A little bit down these Ramblings, we'll talk about Clayton Keller, his 2021 season, and what he could bring next year. In that discussion is the fact that Arizona has not been a great scoring team for years now, and don't look like they'll be a high-scoring team anytime soon.

Compounding that problem is they may not be keeping some of their more talented players that they already have:

Frank Seravalli on TSN1260 – Coyotes asked Conor Garland's agent to put together some salary proposals. He presented them two different options, that was on May 20. #Yotes haven't even answered, haven't responded, haven't picked up the phone to even acknowledge they received them

— NHL News (@PuckReportNHL) June 28, 2021

This has been a dysfunctional franchise basically since the 2005 lockout and there are no signs of that changing anytime soon. It would be nice to see Garland in a better environment, though.

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I was able to take a couple days over the weekend and basically unplug at a friend’s camp. A welcome break, but I did miss the Experts’ Panel so I should give those picks right now. I am a Montreal fan, but Tampa Bay is the heavy favourite for a reason. As I write this a couple hours before Game 1, I will say Tampa in 5 with Kucherov taking the Conn Smythe.

In general, my picks have been pretty bad these playoffs, both in the Experts’ Panel and with my actual bets. Much less success than the regular season. I should have just bet on Playoff Price the entire way.

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Tampa Bay laid the boots to Montreal 5-1 in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final. Nikita Kucherov put the game out of reach with a pair of third-period goals while Yanni Gourde and Erik Cernak gave the Lightning an early advantage with tallies off turnovers. Steven Stamkos then broke Montreal's penalty killing streak that stretched back to Game 4 against Toronto, putting a PP marker past Carey Price with 70 seconds left in the game.

That was the theme for the night, as the Habs just couldn't make the best of the Lightning's mistakes as Tampa filled the net on Montreal's gaffes. Playing against a team with as much talent as Tampa means not being able to afford many mistakes. Carey Price can't save his team every game and they need to do better on the counter-attack. That will be the difference between having a chance at getting into this series or not.

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My last few Ramblings have been spent discussing one big question from each NHL team this offseason, all from a fantasy perspective. One of the reasons to do this is, realistically, we don't have a lot of time until next season. July is only a couple days away, and then training camps start roughly 11 weeks later. That is 11 weeks to get through the rest of the playoffs, the Draft, free agency, the expansion draft, and then the offseason begins. By the time we get through this little stretch, we're going to have maybe seven or eight weeks of real offseason. Seven or eight weeks of offseason provides me with roughly 20 Ramblings, which is not a lot to get most of my thoughts for next season out. That is why we're starting this series early.

Be sure to check out the first in this series as we talked about Tyler Bertuzzi, Oliver Wahlstrom, and more.  

Let's get to some more questions.

Can Clayton Keller be an upper-tier producer?

It has been quite the up-and-down career for Keller to begin. He had a monster rookie season with 65 points in 82 games, playing on a terrible offensive team. He followed that up with back-to-back season with fewer than 50 points, again on bad offensive teams. This year wasn't much better with 35 points in 56 games, virtually an identical production pace to 2019-20. Whether or not Keller is going to be an elite producer is very much in question. Can he do it?

I am not sure it happens in Arizona with this team and roster. They were outside the top-20 teams in scoring this year and there just aren't a bevy of prospects coming that can help. There is no real reason to believe that this team is on the verge of being not even a juggernaut offensively, but consistently average. Just a consistently average team could mean regular 60- or 70-point seasons for Keller. But this team hasn't been that for basically a decade now, and again, there is not a litany of great prospects coming. The roster is, more or less, what it's going to be next year again.  

The bright side is that Keller will continue to be cheap in fantasy drafts as long as he keeps performing the way he does. There have been times when he's been roughly a top-50 pick. It is hard to envision him being even a top-100 pick at this point. Anyone out there who believes in both Keller's abilities and the team's scoring environment should be able to get him at a discount. It is just a matter of whether he's worth that pick, even with the expected discount. In multi-cat leagues, he's not far from being a Do Not Draft in shallow-ish formats.

