I believe we'll need Rand Prouse to chime in to fully understand what he meant.
I think there was a typo in the message: Hatcher-461 is female, a Dolly Hatcher, so could have no bearing on the yDNA discussion. I can't find any similarly numbered descendant of William Hatcher, Hatcher-46, so don't know if Rand was referring to this William (b. 1614) instead. That said, William shows no possible yDNA connections on his profile, and Rand and William show no relationship, at least not on WikiTree. The message also mentioned three males with the surname Hicks, but that surname doesn't appear in any of Rand's possible DNA connections here, and only a Mary Polly Hicks (married to a Stovall) appears among any of William Hatcher's descendants.
So I'm drawing a blank as to relevance to William Hatcher.
I could comment in generalities about Y-STR null values, but don't know if it would serve any purpose to Hatcher-46. Rand is correct, though, that multiple nulls is rare; and the number he's talking about--six nulls in the Y-37 panel and an additional eight for a total of 14 at 67 markers--is exceedingly rare...if not possibly unique to a single paternal line.
What isn't uncommon is to see a Y-STR null (deletion) associated with a specific haplogroup. The most common here have historically been DYS425, DYS439, and DYS448. The most studied is probably the DYS425 deletion (FTDNA project here) where--although it does show up in some R subclades--the most prevalent haplogroup by far is E-M35.
