For the 14^th time in 15 years (damn lockout), I am offering a playoff draft list for your playoff pools. This will be available for download Monday (so it may be available as you read this. It is an interactive list – you select your teams that go deep, run the rankings on the spreadsheet, and you get your draft list. So you can print off a couple of scenarios. I'll also include my own list, in case you don't want to do the work. You'll need excel and you'll need macros to be allowed. You can run these on Google sheets, but the macros won't work – you'll have to sort it manually (not a huge deal, you just miss out on the cool gimmick). Pick it up here.

Those of you who subscribed to DobberHockey's guides (thank you) you may have noticed these charges went through yesterday. Subscriptions will process May 15. This is our first time offering subscriptions so naturally this is the one year where the regular season is actually still going on May 15. Just to confuse our wonderful new subscribers. Rest assured, if I have to go in manually and add it (I shouldn't have to, but just saying) – if your subscription processed on May 15, you will get everything you paid for when they come out. Sorry for any confusion.

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The Islanders are my backup playoff team. While I run scenarios in my playoff draft list that favor Toronto, Vegas and Colorado (as everyone does), the Islanders are that team that I go with at the end of the draft. The perfect end-of-draft team. Because nobody takes Islanders and yet at the same time they are the type of coached team that can steal a couple of rounds. So in a 12-round draft, I'd probably grab one in the eighth, 10^th and 12^th rounds.

The hard-working, team-defense style coaching systems tend to get teams into the second round and perhaps even the third round. For the purpose of this season's unique setup, the Islanders, Wild and Hurricanes are each good ones to grab under my scenario above. Carolina in particular, because they have a few offensive studs that can take them to the third round or even all the way. So those players are probably not going to slip. But Islanders and Wild players almost certainly will.

I'd once again recommend Anthony Beauvillier. Maybe even over Mathew Barzal. Beauvillier has points in eight straight games. He has 23 points in his last 26 games, including a beauty assist on Sunday. That leads the Islanders in that span (which goes back to March 20, two full months ago).

Other playoff performers – J-G Pageau, who we saw put on a clinic Sunday. Pageau averages 0.44 points per game in the regular season… and 0.52 points-per-game in the postseason, for his career. And as a final-round pick, if you are building on Penguins and all the good ones are gone: Frederick Gaudreau. He has four points now in eight career playoff games, but just 18 in 103 regular season contests. His getting into the lineup is reliant on Evgeni Malkin staying out of it, so I wouldn't count on seeing too much of Gaudreau.

No word on how long Malkin is out. He was an unexpected scratch, seeing as he played their last game (albeit limited to just 13 minutes). "Unexpected" because we didn't know for sure he would miss until warmups.

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Vegas and Minnesota played to another overtime, making the playoffs three-for-three in heading to overtime at that juncture. Cam Talbot was dynamite, stopping all 42 shots he faced. Marc-Andre Fleury was also amazing, but allowed the overtime winner on the 30^th shot. I doubt that's enough to give the next start to Robin Lehner, unless Pete DeBoer was going to take turns with the goalies anyway.

Of note for Vegas, with Max Pacioretty out, Tomas Nosek was moved up to the Mark Stone line. So his hot second half made enough of an impression to earn a look on a scoring line. The trio were effective, creating 12 chances whilst only giving up seven.

The line for Minnesota that got the winner was Joel Eriksson Ek with Marcus Foligno and Jordan Greenway. Those three have had great chemistry all year. Eriksson Ek and Greenway have had minor breakouts, while Foligno regained some of that touch he showed us back when he first arrived in the NHL (but nothing since). The irony is – the line was probably the worst on the team all game long, giving up chances by a 15-6 total.

Why keep Kevin Fiala and Kirill Kaprizov apart? I don't get that. Put them together! I mean… Ryan Hartman with Kaprizov and Mats Zuccarello? The guy had a million chances and could never convert. I get that the two stars are on the same wing, but put one on the other side and make it work.

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The magical Nikita Kucherov injury that took him out of the lineup for the perfect amount of time, finally healed up in time for Game 1 of the playoffs. Tampa Bay is so lucky!

