Will Hopkins retain his Fantasy-friendly role while playing in a new offensive system?
From a volume perspective, there simply hasn't been a receiver like Hopkins recently. He's the only wideout to finish with a target market share of at least 30 percent in each of the past three seasons. He also is the only one with an air yards market share of at least 40 percent in each season.
Expecting him to repeat such an unprecedented level of volume in a new offensive system takes quite the leap of faith.
The Cardinals didn't have a receiver even top 110 targets last season, as Kyler Murray spread the ball around evenly. Christian Kirk led the team with a 23 percent target market share, and four receivers finished with a target share of at least 10 percent. The second part of that sentence may not seem significant, but it is. The Cardinals use four receivers at the highest rate in the NFL, and it is not even close. Arizona had four-plus receivers on the field for 33 percent of their offensive plays -- no other team even reached the 10 percent mark.
The reason that is so noteworthy is that with more pass-catching options available, Kyler Murray is less likely to focus all of his attention on only one weapon in the way Watson did. The Texans are one of 10 teams that used four-plus receivers on less than one percent of offensive plays in 2019, and they ranked near the top of the league in sets that involved two or fewer receivers.
It's impossible to quantify how much Hopkins' target ceiling will be capped by the change in offensive philosophies. But basic intuition would lead you to the conclusion that he's likely to see fewer targets while acting as one of three or four downfield route runners, as opposed to his time in Houston, when Hopkins regularly operated as the clear first read among only two or three downfield route runners.
Maybe Hopkins will be able to dominate the target market share the same way he did in Houston. He could simply be a transcendent talent that the rest of the offense conforms to. But time and time again we have watched receivers struggle to replicate their big numbers when transitioning to a new team. And with Hopkins' transition including so many potential factors that could result in a downtick in target volume, the only reason to assume he will be immune to the transitional phase that has plagued other big name receivers is blind faith in Hopkins' talent. I don't want to tell you how to draft, but I prefer not to make first- or second-round Fantasy selections based on faith alone.
Fewer targets AND less valuable targets?
Not only is Hopkins likely to see fewer targets in Arizona, but the targets he sees will likely be less accurate than what he has grown accustomed to while playing with Watson. Watson ranked ahead of Murray in nearly every advanced passing metric in 2019, and his pass-catchers saw a catchable target 75.6 percent of the time. Murray's catchable target rate came in at a respectable 74.6 percent in his rookie season, but that was boosted a bit by the amount of throws that went to the RB position. As proof, Hopkins' catchable target rate of 75.3 percent was markedly higher than that of Larry Fitzgerald (72.1 percent), Christian Kirk (71.7 percent), or KeeSean Johnson (60 percent).
As if that wasn't enough bad news, Hopkins will have fewer opportunities to take advantage of lesser defenders from the slot in 2020. Slot targets are worth 10-11 percent more Fantasy points than perimeter targets, and the discrepancy has been even larger than that in Hopkins' case. The Cardinals already have established slot man Larry Fitzgerald, and the up-and-coming Christian Kirk ran 42 percent of his routes from the slot in 2019.
Over the past two seasons, Hopkins' 2.5 yards per route run when operating from the slot has dropped to 2.16 on perimeter routes. So, just to recap, Hopkins will almost certainly be looking at a lower target share, he'll catch passes from a less accurate quarterback with whom he has less familiarity, and he'll run more routes from the perimeter -- where he has been significantly less efficient throughout his career.
Takeaways -- Don't draft Hopkins inside the top-25
Given the amount of question marks surrounding Hopkins' 2020 Fantasy outlook, I am staying far away from him at his ADP. He's going off the board as a top-three Fantasy WR in most formats, but I have him ranked 30th overall as the WR11 as of this writing.
I just don't understand Hopkins' ADP at all. Unless he records a complete outlier type of season when it comes to finding the end zone -- which seems quite unlikely after Arizona's passing offense produced just 20 touchdowns in 2019 -- Hopkins' ceiling seems capped.
When working on projections, Hopkins' ceiling and floor range of outcomes are both lower than that of Michael Thomas, Davante Adams, Tyreek Hill, Julio Jones, and Chris Godwin. He shouldn't even be in the same discussion as those guys if using a statistical-based approach. As stated already, Hopkins isn't in my top-10 at the WR position. He came in just ahead of Calvin Ridley, A.J. Brown, Mike Evans, Adam Thielen, and JuJu Smith-Schuster. Among that group, only Thielen and Ridley do not have a higher ceiling projection than Hopkins, and both have a much higher floor projection.
