After months of rehab from his hip surgery, Tyler Seguin made his season's debut for the Stars on Monday night. He started the game on the fourth line but we know how these things can go.

There was a good article over at The Athletic written by Saad Yousuf about Seguin's road to recovery. It is pretty gnarly but very thorough. For those with subscriptions, I highly recommend it.

I am not sure there is much fantasy value here for the rest of the year but just to see him on the ice is a great thing.

He did score in Dallas's game on

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The New York Rangers sat a bunch of guys on Monday night, including both Jacob Trouba and Chris Kreider. Both players have been banged up of late so it's not a big surprise those two guys in particular are sitting. One thing I wonder is if we don't see teams just kind of pull the plug here over the last week or so. This has been an absolutely brutal year on the players and I could very well see coaching staffs decide to give players some nights off, even if they're out of the playoff race. By the time this season finishes, it'll be four months until training camps. Not exactly a lot of time to let injuries heal and start training. For some players, it may be better to just start that clock now.

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Speaking of the Rangers, the kids scored one of the slickest passing plays I have seen this year:

When @Alexlaff13 and Kakko team up… 🙌 pic.twitter.com/mernONTe5J

— NHL GIFs (@NHLGIFs) May 4, 2021

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Both John Carlson and Alex Ovechkin were back in the lineup for the Caps on Monday night. Both had missed time recently with minor injuries. This is a team with Cup aspirations and having everyone as close to 100 percent as possible is the goal here.

Ovechkin left the game after just one shift, however, and did not return.

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In other playoff-related injury news, Carey Price should be back today for the Habs, at least skating in practice. It isn't game action, but they still have a couple weeks to get him into shape for that, so it's just a good sign he's back on the ice.

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I have to mention Michael House starting for the Buffalo Sabres. Who is Michael Houser? Glad you asked.

He has two AHL games in five years, playing almost exclusively in the ECHL. He is 28 years old and wasn't drafted. Here he is getting a start in the NHL. In a hellish season for Buffalo, cool things like this can still happen.

The Sabres won that game 4-2 thanks to 34 saves on 36 shots from Houser. Just an incredible story.  

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Evgeni Malkin was back on what is the second line and back on the top PP unit.

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Remember when Patrik Laine wanted out of Winnipeg because of his role on the team? The monkey's paw just curled a finger:

#CBJ lines this morning:
Robinson-Domi-Bjorkstrand
Grigorenko-Roslovic-Bemstrom
Foudy-Texier-Atkinson
Laine-Dalpe-Gerbe
Del Zotto-Jones
Gavrikov-Lehtonen
Bayreuther-Kukan
Merzlikins
Kivlenieks

— Jeff Svoboda (@JacketsInsider) May 3, 2021

He did get moved up early in the first but this just is a lost season for Laine.

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It was a stacked NHL slate so let's go through the important parts.

Cole Caufield scored in overtime again, from Jeff Petry again on a wicked shot coming off the bench. As the broadcast put it, he has been worth the wait.

The Preds blew a 3-0 lead thanks to a… natural hat trick from Emil Bemstrom? Not exaggerating. The Preds won 4-3 in overtime, but what a way to get two points.

Speaking of hat tricks, Sebastian Aho had one in Carolina's 5-2 win over Chicago. I believe that eliminates Chicago from playoff contention. Dougie Hamilton had 1 and 1 in this game, bringing him to 42 points in 52 games on the year.

Mika Zibanejad had a pair of goals in New York's 6-3 loss to Washington. That makes 20 goals in his last 31 games.

The Stars lost in overtime to the Panthers, meaning the Preds are now four points up on the Stars with four games to play for Dallas. Seguin ended up playing 17 minutes and had three shots on goal.

Philly put up a 7-spot on Pittsburgh, with Claude Giroux (2+1) leading the way. Joel Farabee had three points of his own (1+2), giving him 35 points on the year. Not bad for 51 games in his second year.

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Over the next couple of days, I'm going to take some time and go through some of my preseason prediction to figure out what went right, what went wrong, and how we can learn from some of these mistakes. This is an exercise I do every year, as it I find it helps me avoid making the same mistakes in the future. Do I find new mistakes to make? Of course, but constant incremental improvements is the way to get ahead, rather than look for some over-arching theme; if there's one piece of knowledge I could impart it's stop trying to develop coefficients and just look for small ways to get better.

To start this season's recap, the place to start is probably our preseason Experts' Panel.

