But individual scoring isn’t everything. What we ultimately care about is how well a player drives shot differentials or scoring chance differentials, and how those translate to favorable goal differentials.

So let’s take this same sample of 31 forwards around the league with similar usage and identify expected goal differentials (shot volume, adjusted for quality, and, most importantly, blind to goaltender effects) for each player. What does it look like?

Again, Sobotka is a pretty substantial outlier here. The average No. 4 forward around the league gets just more than 50 percent of the expected goals, and that correlates pretty strongly with reality. No. 4 forwards have outscored their opponents 916 to 891 while on the ice this season (50.6 percent), so we have confidence that our expected goal measure is strongly tied to actual performance.

Sobotka is at 38 percent, which is frankly stunning. There is even a larger gap between him and the 30th-ranked forward in the league (Vancouver’s Jake Virtanen at 43 percent). There’s no doubt in my mind that Sobotka is getting a bit tougher minutes than the average forward itemized here, but it cannot possibly explain just how variant the results are. Especially since Sobotka has played with very similar defensive usage in the past, and his performance – before this season – had been there: