Overperformers: Who might take a scoring step back next season?

Every year, there are guys who score more goals than anyone would have expected, seemingly out of nowhere.

There may be a lot of reasons why this happens, but the question we should always be asking about those players is, What does this mean for the player?

Sometimes, players like Brad Marchand break out. They go from having a long track record of being perfectly good goalscorers to consistently being near the top of the league. For Marchand, that seems to have come in no small part because he started getting a lot more power play time, but also because of things like linemates and deployment.

Other times, players like William Karlsson seem to break out by going from being mediocre or worse to suddenly putting up cartoonish numbers before falling back to earth. Karlsson went from a career 7.7 shooting percentage to shooting 23.4 percent in his first season in Vegas, en route to 43 goals (third in the league). Since then, he has been much better than his pre-Vegas scoring record, but he also has just 53 goals in his last 201 games, a far cry from 43 in 82.