Steven Stamkos was back too. But it was Kucherov with the huge impact. He had three points. Victor Hedman was also back and he added three of his own. When you see the score of 5-4, your first instinct may be to blame Sergei Bobrovsky. And perhaps Chris Driedger would have done better. But Bobrovsky stopped 35 of 40 (Andrei Vasilevskiy stopped 35 of 39), and the Panthers were sloppy on the last one. Both goalies in that game gave up a softy, and the others were tough to stop. These are two offensive teams and I think you're going to see 5-4 scores all series long. If the Panthers go down 2-0, I would think that Joel Quenneville will at that point give Driedger a shot.

Tyler Johnson saw just 7:31 on the fourth line. And although Ondrej Palat was on the top line with Kucherov, the game had a million penalties and Jon Cooper almost never turned to his second unit. So Palat saw little special teams' action. In the end his ice time was 11:23.

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Healthy Scratch: Nikita Gusev. Not a shocker there, but that should spell the end of his NHL career. I can't see him wanting to go through this crap any longer. Not when he could go to the KHL and be treated like a hero. I'd love to see him stay. I'd love to see him find the right fit. His fancy stats point to his being a better player than the production this year has shown. But I'm skeptical he wants to. If he does though, first thing I'd do is fire my agent. Any idiot who thinks a smaller one-dimensional guy would fit in on a Joel Quenneville team needs to have his license revoked. He set his client up to fail.

Grigori Denisenko was also a scratch, which was interesting. If the Panthers lose again I can see him getting into Game 3.

Sam Bennett's playoff dominance is as good as ever. Another two points Sunday playing with Jonathan Huberdeau and Owen Tippett.

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Running the season and playoffs at the same time has caused more than a few headaches in the back end of a couple of my sites (Goalie Post and Dobbernomics), and I'm sure it's done the same to other websites out there. And it's caused a lot of headaches in fantasy leagues. But I'm actually having fun with it, from a fantasy standpoint. I'm not winning any leagues this year. Big disappointment. Yet for some reason I want to see how high I can get in Dobbernomics, and if I can hang onto third place in a keeper league I'm in. Normally I don't care at all about third. Or second, for that matter. Second is just the first-place loser. But… this time I'm excited about it? I'm grabbing guys like Jayce Hawryluk, Olli Juolevi and Glenn Gawdin, and although I didn’t bid enough to win Andrew Mangiapane, I bid my max remaining dollars. All in an effort to squeak out that extra 6.4 points next week.

And in Dobbernomics my entire roster is now Calgary or Vancouver. It's helped me move from 86^th to 71^st. ‘Nothing points’ in a 'nothing spot’ in the standings, yet I'm challenged and intrigued to see how high I can go. It's surprisingly almost as much fun as jockeying for the top, as I was earlier in the season before making the decision to retool in my two dynasties.

This is an unexpected twist to this unique scenario. It must be the strategy of roster manipulation with limited transactions. The challenge of piecing together a roster that can gain ground based on a dozen remaining NHL teams (last week) and just the two teams (for the week ahead).

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Looks like Josh Leivo was the low-level player I should have gone after (kidding – he was taken, as others obviously were pushing to gain ground in the final week as much as I).

I don't know how seriously we can take these final regular season games in terms of evaluating players. The games are shinny. Just 21 Hits combined between Vancouver and Calgary. Combined. Or 3.5 Hits per team per period.

That being said, there was a fight between two players battling to make an impression – Connor Mackey (fourth career NHL game) for Calgary and Jonah Gadjovich (first career NHL game) for Vancouver:

Lots of great punches to the helmet there. Sure taught those helmets a lesson.

It's a great time for Vancouver and Calgary players to pad their stats. Three years from now we could look back at Quinn Hughes' sophomore season and say "hey, it was just as good as his rookie campaign". Completely forgetting that he grabbed 10 of his points (or whatever it ends up being) in the final four useless games with nothing at stake.

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People have already crowned Connor McDavid with the Art Ross, but if Brock Boeser puts up 30 points on Tuesday and another 30 on Wednesday, we'll have ourselves a tie, folks!

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See you next Monday.