Every year in the NHL there are a number of players that don’t quite meet the expectations that are set out for them at the start of the year.

There are a lot of factors that can impact that performance, from a change in their role, to different linemates they may not develop chemistry with, to some bad luck, to just overall poor play.

In a lot of cases those players end up coming back the next season with a strong bounce back performance that quickly erases the memory of that down season.

Here, we take a look at four players that you should expect to do just that in 2016-17.

Jakub Voracek, Philadelphia Flyers

Overall, Voracek’s 2015-16 season for the Flyers was pretty solid.

He was still a possession-driving forward and his 44 assists (in only 73 games) were the second highest total of his career and the second best mark on the team (just one behind Claude Giroux). A lot of players in the NHL would love to have a “down” year like that.

But the one area where he did struggle was in the goal scoring department, where he managed just 11 goals. That performance was pretty unexpected, especially given the amount of power play time he gets and the fact he is still very early in a massive long-term contract.

On a goal per game level his 2015-16 performance was the second worst of his career, ahead of only his rookie season in Columbus when he was just 19 years old and playing in his first year of pro hockey.

The Flyers probably want to see more than that, and when you look at the underlying numbers in his performance this past season there was still a lot to like about what he did and what should be expected from him this season.

The big thing is that while his goal scoring totals plummeted, he was still putting more shots on goal (2.92 per game) than at any other point in his career. What crushed him was a 5.9 percent shooting percentage that was not only (by far) the lowest of his career, but was also among the worst in the NHL.

There has to be a pretty significant element of bad luck there. Looking at the past 20 years in the NHL, Voracek was just the 10th player over that stretch to play at least 50 games, average more than 2.9 shots per game, and finish with a shooting percentage lower than 6 percent. Of the previous nine players on that list, five of them saw an increase of eight or more goals the following season.

Players with his skill level that generate shots at that should score more goals. Especially when they do so many other things so well (in Voracek’s case, he was still a top possession player and a top set-up man).

Just a small change in his shooting luck and you’re looking at a potential 10-goal (or more) swing this season.

Colin Wilson, Nashville Predators

After adding P.K. Subban this summer, the Predators look like they are going to be one of the Stanley Cup favorites in the Western Conference. They have one of the best blue lines in the league and a talented core of forwards led by Ryan Johansen, Filip Forsberg and James Neal.

You should be pretty confident that the latter three players are going to score and provide the bulk of the offense, but every contender still needs strong complementary cast to pick up the slack when the top players inevitably get shut down for an extended period of time during the season.

That is where players like Colin Wilson have to come in.

Coming off of a 20-goal campaign during the 2014-15 season, Wilson seemed to be on the verge of becoming a reliable scorer in the Predators’ lineup. And then everything went in the tank for him during the regular season, finishing with just six goals in 64 games during a regular season that general manager David Poile described as “terrible.”

Wilson did his best to make up for a disappointing regular season performance by finishing as the Predators’ leading scorer in the playoffs with 13 points in 14 games. It’s important not to put too much weight on that playoff performance because a lot of bad decisions get made based on what happens during a short postseason, and he’s simply not a player that you expect to be a point-per-game player over a full season.

But it does show what he can be capable of when he is going at his best, and he is probably a little closer to being that player than the one that scored only six goals during the regular season.

As was the case with Voracek in Philadelphia, Wilson’s season was sabotaged by an almost unbelievably low shooting percentage, scoring on just 5.6 percent of his shots. Even though his shot rate also dropped, if he had simply shot at his career average of 12 percent on the same number of shots, that would have doubled his goal total.

Eddie Lack, Carolina Hurricanes

Goaltending was once again a big issue for the Hurricanes in 2015-16 and helped mask a lot of progress the team made on the ice, especially when it came to the young defense. Lack, coming off of a successful two-year run in Vancouver where he split time with Roberto Luongo and then Ryan Miller, was supposed to help fix that after being acquired in a draft-day trade.

It did not quite go as planned for him or the Hurricanes. At least at the start of the season.

Lack had a miserable start to the 2015-16 season with a 0.891 save percentage through the first three months of the season. Along with the play of veteran Cam Ward, it helped put the Hurricanes near the bottom of the NHL when it came to their goaltending performance.

The good news for Lack is that after that start he showed significant improvement over the remainder of the season, while his save percentage from January 1 to the end of the season was 20 points higher than that three month slump at the start.

The Hurricanes decided to bring Ward back on a two-year contract, but there still seems to be a very good chance that Lack can take playing time away from him and get back closer to the form he showed in Vancouver. If he is able to do that the Hurricanes could be a nice sleeper team in the Eastern Conference and maybe challenge for a playoff spot.

Sam Gagner, Columbus Blue Jackets

When the Philadelphia Flyers traded Nicklas Grossmann and Chris Pronger’s contract to the Arizona Coyotes for Sam Gagner it looked to be a steal of a trade. And in a lot of ways, it was. Even if Gagner did nothing for the Flyers it was still going to be an important move just to clear some much needed salary cap space.

But Gagner, if nothing else, had proven to be a consistent 40-point producer in the NHL with the Coyotes and Edmonton Oilers and at least seemed like he was going to be a nice secondary scoring option to add to the Flyers lineup.

It did not work out that way for the Flyers or Gagner. At all.

He ended up only dressing in 53 games for the Flyers, spent some time in the American Hockey League, and recorded just 16 points in what prove to be the most frustrating season in Gagner’s NHL career. Entering a contract year, it could not have happened at a worse time for him financially.

Still only 26 years old at the start of the summer, Gagner was only able to land a one-year, $650,000 contract with the Columbus Blue Jackets in free agency. It has the potential to be one of the best value signings of the summer.

Even though Gagner never became the star player the Oilers might have hoped he would be when they selected him with the No. 6 overall pick in 2007, he has still had a productive career and it is pretty clear that the 2015-16 season is the outlier.

Before then he was pretty much a lock for 15 goals and 40 points every single season. That is easily third-line production and maybe even second-line production in today’s NHL (at any given time there are 360 forwards skating in the NHL. Only 112 finished this past season with 15 goals and 40 points).

He also doesn’t seem to be the type of player whose skill and ability would suddenly fall off a cliff in his mid-20s.

If he gets a bigger role and more ice-time than he did a year ago in Philadelphia (and on a Columbus team that needs more skill and scoring ability, he should) it wouldn’t be a surprise to see him get back to that level.