Today is the day! It's officially the release date for the 2020 Dobber Hockey Prospects Guide. It has everything fantasy hockey owners need to get a leg up in their keeper or dynasty leagues, as well as simply familiarizing themselves with the future elite of the NHL. Just head to the Dobber Shop at 3pm EST – that is the target time for release.

A huge kudos to our prospects team and to Dobber himself. It has been less-than-ideal circumstances for a while now and they've still put together a great product that will prove to be an invaluable resource. Please go support what we do by grabbing your copy!

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One thing that hit my twitter timeline yesterday that I didn't really think about: what about the media members covering the playoffs? A leaked memo from the Professional Basketball Writers Association stated they expected reporters to have to be locked up in Disney World for three and a half months. Also, it won't be reporters for every team, it looks like; more a select number. It's going to be interesting to see what organizations do about this. I certainly wouldn't fault sports reporters for not wanting to venture outside their home for 3-4 months at this particular time in our lives.

What does the NHL do here? Do they just allow people like Bob McKenzie and Julie Stewart-Binks? Or will they allow reporters from individual teams? Maybe 1-2 reporters per team? Or maybe none because it's an unnecessary risk. As much as I value what reporters do, teams are so secretive in playoffs that I'm expecting we eventually get "outer-body experience" as an injury.

There are still a lot of moving parts here and the sand keeps running through the hourglass.

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This is besides a lot of things, it's just something I want to talk about: what does Jonathan Quick have left in the tank?

I say this because the Los Angeles Kings have not been very good of late. In the last three years, they've made the playoffs once, and it resulted in their sweep at the hands of Vegas. (Jonathan Quick, by the way, had a .947 save percentage in that series. He lost two games 1-0 and a double OT game 2-1.) But he was great in the 2017-18 season (like, Vezina-worthy great) before having a real bad 2018-19 and then bouncing back in 2019-20. So is he great, bad, or good?

Quick will be 35 years old for next season. In general, we don't like players and goalies on the wrong side of 30. All the same, we've seen guys like Jaroslav Halak and Pekka Rinne have very good seasons in recent memory, both guys in their mid-30s. It's not impossible for Quick to still be good.

That ties into what I was saying in my Ramblings yesterday about the Kings: can their young prospects develop fast enough to take advantage of the current window with guys like Kopitar, Carter, Doughty, and yes, Quick? I still believe Quick has something left in the tank. Does the rest of the team? I guess we'll find out in the next couple years.

This isn't some sort of fantasy prognostication, either. I wouldn't be drafting Quick too highly next year. Just someone to keep in mind. He may not even be the starter.

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Who knows when the offseason is going to be. I mean, we're still just kind of hoping that the NHL does actually restart sometime early/mid-August. After the NHL's announcement about the Return To Play, the hope was camps would start somewhere around July 4^th weekend. That's already been pushed to July 10^th. Chris Johnston of Sportsnet reports the target right now is playoff starting in early August.

ANYWAY, my whole point here is we don't know when the offseason will be. Maybe it's September and October. Maybe it's October and November. Maybe it's November and December. I'm not sure whether your individual fantasy leagues would allow trades right now, but I want to go through some trade targets.

Every year, marginal fantasy options get moved and find near-immediate success. We've seen it with Elias Lindholm, J.T. Miller, Ryan Strome, Kevin Fiala, William Karlsson, and so on. The trade isn't always in the offseason – sometimes it's the trade deadline the year before – but once they get acclimated, there's a big jump in fantasy value. Most stats from Natural Stat Trick.

Nikita Gusev

The Devils added Gusev, among a few other players, last year in hopes of taking advantage of their Taylor Hall Window. As we know now, that really didn't work out. It makes me think that Gusev is certainly on the trade block. The Devils are now in some sort of quasi-rebuild (again), and that makes Gusev and his one-year left very attractive as a trade option.

According to our Frozen Tools, Gusev gained ice time as the season wore on, adding about a couple minutes of TOI in the second half of the year compared to the first half. He really started piling on the points as the season wore on: eight points in his first 20 games followed by 36 points in his next 46 games. Now, that's an arbitrary cut-off, but it's worth noting a few things:

• In that 46-game span, Gusev's on-ice shooting percentage, or the team's conversion rate with him on the ice at 5-on-5, was 8.7 percent. That wasn't even first or second among the team's forwards, meaning it wasn't a huge percentage binge.
• His secondary assist rate was 0.43 per 60 minutes, fourth among the team's forwards. Again, another area where he wasn't lucky.
• He shot 3.9 percent individually, which was very unlucky.

What I'm trying to say here is that over Gusev's final 46 games, where he tallied 36 points for an 82-game pace of 62 points, weren't a mirage. There were 15 PP assists mixed in which obviously helped a lot. But even 21 points at 5-on-5 in 46 games works out to 37 points at 5-on-5 in a full year, or as many as many as Jonathan Marchessault and Vladimir Tarasenko back in 2018-19.

I think Gusev is a wonderful offensive talent and he would flourish in an offensive environment. He's a guy someone like Montreal could use in the short-term to bridge them until the prospects are ready. Or maybe a team like Pittsburgh or St. Louis trades for him for another Cup push. Either way, I think he's gone from the Devils in the offseason and there shouldn't be a shortage of suitors.

Sam Bennett

Here's a fun fact: if we include Bennet's one game played in 2014-15, his ice time has been declining for six seasons. The 2019-20 season saw him fall to a career-low 12:31 per game. The only Calgary forward who played less per game than Bennett at 5-on-5 was Tobias Rieder, and he's no longer in the NHL. It seems as if he's fallen out of favour with the team. (Yes, he did suffer injuries this past year. Surely that factored in somehow. It still doesn’t discredit his continual TOI decline for a half-decade.)

To me, Bennett feels like one of those "change of scenery" trades in the making, like Cody Hodgson or Alex Galchenyuk. Whether he ever lives up to the fourth overall selection status remains to be seen. But I just can't help but think a guy who is just 23 and has been getting his role cut for years is on the trading block.

Bennett does two things that fantasy owners should enjoy: he shoots a lot and he hits a lot. His shot attempt rate at 5-on-5 over the last three years is 14.33 per 60 minutes at 5-on-5. For reference, that's about the 80^th percentile among forwards league-wide, and higher than names like Matthew Tkachuk, Brad Marchand, Mike Hoffman, and Brock Boeser. He's also in the 83^rd percentile for hits per 60. In other words, with more ice time, there is a mutli-cat monster lurking here.

The question is whether he gets the ice time to do it. That depends on a lot of things. All I'm saying is that with decent TOI allocation, there are 20 goals, 40 points, 180 shots, and 150 hits here. That will play very well. Keep a sharp eye on Calgary's transactions whenever the offseason hits.