I had Connor McDavid picked for both the Hart Trophy and Art Ross, and both of those look likely at this point. Quite frankly, I think picking anyone but him to win either of those two trophies for the foreseeable future is just a mistake. He should be the favourite every year. And, honestly, with Alex Ovechkin getting to the age he is – and all the players around him as well – it's probably a bad idea to pick anyone but Auston Matthews for the near-term as well. The fact is both those guys are in their prime, those guys have already proven themselves to be in tiers of their own, and there is enough of a supporting cast around both of them to sustain elite production for years.

Next up is Cale Makar for the Norris. I still feel good about that one. He may not win, but I think he'll get nominated: he is over a point per game as of Monday afternoon (38 in 37 games), he leads all defencemen in WAR/60 per Evolving Hockey, and his team looks like an absolute juggernaut. What keeps him from winning, or perhaps getting nominated in the first place, is the fact he missed a dozen games. In a full year, that might not be enough to keep him from the top-3, but in a shortened year he missed basically 20 percent of the season. That might be too many games missed for some voters. I get that argument, but it's clear Makar has been one of the best defencemen in hockey this year. Something to keep in mind going forward.

I had John Gibson for the Vezina and that's my first big miss. My reasoning here was, before the season, I saw VGK-COL-STL as the top-3 teams in the West, leaving the fourth spot up for grabs for whichever team has the best season. It didn't quite work out that way, though COL and VGK are clearly the top two teams in the division. The third looks to be Minnesota with St. Louis still battling for a playoff spot. Anaheim, conversely, was the first team in the division eliminated from playoff contention. Gibson has not had a good year by any measure, as his goals saved above expected is in the negatives while his high-danger save percentage (.812) is between Martin Jones (.813) and Matt Murray (.810). Not where you want to be.

Anaheim is making strides forward but I think I over-estimated where they were in their rebuild. It could be another year of pain coming up, which doesn't bode well for Gibson's fantasy value. I still think he's elite, but the team is far from it, and that'll make it hard for him to have a lot of said value.

My Calder Trophy pick was Kirill Kaprizov. In an interview in a hometown newspaper, I said I thought he could be a point-per-game player this year. While he won't get to that level, a good run to finish the year would see him finish with 50 points, which would be a phenomenal rookie year. Jason Robertson has made a huge push but Kaprizov could finish with a 25-goal season (he has one fewer goal than Leon Draisaitl as of Monday afternoon). Unless Robertson goes nuclear over this final stretch, it feels like it's Kaprizov's to lose.

One thing I wonder is where Igor Shesterkin sits in the Calder race if the Rangers hadn't started the year with Jack Johnson and Tony DeAngelo on the same defence pair (I know they didn't play every minute together). They started the year 2-4-2 with losses to New Jersey and Buffalo mixed in there. If they start 4-2-2, they're still firmly in the playoff race. Alas.

Shesterkin has been excellent this year, coming in first in HDSV%, posting a .920 save percentage at all strengths. If he can get to 40 starts and 20-25 wins, he's probably top-3 in the Calder Race. But he didn't, and he's not, so here we are. He might still get there, I guess, depending on how many people vote for Josh Norris.

My rebound player was Dylan Larkin. Whew.

Okay, I should explain that pick.

My theory going into this year were the North and Central would be very weak defensively. Looking at Columbus, Detroit, and Chicago, I was right, to a degree, in the Central. The problem is Detroit was just awful all year, and the injuries and coaching decisions didn't help. We knew they'd be thin for talent, I didn't know Blashill would do what he did all year.

So, Bertuzzi hasn't played since January. Out of his 121 minutes of 5-on-5 time this year, fewer than 50 were on a line with Larkin/Mantha, meaning that trio wasn't a thing for most of Bertuzzi's short tenure. After that, the duo of Larkin/Mantha were split most of the year, both at even strength and at 5-on-5: Larkin spent just 270 of his 610 minutes in Detroit playing with Larkin. With Bertuzzi injured and Mantha mostly on a different line, Larkin was left to carry the play with either bad or unproven players. Not good for upside.

I overrated the upside of the Wings this year but Blashill did his best to ensure low upside for his top forwards. Might be something to remember for next year before we get super excited for a potential Vrana-Larkin-Raymond line or something.

My player to disappoint was Connor Hellebuyck and I feel that was a hit. Not that it's hard to pick a goalie to disappoint, but he was often a top-3 goalie off the board and he's currently outside the top-15 in standard ESPN leagues and around 20^th in standard Yahoo! leagues. I would not recommend putting all your goalies eggs in the basket of a team that is bad defensively. Consider this a lesson learned when everyone gets excited to draft Thatcher Demko next year.

Alright, those are my hits and misses for the preseason Experts' Panel. I think, all things considered, I didn't do too badly. A couple valuable lessons in there for next year. What are some things you learned this year in fantasy?