Statement from Office Pools: Our friends over at Office Pools have asked me to publish their statement for them. You can read it here.

The Habs have signed M.A. Bergeron to a one-year contract. High risk/high reward here, but definitely worth a flyer. He will play in the AHL for now as he gets in shape, so that gives Yanick Weber about two weeks to really show what he can do. Ditto for Paul Mara. If the offense isn’t there and the power play doesn’t click, then Bergeron will have all the opportunity in the world. He has shown that in some instances he can produce as well as any rearguard in the NHL. But he gets benched a lot for poor work in his own end.

Angus here… you know the drill. Ask your fantasy hockey questions here!

Check out some awesome DobberHockey wallpapers I put together a few weeks ago.

Mathieu Schneider is inching closer to his debut as a Canuck. He proclaimed himself 85 or 90% there, and now it is about building up some shoulder strength. He will be a huge help to the powerplay with his vision, skating, and most importantly his huge point shot.

I’ll be on the Hardcore Hockey show on Sirius at 1pm today.

Alex Goligoski has averaged 22:18 in ice time over two games. My one concern with him when making my projections was ice time. That concern is somewhat alleviated, though we’re only two games in. He is a strong candidate to surpass 50 points this year.

Ruslan Fedotenko will be back in practice today. He missed practice yesterday and left the game Saturday with an undisclosed injury. Still, this could be the opening needed to get Chris Bourque into the lineup, so keep an eye out for that.

TSN is reporting that Sergei Kostitsyn will indeed report to Hamilton of the AHL now. I think he’s done in Montreal though and his odds of going to the KHL are higher.

Sergei Shirokov managed to be a minus-3 in just 10 minutes of ice time. Welcome to the “real” NHL – not the “fake” NHL like you were tearing up in September. He’ll need to shake this quickly, or he may never regain the confidence.

Michel Ouellet, Mark Bell, Kris Beech and Jonathan Filewich have all signed to play in Europe this season.

Michael Del Zotto – a power play goal last night. Gives him three points in three games. This is a rookie defenseman – he is for real and I now have little doubt that he’ll shoot past 45 points this year. That will be enough to earn Calder consideration.

Speaking of rookie rearguards, Matt Gilroy scored his first NHL goal last night. He doesn’t have near the upside as Del Zotto

Like many of you, I needed to find an alternative for the Office Pools site – either temporarily or permanently. As many of you know (and found out the hard way), our friends at office pools had a problem with their upgrade that has had their site down for much of the past several days. They have an option to go to “Office Pools Classic” now, but the players I punched into their new site did not transfer over to the classic site. Naturally, my first check for a replacement was with my friends over at Pickup Hockey. The price is right (FREE), but they couldn’t handle my goaltending format. So on went my search. I found Armchair Pools. What a great new site. Very clean, very fast – I stumbled onto an issue where they were forcing you to invite users from your pool and would not let you put in their team until they accepted their invite. HOWEVER – that’s where Dobber stepped in for ya. I approached them about the issue and they were quick to make the change. Now, simply by sending out the invite, I could then fill in the rosters. It took 40 minutes to put in 312 players. Can’t ask for more than that. Armchair Pools can handle my rules. It has trash talk – I would rather it be a notification for each team as part of the standings, but instead they have it in its own section, but highlighted on the intro page and in a format that is more like a “chat”. That will take getting used to, but has potential. They promise to be quick to add players to their database when I asked about several kids that were missing.. All in all, a very sleek and easy pool managing site. I was impressed with how my pool standings were updated as I entered in each team. Worth a look!