The Fantasy Guide – my eighth – was released Thursday and updated Friday. The Draft List was added Friday. Both PDF and Excel documents are ready for download.

*

Happy Long Weekend! At least here in Ontario. I don’t know how it works in the other provinces/ countries. But that’s why the signings have stopped. They’ll resume again Tuesday I’m sure.

*

Alexei Ponikarovsky has signed a contract to play the next two years in the KHL.

Former Calgary prospect Mitch Wahl has signed to play next season in Europe.

*

Jonathan Drouin was hit in the foot by a puck and will miss both days of the Canadian WJC summer camp. The injury is not considered serious – and I wouldn’t expect Drouin at the WJC in December anyway, because he will be with Tampa Bay.

*

Good news hotmail users! For the last few months, hotmail has been blocking my dobbersports domain emails. That means that if you have a hotmail account you haven’t been getting:

a) a verification email to activate your account

b) a ‘reset password’ code, if you were trying to login but forgot your password

c) a receipt from the shop if you ordered something

d) a notification from the forum, if you subscribed to a thread

e) the newsletter that you may have signed up for

f) any replies that I write you from the admin email address. So I had been forwarding the emails to my dobberhockey email address and replying to you that way.

Hotmail has finally lifted the block and by tomorrow you should be getting dobbersports emails again. If you have experienced any of the above issues, try again now. And if there is still a problem, email me.

*

It looks like Mike Knuble will retire. He has limited his options to just a couple of NHL teams because he doesn’t want to be far from his family again. And the teams listed – Chicago and Detroit – are already very full and he knows it. Knuble’s a smart man – or at least he has a smart agent. Because he has always had third-line talent, but managed to hook on with team after team that needed a winger for their superstar. And Knuble filled the void nicely each time, inflating his stats (and driving up his contract price) along the way. He played with Joe Thornton in Boston, which got things rolling (peaked at 59 points). Then he played with Peter Forsberg in Philadelphia (peaked at 65 points). And then off to Washington where, of and on, he saw time in the first season with Ovechkin (53 points). This is a 35-point guy who year-after-year exceeded that number because he could keep up with star linemates. Hats off to him.

*

Great ramblings by Drance yesterday and I echo his sentiments about Cory Schneider. Indeed, if he does not start at least 55 games, I too would be shocked.

I’m not on board with his Reimer stance though, but I’m not completely against it. Reimer has ‘it’. That intangible way of winning. In my books, he’s terrible with giving up rebounds – I can’t remember seeing anyone worse for that. But he’s always where he should be and the puck hits him when he needs it to. So I don’t rule him out, but my money is on Bernier. The Golden Boy status wins out every time, and Bernier has that status.

*

I’ll be looking at bringing in a couple of new writers today and tomorrow, reviewing some of the work done in the forum by those who threw columns in there as a ‘tryout’. I’ve already read a couple of them and enjoyed them both. What I do know for sure is that Amato (Wild West) and Laidlaw (Cage Match) are going to be done with those columns and focusing on managing the site. Rick Roos will be the new Cage Match guy, which is well deserved because he’s written some fantastic pieces for his Holding Court article.

DobberBaseball, which had 360,000 page views in July, easily a record, lost two writers in the last couple of weeks, plus the co-managing editor… and the other managing editor is on vacation. So I’m doing a bit of scrambling to get new writers in place there. I don’t want to lose the momentum there.

*

Lars Eller has passed his neurological tests and is healthy and ready to go. Great news, because the hit was so nasty that I wasn’t even sure he would start the season ahead. His production has increased in each of his three NHL seasons and now he’s entering his magical fourth. But he’ll be battling for ice time with three other top-notch centermen on that team.

*

Evgeni Malkin: “Maybe at some point in my career I will realize it’s time to return to Russia.” Malkin is signed until 2022 and I think is a safe bet to see it through (I had to point that out, because obviously a lengthy contract isn’t enough to keep a player in the NHL).

*

Speaking of Russia, do you remember Maxim Balmochnykh? He was in my keeper league for a couple of years in the late 90s, had plenty of upside. Anyway, here is an interesting interview with him in which he goes into detail about why things went wrong and how he should have stayed in Russia for several more years instead of crossing the pond so early.

*

This piece on the Top 10 prospects for the Kings caught my attention in that team brass likes Linden Vey a lot more than I thought. Vey is ranked 146 on my Fantasy Prospects List, but I bumped up his ‘certainty’ a little and pushed his ‘NHL Readiness’ ahead from two years to one-point-five. That should equate to a bump of 50 spots or so for the next update on the 10th.

*

No official news release, but Steven Pinizzotto, who was in the Canucks’ organization, now appears on Florida’s website.

*

He hasn’t made it official yet, but Steve Sullivan is 99.9% sure that he will be retiring. Sullivan has always been one of my favorites, from when his girlfriend went to Guelph while I was there and I grabbed his autograph…to my moving to London next door to a group of guys from Timmins, one of whom was Sully’s cousin, but all were good friends of his. On a side note, my sister ended up marrying one of those guys. Not to mention my well-known enjoyment of the smaller, skilled players.

And here is the funniest Sullivan highlight