Chris Tierney has signed a two-year deal with the Sens carrying an AAV of $3.5M. It is noteworthy because the team could be going into the season with an unproven Colin White as their 1C. It is far from a lock that White is the top-line centre all year. We saw what J-G Pageau did last year on the top line (albeit with an inflated shooting percentage). Not that Tierney will do the same, but at some point in the season, he could be skating 18-19 minutes a night, and that is interesting for fantasy. If he's pushed to the bottom-6, though, there's no fantasy relevance here.

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It won't be long now until the 2020-21 Dobber Hockey Fantasy Guide will be available for our readers. It can be pre-ordered now and is slated for release at the end of this week. Dobber has been working tirelessly on his projections and depth charts while the rest of us writers and editors have been pitching in with our pieces. There may not be hockey for a few months, but there will be lots of fantasy hockey chatter at Dobber Hockey. Help support what we do by grabbing your copy! It would make a great Christmas present, too.

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One thing about the pandemic is not just how it has affected the NHL, but all the lower leagues. In Canada, we've seen Junior leagues stop and start, teams be suspended from playing, etc. In America, we've seen ECHL teams announce they're ceasing operations for the season, for one example, as well as the delay of the NCAA. Then there are the youth leagues and, well, everyone is kind of in the same boat.

It makes me wonder about the World Junior Championships. There are already some elite, young players that were sent overseas by their NHL team, but that's not all of them. Or even most of them. Some players will have been playing in upper leagues, some not. Some will have been playing the entire fall/early winter, some sporadically when their league allows. It won't be an even playing field, is the point here. That, in turn, makes me wonder about player evaluations. Most people don't have the time to watch prospects in second- and third-tier leagues across the world, which is why we here at Dobber have a robust accumulation prospect evaluators. Those people use the World Juniors as a point of reference in their scouting, but they have lots of other data points to use. For the rest of us, it's one of the few times we can view all these future young stars playing each other. But how level of a playing field will it be? And I don't even know who it'd be unfair for. It would depend on which teams have players playing overseas, maybe?

All that is intended is that taking performances at this year's World Juniors – assuming it goes off without a hitch – at face value might be doing a disservice to the player being discussed. Not only are there going to be varying levels of rust, but who knows what is going on behind the scenes for each player in each country.

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Last week's Ramblings largely discussed shot assists and their utility for fantasy hockey (defencemen here and forwards here). If nothing else, digging through surprising players is fun from time to time.

One last thing I want to say about this before moving on from the 2019-20 regular season: these are the kinds of edges fantasy hockey managers should be looking for. Compared to other sports, hockey is still in the Dark Ages, stats-wise. While the NBA has pin-point movements tracked all over the court; we rely on people hand-counting passes during games. While MLB has the distance, elevation, and velocity of every single batted ball; the NHL's shot locations are still sometimes in the stands. Literally.

That is why smart fantasy hockey managers should take advantage of little edges like this wherever possible. Despite the NHL's neanderthal-like approach to almost everything, they will eventually be dragged into the 21^st century, and at that point the current edges will disappear, and new ones will need finding. It is a constant game of finding out the hidden rules – which isn't a new concept, more a reminder – and this is one way to get ahead of people unaware of the hidden rules. Once things like this are automated and available for free to the public, we will need to move to the next one. Make use of what we have while we can.

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Just for fun, I went through Corey Sznajder's 2020 NHL Playoffs zone entry/exit/assist data. I wanted to take some time to go through them to see if there's anything interesting to note. The usual caveats apply here: all at 5-on-5, it's a limited sample (100+ minutes here, which is small), it doesn't give us definitive proof of anything, etc. We are just looking for a possible sign that someone has turned their game around. Remember, there was basically an entire offseason between the pause (mid-March) and the restart of exhibition games (late July). It is not unreasonable to think that we may see some changes from some players. Just remember that a signal may end up being noise given all the applicable caveats. Cool? Cool. Super cool.

(Because our cut-off is 100 minutes, we're not going to see teams that were eliminated in the prelims. Sorry, Kevin Fiala. I see your superlative efforts in a handful of games.)

Nick Cousins

The first four names on our list for shot assists/60 aren't a huge surprise: MacKinnon, Marchand, Pettersson, Barzal. That all makes sense. Fifth on our list? Nick Cousins.

This is curious for one reason: Cousins has, for a few years now, not been very good in this regard. His percentile finish from 2017-20 was the 64^th percentile. That is nothing special and wouldn't indicate someone being capable of a top-percentile finish in any meaningful sample.

But, if we got back a bit further to 2016-17, Cousins's last season in Philly playing largely a bottom-6 role, his percentile finish for shot assists was the 94^th percentile. That 94^th percentile finish, mind you, was in over 600 minutes tracked at 5-on-5, or more than enough for a single season to stabilize (from CJ Turtoro’s viz):

A reminder that Cousins is in Nashville now. Talking about shot assists last week, two names that came up and were very prominent were Ryan Johansen and Roman Josi. Can Cousins help get their non-top line wingers going offensively? If he can perform as he did back in 2016-17, or the 2020 playoff, then yes, he absolutely can. We have seen him be that kind of player before in significant samples. It was a good signing for the Preds.

In a full season, Cousins is very capable of putting up triple-digit hits, and that makes him of note in banger leagues. He has never put up 30 points in a season, though. His lineup slotting will determine his worth in fantasy, but there are reasons to be interested for now.

Chandler Stephenson and Pierre-Luc Dubois

Two different players for two different teams but they do share one thing in common: Stephenson (14.2) and Dubois (14.1) were sandwiched between Brayden Point (14.4) and Nikita Kucherov (14.0) in shot assists/60 minutes. That is very, very good company for Stephenson and Dubois to be keeping.

That the Golden Knights traded Paul Stastny to make room for Alex Pietrangelo tells me that the team probably sees the same thing we are. He played extremely well between Mark Stone and Max Pacioretty, making Stastny kind of expendable. Stephenson has seen a remarkable turnaround in this regard, as he was in the 39^th percentile in his two years with Washington before climbing to the 87^th percentile in 2019-20 with Vegas, and being in the 87^th percentile among forwards in our sample in the 2020 playoffs. If he can maintain that level of playmaking, then Stone and Pacioretty should be fine.

Dubois is always interesting to me because I think the general narrative around him is that he's an elite defending centre, or at least a great two-way forward. The reality is that he's considerably better offensively than he gets credit for, and probably worse defensively than is believed. He just turned 22 years old over the summer, though. There is still growth to be done defensively; that he's as good offensively as he appears to be is wonderful news for fantasy managers, and for those hunting for value in fantasy drafts.

Jakub Voracek

Again, all the caveats about small-ish samples apply here. I just wanted to note that the 2019-20 regular season saw Voracek post his worst percentile finish for shot-assist rate (82^nd) in four years, and he followed that up with a 70^th percentile finish in the playoffs. Now, he had a bad year (for him) in 2016-17 with an 84^th percentile finish, and that year he had his lowest point/game mark from 2013 and beyond. Then, in 2017-18, he posted 85 points, the best season of his career. That is why I say one-year samples (or one playoff sample) doesn't give us definitive evidence of anything.

All the same, it is a concern, and something for fantasy managers to be aware of. If Voracek is losing his playmaking, he's losing the source of his value in fantasy hockey.