The Fantasy Guide can be picked up online in pdf form for the small price of $9.99. And unlike newsstand magazines – besides being way better – this one will be updated up to October. And that includes the projections.

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Another good ramblings from Drance yesterday. As you saw at the bottom, he’s a part of the Score now. That makes two DobberHockey ramblers poached by the Score (Amato is the other one). I’m gonna pat myself on the back here for identifying the talent and giving them the soapbox. Add in Matt Bugg and Justin Goldman going to McKeens, and the track record here is fantastic.

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And I’m with Drance about O’Reilly being the better man for center. The Avs and the Colorado bloggers and fans can talk all they want about ROR playing the wing – and I’m sure that is how things will start. But by Game 5 he’ll be back at center and someone else will be wing. Logic dictates that it will be Nathan MacKinnon. After all, he’s a rookie and it’s easy to put 18-year-olds on the wing to start their career. You saw it happen with Joe Thornton. And by Year 3, he’ll be moved back to center. Here is more on O’Reilly moving to the wing.

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Several of you may have jumped on the Alexander Avtsin wagon back in 2009 when he was drafted in the fourth round. This was due to his tremendous upside – the mystery, really, about what exactly Montreal had there in him. As happens more often than not, the gamble didn’t pay off. Now 22, Avtsin has shown us his upside and it’s not very high. Hopefully, those of you who took a flyer on him in 2009, saw fit to drop him in 2010 because even at that point the wait was clearly going to be a long one. And now that hope is officially dead, as he has signed to play in the KHL next season. Alexander – we hardly knew ye.

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Steve Montador has also signed to play in the KHL. Montador topped out at 26 points (with Buffalo in 2011) and 143 PIM (with Anaheim/Boston in 2009).

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Since it’s the dry season in terms of hockey news, I’ll grab a few questions from The Hockey News mailbag that are too old at this point to use the next time a do the mailbag (probably a couple of weeks away). I was asked by Patrick of Montreal if I would pick two out of – Nail Yakupov, Alex Galchenyuk, Jonathan Huberdeau and Vladimir Tarasenko. Very tough question and it wouldn’t surprise me if, five years from now, these four players are ranked in the complete opposite order that I put them in. But I would say:

1. Yakupov

2. Huberdeau

3. Galchenyuk

4. Tarasenko

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Gary from Yellowknife asked me what I thought would happen with Tim Thomas. I would bet on Thomas joining a team late in training camp after the starter gets injured. I can then see a bit of a goalie controversy as Thomas plays better and better – and just hits his stride when the starter returns from injury. He’s 39 years old and he left the game with pretty strong numbers.

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I’m hearing that the Red Wings are fairly close to signing Gustav Nyquist to a two-year deal. The  Wings will definitely be over the salary cap, given that they have just $300,000 in cap space. Even if Mikael Samuelsson ($3 million) goes on LTIR, some sort of deal will have to be made just to give Detroit some breathing room. So again I wonder, when it comes to them signing Patrick Eaves – why?

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Here are some questions on the Dallas Stars heading into next season, among them includes one of my favorite topics – Tyler Seguin moving to center. I don’t think it will last, but if he starts winning draws I’d change my tune in a hurry.

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It’s good to be Jonathan Toews – he sold his condo for how much?

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I’m seeing more and more hockey sites copy the Puck Daddy formula of just posting a new news article about every little tidbit that’s out there. USA Today and NBC’s Pro Hockey Talk do that now – and so we have three articles reporting the same thing, usually just repeating what a beatwriter wrote in his local paper. Cheap ploy to increase hits. Puck Daddy puts a humorous spin to it and is always enjoyable. But thirty minutes after they put an article out, one of the other two sites (or both) post a similar, less funny story on that topic. Then they cover their butts by thanking Puck Daddy for bringing it to their attention. Anyway, it clogs up my newsfeed and Google searches.

Take this Justin Schultz piece as another example. He admits that he hit a wall in terms of his energy level. Very interesting. Pro Hockey Talk discusses is in a brief paragraph and links to the Edmonton Sun article.  I want to read the original article, not the PHT commentary of that article. And to be clear, I don’t mind commentary on an article if it’s like my ramblings – several articles listed, with commentary for each. It’s the ‘create an entirely new article to briefly touch upon another article so we can get more clicks’ thing that I resent. This would be the same thing as RotoWorld taking their player blurbs and each blurb would instead be in its own article-page that you have to click in order to read.

By the way – the Schultz information is about what we should expect from college players and generally it takes them about three or four seasons before they stop slowing down in the second half. They really do get drained thanks to the lengthy NHL schedule.

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My condolences to the family of Jim Gintonio, who was the beat writer of the Phoenix Coyotes. He died of cancer yesterday. Having done this for eight years, reading work by each of the 30 NHL team’s beat writers a couple of times each week, it almost feels like you get to know them. So this news was shocking to me. RIP

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I enjoyed this song. Here is a preview (and get the whole thing here):