consider a sophomore slump. Mine was more of a detour. By my junior year I had my normal standing back, and in the end, my natural hair color was restored.

What Marco Kasper did last year was something totally different.

It was worse than a sophomore slump. Of the 172 forwards since 1997-98 who had rookie years like his, the median one got 18 percent better in year two. Four fell as far as he did. He may have permanently altered the trajectory of his career.

A year ago he looked like a shoo-in second-line center with an outside (and I mean outside) shot at the top line, and now he’s in a bottom-six role where Todd McLellan is also trying him out on the wing.

I won’t write in ink that he’ll never get back there, but the situation is dire. I went through a boatload of data, and there’s still a path to a top-six center peak. It’s a razor’s edge.

Marco Kasper’s rookie season was better than his box score

If you like counting stats, Kasper had a good but not great rookie season, with 19 goals and 18 assists. Heading into the season, most people thought Kasper would be a good defensive center, hard to play against, but also not likely to put up a lot of offense. If you told those people he’d score 19 goals as a rookie, they’d be ecstatic.

Take every forward since 1997-98 who was an NHL regular at 20 or younger (266 in all). Kasper’s goals per 82 ranked in the 69th percentile of that group, and his points per 82 in the 56th. Nothing to sneeze at. Also nothing to write home about.

Look deeper and you’ll find he impacted the game more than his box score let on. His RAPM xG±/60, which isolates his impact on expected goals from his teammates and opponents, ranked in the 86th percentile of all NHL forwards, not just rookies. His expected goals above replacement (xGAR) was 9.6, which ranked in the 75th percentile among all NHL forwards that year.

But the real story? Most of his scoring came in the final 39 games of the season. He had 11 points in his first 38 games and 26 in his last 39, a 55-point pace at almost 17 minutes a night. Heading into the offseason, expectations grew so much there were rumblings about him being a bona fide second-line center behind Dylan Larkin. Not because a thin roster forced him into the role (although that was already happening), but because his play put him in that echelon league-wide.

What’s worse than a sophomore slump? A Kasper

What Marco did his second year was so unique, it warrants turning his last name into a verb - he Kaspered. How unique are we talking?

Now take a different group: the 172 forwards since 1997-98 who were 21 or younger as rookies, scored at a 30-to-55-point pace, and played at least half of year two. Sixty-three percent of them got better in year two, and the median one improved by 18%. The sophomore slump isn’t the rule. It’s the exception.

Give Kasper that median bump and he’d land somewhere between 45 and 50 points. 20 goals and 25 assists would have been a normal second-year output for the type of rookie season he had.

That’s not what the hockey gods had in store for Marco Kasper. He finished with 9 goals and 10 assists.

And honestly, it felt worse.

He scored on the second night of the season. Over the next 27 games he scored twice more, both on one night in Los Angeles. 29 games, 3 goals, 0 assists. A second-line center does not do this.

Of those 172 forwards, four fell as far as he did.

How Marco Kasper’s second season impacted his career trajectory

First, the good news. What made Kasper such a good rookie was the hockey sense beneath the scoring output. That didn’t go away. His individual expected goals per 60 minutes at five-on-five (ixG/60) barely moved. He had 0.82 as a rookie and 0.81 in year two.

But the results fell off by more than advanced stats can make up for. His confidence was shot, and his ice time went from 16:45 a night at the height of his rookie year to 11:42 at the low point of his second (15:27 to 13:48 across the full seasons).

Let’s get into the projections. After his rookie year, the projection for Kasper’s best single season between ages 22 and 28 was about 67 points. That was the median outcome, and the optimistic end of the range ran to 88.

Instead? That expected peak is 45 points. His typical season over that stretch was projected at 48 points. Now it’s 28, nine fewer than he scored as a rookie.

Getting back to the original trajectory

Four other forwards in that group of 172 kept less than half their rookie scoring rate, the way Kasper (0.48x) did:

• Mattias Tedenby (0.38x)
• Cole Sillinger (0.43x)
• Magnus Paajarvi (0.47x)
• Anthony Duclair (0.47x)

The model’s three lines for Kasper cover the same ground. The pessimistic one has him under 10 points a season by 26 and out of the league by 29. The realistic one settles around 25 to 27 points a season. The optimistic one climbs to about 55 by 27. These four landed all over that range.

Mattias Tedenby is the worst case. He scored 22 points in 58 games for New Jersey at 20, then six in 43 the next year. He played 19 more NHL games after that.

Magnus Paajarvi, a 10th overall pick, scored 34 points as a 19-year-old in Edmonton. The next year he managed eight in 41 games. He never got back to 20. His second-best season was 19 points at 27, and it was his last in the NHL.

Cole Sillinger’s drop was even steeper. He went from a 32-point pace as an 18-year-old rookie in Columbus to a 14-point pace the next year. Over the next three seasons he’s averaged 36 points per 82 games, right back at his rookie level. The Red Wings could stomach that from Kasper, or a little more, if they knew they had a reliable third-line center behind him.

Anthony Duclair had the best rookie season of the five, Kasper included. He had 20 goals and 24 assists in his true rookie season. That number plummeted to 15 points, albeit in 58 games. Then, from 24 to 26, he averaged 58 points per 82 games, on his fifth and sixth NHL teams. He was able to get to a level above his rookie season output and is still playing at 31 years old.

Before we get to what it takes to climb back, it’s important to know where the 18-point gap between his rookie year and second year came from. Half of it was luck, and half of it was real. His expected goals only dropped by 4, but his actual goals dropped by 10. And when his teammates did score, he got a piece of it far less often. His secondary assists fell from 11 to two.

The real half was ice time. He lost almost two minutes a night and 20 power-play minutes over the season, so he generated fewer chances, and his linemates generated 10 fewer expected goals with him on the ice. If his numbers had held at expectation, he would have finished with 15 goals and 14 assists.

That’s still below his rookie output, but it’s more in line with accidentally dying your hair purple and fixing it to red.

To get back to his original projection, he needs to score at a 65-point pace this season while averaging about 15:20 a night, the median for an NHL forward. The minutes count too, because they show how much Todd McLellan trusts him. This also allows for the fact that he’s been on the injured list for most of the start of the season.

If that sounds unreasonable, it is. Since 1997-98, forwards 23 or younger have played 1,254 seasons at median minutes or less. Five of them scored at a 65-point pace. They are Bobby Ryan, Nikita Kucherov, Marek Svatos, Martin Havlat, and Jason Spezza. That’s good company, and beyond what Kasper is likely capable of.

All thanks to that second season.

The realistic bar is lower, and it’s still a climb. At those same minutes, a 36-point pace (about 0.44 points a game) puts him back on a middle-six track. A 47-point pace puts him on a top-six track. And year three is the inflection point. Since 1980-81, 21 forwards started like Kasper and stuck as regulars in year three. Of the 11 who scored at a 35-point pace that season, seven later had a 50-point season. Of the other 10, one did.

There’s even a precedent for the climb. Andre Burakovsky went from 35 points in 64 games at 21 to 25 in 76 at 23, playing 11 minutes a night in Washington. Colorado traded for him, gave him four more minutes, and he scored 45 points in 58 games.

Now, Marco Kasper is a unique individual walking his own path. Comps are really just to give context for the uphill battle he’s facing. Can he climb it? I’m not sure even he knows. Kasper’s hair is still looking purple to me.