The Cutter Gauthier stats from his first 11 games this season looked like a slump. The ones from his last six look like a misprint.

Two goals on 38 shots before Oct. 29. Thirteen goals on 34 shots since.

Same player, same power play. Different luck.

That gap is the whole question for anyone pricing Gauthier props or setting a fantasy lineup before the Ducks host Nashville on Wednesday night.

The hat tricks happened, and they were something. Nov. 1 against Ottawa. Nov. 3 in Vancouver. Nov. 8 against Pittsburgh, finished off with an empty-netter at 19:26 of the third in a 5-2 win, Anaheim’s fifth straight.

According to NHL.com, nobody had ever scored three hat tricks inside the first 10 days of a calendar month. Phil Esposito had the old mark at 13 days, back in December 1970. Gauthier is also the fourth Duck to score three in one season, joining Corey Perry, Frank Vatrano and Teemu Selanne.

His coach, Joel Quenneville, kept the scouting report short.

“He’s hotter than a firecracker.”

Gauthier’s own explanation was shorter still.

“I’m just shooting the puck and they’re going in, so I’m just going to keep shooting it.”

He has both halves of that right. Only one half lasts.

Start with the half that does. Gauthier has 72 shots on goal in 17 games, a little over four a night. Last season, when he scored 41 goals in 76 games, he put up 285 shots, closer to three and three-quarters a game. His ice time is up too, from 17:15 a night to 18:18. That isn’t a hot hand. That’s a bigger job.

Then the power play. Anaheim’s is the best in the league at 38.5 per cent. Ten of Gauthier’s 15 goals have come with the extra man. Leon Draisaitl, tied for the league lead with 16 goals, has eight on the power play. Over the eight-game run the Ducks went 18-for-33 with the man advantage, per NHL.com.

So the volume is real. The role is real. Anaheim believed it enough to hand him a six-year, $81 million deal in September, a $13.5 million cap hit, and nobody pays that for a hot week.

Now the half that doesn’t last.

Gauthier is shooting 20.8 per cent this season. During the six-game goal streak, it’s 38 per cent. Last season, the best of his career, he shot 14.4 per cent. The year before, 10.5.

Do the arithmetic at last season’s rate. On this season’s 72 shots, that’s about 10 goals, not 15. On the 34 shots in the streak, about five, not 13.

Five goals in six games would still be a terrific week. It would not be three hat tricks.

And the October version, the one shooting 5.3 per cent, was every bit as fake in the other direction. The real player lives between the slump and the bonfire, a lot closer to last season’s number than to this week’s.

The team around him is running hot as well. The Ducks have scored five or more in eight straight games, only the eighth team in league history to do it and the first since the 1988-89 Los Angeles Kings, according to The Sporting Tribune. They’ve done it while averaging under 25 shots a game. That’s a lot of pucks finding twine from not a lot of tries.

Streaks like that don’t usually stop in a single night. They tend to wear off a little at a time.

The schedule won’t help. Nashville kills penalties at 88.5 per cent, third best in the NHL. The Islanders, in on Saturday, are fifth at 85.7. Compare that with Vancouver, where Gauthier scored two of his three goals on the power play. The Canucks rank 31st at 63.5 per cent.

A power-play goal scorer about to face two of the league’s better penalty kills, coming off a run where he scored on nearly four of every 10 shots.

That is regression bait, plain and simple.

But only at the goal price.

When a player scores 11 times in eight days, the anytime-goal number gets shorter, and the shorter it gets, the more a bettor is paying for the 38 per cent instead of the four shots a night. The shots-on-goal line is where the real Gauthier shows up, because shot volume comes from the role, and the role isn’t going anywhere. That line will climb too, so price it, don’t chase it. Nothing about a hot player is a lock, in either direction.

Fantasy managers have the easier call. Don’t sell him because a regression is coming, and don’t buy him from a rival at a 50-goal price either. A winger putting four shots a night on goal, with two-thirds of his goals coming on the best power play in the league, is a keeper whether the pucks go in this week or not.

The goals will slow down.

The shots won’t.