Thoughts on John Klingberg and Jason Demers, Vladimir Tarasenko, and Brock Nelson: PP ace.

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Let’s start with the injury run down, as we so often do following Saturday night’s slate. 

The big injury news this weekend involved Canucks defender Dan Hamhuis, who is likely to miss months (plural) with an undisclosed “significant body injury”. Hamhuis is a marginal fantasy player, but he’s a huge loss for a Vancouver team that has surprised out of the gate.

In his absence I’d suspect that Ryan Stanton and Luca Sbisa will see their time-on-ice spike somewhat, though it’s also possible that the Canucks will just lean more heavily on their top-pairing of Alex Edler and Chris Tanev.

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More injuries, and all of them along the blue-line, as Mike Green of the Washington Capitals also left Saturday night’s game with an upper-body injury and didn’t return. The severity of Green’s injury isn’t known, but he’s apparently just day-to-day so hopefully he doesn’t miss too much time.

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Finally one of the league’s hits leaders, Roman Polak of the Toronto Maple Leafs, sustained an apparent lower-body injury when he got tied up with Tomas Tatar of the Detroit Red Wings on Saturday night. Polak was helped off the ice and didn’t appear to be able to put any weight on his left leg. It seems probable that Polak will miss a good stretch of games as a result.

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Finally an injury of relevance for keeper league poolies, 2014 Montreal Canadiens first-round pick Nikita Scherbak left a WHL game between Everett and Seattle on Saturday night on a stretcher. Apparently he seemed to injure both his leg and his neck following an awkward, but apparently not malicious collision with a Seattle player.

Scherbak was likely to make Team Russia’s U20 team for the World Junior Championship tournament, and with 24 points in his first 14 games of the WHL season, was off to a stellar start to the campaign. Hopefully he’s alright long-term. It’s alway terrifying when the stretcher comes out…

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OK. On to NHL action.

The St. Louis Blues defeated the Ottawa Senators 3-2 in the matinee game on Saturday. Brian Elliott made a junk save, while Vladimir Tarasenko scored another goal and added six shots. In a Yahoo! Fantasy League that uses G, A, PPP, +/-, SOG and Hits as categories, Tarasenko is currently the second most valuable skater behind only Claude Giroux. 

Now that’s what a breakout season looks like.

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It’s probably also worth mentioning that the Tarasenko line, which also includes Jaden Schwartz and Jori Lehtera and is laying waste to all comers in the early going, thoroughly stomped Ottawa’s secondary lines. That line controlled somewhere in the neighbourhood of 70 percent of shot attempts at even-strength, and particularly bashed in the Kyle Turris line.

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The short-handed Boston Bruins outplayed the Montreal Canadiens on Saturday night, but coudln’t beat Carey Price as the Habs stole one with a 2-0 victory. 

The Bruins were forced to play without David Krejci, Brad Marchand and Chris Kelly, but their top-six still did decently well from a territorial perspective and I particularly liked how the Carl Soderberg,  Loui Eriksson, Milan Lucic trio looked playing together. Would be cool to see them given an extended look even when Krejci returns, frankly.

Brendan Gallagher had two assists for the Canadiens, and Andre Markov became just the fourth Canadiens defender in history to score 100 goals for the franchise joining a group that includes Larry Robinson, Guy Lapointe and Serge Savard. 

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The Toronto Maple Leafs flattened the Detroit Red Wings 4-1 to cap off a hectic, controversial week. Tyler Bozak scored twice in his first career multi-goal homegame, while Leo Komarov and Peter Holland had the other goals for Toronto.

Similarly to how the Canadiens got past the Bruins, I thought the Red Wings were the better team for large portions of this game.

Hockey is a game of opportunism though, and the Maple Leafs took advantage of counter attacking chances repeatedly. Several of those chances were provided to them by Gustav Nyquist’s suspect decision making.

Not that Nyquist is particularly turnover prone in general, but on Saturday night every turnover he had seemed to end up in the back of Detroit’s net as Nyquist finished the game with a -3 rating.

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The Lightning bested a Wild team that I rate pretty highly 2-1 on Saturday night, and bounced back after an iffy start to the contest. When you consider that the Lightning were able to dominate a very good team in spite of their No. 1 defenseman being out of the lineup, it becomes increasingly clear that this club is a serious Stanley Cup threat. 

The Tyler Johnson, Nikita Kucherov and Ondrej Palat line continued to control the flow of play on Saturday night, and even though that trio didn’t find their way onto the scoresheet, they combined for nine shots on goal and were all in the 60s by Corsi For percentage. Ryan Callahan meanwhile had six shots on goal and contributed an assist.

For the Wild, they were basically able to hang with Tampa Bay when Mikko Koivu was on the ice at five-on-five. Otherwise, they were out of their depth.

Zach Parise had a solid game with a goal and five shots, and Nino Niederreitter continued his strong play of late with four shots on goal and four hits, but zero points.

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So New York Islanders forward Brock Nelson is now tied for the NHL lead in power-play goals with six, after he scored his 10th goal of the season (and sixth on the power-play, obviously) in Thursday night’s 4-1 Islanders romp of the Pittsburgh Penguins. The 14-6 Islanders are now tied with the Penguins for the Metropolitan division lead and have matched their franchise record for hottest start to a season.

Most impressively though is that the Islanders richly deserved the win in Saturday night’s game, and really put the boot to the Penguins early and often. Only one Penguins skater (Nick Spaling) finished the game on the right side of the ledger by shot attempt differential, meanwhile the Tavares line absolutely man-handled the Penguins on home-ice. That’s good to see particularly since the Tavares line basically played the top of the Penguins lineup to a draw the night before in Pittsburgh…

What’s apparent is that the Islanders are really, really good. It helps, obviously, when Jaroslav Halak is stopping better than 95 percent of all shots faced, as he’s done over his past six games (all victories). Still, what the Islanders did to the Penguins last night was very impressive.

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Some more notes from New York’s big win: Matt Martin scored a goal for his second consecutive game on Saturday night. It’s the first time in his career that he’s scored in consecutive contests, although on two occassions he’s scored two goals in a game.

Anders Lee scored a goal, finished with a Corsi For percentage in the 60s, threw a hit, and took five shots on goal.

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The Philadelphia Flyers defeated the Columbus Blue Jackets on the strength of huge fantasy games for Claude Giroux, Jakub Voracek, and Wayne Simmonds (yeah what else is new).

Voracek and Giroux each had multiple point games, including one PPP, while Wayne Simmonds scored a power-play goal, finished with a +1, took five shots on goal, and threw a hit. 

Scott Hartnell didn’t score a goal, but he threw seven hits against his old team. Cam Atkinson took his customary four shots on goal and Boone Jenner scored his first goal of the season and now has six points (1 G, 5 A) in nine games.

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I actually really like Jhonas Enroth. If I was building a Ken Hitchcock style goaltending platoon, I’d be very comfortable with bringing in Enroth to be my 1A guy and start 45-48 games. 

The undersized Swedish-born goaltender was stellar on Saturday night against the Washington Capitals as he stole two points for the Buffalo Sabres on the strength of 43 saves. Matt Moulson had his second consecutive strong Saturday night of fantasy hockey; scoring a goal, taking four shots, and throwing three hits.