Will Robert Thomas be a fourth-year breakout?

This will not be the first nor the last time readers see or hear something to the effect of "this season was a weird year." There are not many teams that had a weirder season that St. Louis. The injury list was extensive, for one:

• Jaden Schwartz missed 16 games
• Vince Dunn missed 13 games
• Tyler Bozak missed 26 games
• Vladimir Tarasenko missed 32 games
• Colton Parayko missed 24 games
• Sammy Blais missed 20 games
• Oskar Sundqvist missed 28 games

Every one of those players is either on the first, second, or third line, or top two defence pairs. Almost every player listed missed more than a quarter of the season and – you know where this is going – Robert Thomas fell into that group as well, missing 23 games.

For that reason, it's hard for me to look at this campaign for most Blues players and think it was anything close to business as usual. There was a stretch in late February/early March where Jordan Kyrou, a guy who couldn't crack the lineup for years – was regularly playing 18+ minutes a night. That is how short-staffed they were at times.

When looking to next year, we can't just ignore last season, but we can't assume that'll be anywhere close to the norm moving forward. This team was eliminated a month ago, meaning they'll have more time to recuperate than many other potential contenders.

But what about Thomas? Can he rebound? The concern would be that he stays on the third line, away from the top offensive stars like Tarasenko and Perron, while doing the same on the power play. He could very easily rebound from last year but still not take a huge step forward, if only because of a lack of opportunity and ice time. He probably comes in as a nice, cheap option in drafts, but he has little value in multi-cat leagues. When looking to points-only leagues, barring injuries, he may not get a big enough role to rack up more than 50 points.

Is Yegor Sharangovich "for real"?

There are lots of storylines to watch for in New Jersey this offseason. We have to start figuring out Jack Hughes's ceiling, Ty Smith's role, Nico Hischier's real upside, Mackenzie Blackwood's talent level, and more. There are lots of interesting stories here. Personally, I think Sharangovich is one of the more interesting players not only on the team, but in the entire league.

From Evolving Hockey, we saw a guy who was decent at driving offensive shot quality but was very poor defensively:

That doesn't really matter for us, as we only care about offensive production in fantasy. The issue is that if a coach feels like he can't trust a player at both ends of the ice, unless they're an absolute offensive superstar, it's hard for them to consistently rack up high levels of TOI. Sharangovich wasn't far off from 17 minutes a night, which feels about right for someone with his skillset. It is hard to see him getting 19-20 a night unless he improves in his own end.

Sharangovich's upside comes from his shot. HockeyViz has him as 5 percent better than league average, but we have to remember he's only played two-thirds of a full season. Whether or not he's that good, we'll have to wait a couple years. But what we do know is that he'll be given an opportunity, likely in the top-6, to produce. He has to make good on that opportunity.

By my eye test watching Sharangovich, he looked like a good offensive talent. His shot has long been an asset of his, which makes me think that HockeyViz's assessment isn't far off from the truth. Playing with someone like Hughes – a great passer – should get the most out of Sharangovich. He led the team in individual expected goals and individual shot rate at 5-on-5. Maybe he was a bit lucky in shooting percentage at 14 percent, but as long as he keeps shooting as much as he is, he'll always be a 20-goal threat. He just may not be a multi-cat threat.

Who is Carolina's new PPQB1?

This is based on the assumption that Dougie Hamilton is not re-signed. If he is, we probably have the answer to this question already. If he is not re-signed, well, we have some digging to do.

Initially, it seems like Jake Bean would be the guy that would take Hamilton's role. While both he and Brett Pesce were PP2 mainstays this year, Pesce was more in a shooter's role with Bean playing distributor at the top. It isn't to say Pesce can't do it, but it seems like they were grooming Bean for this exact potential outcome. For that reason, Bean probably has the inside track to top PP minutes.

I don't think it'll be Pesce, so if it's not Bean, maybe Brady Skjei will take the reigns. He has PP experience from both New York and last year in Carolina. He also has been generally great at moving the puck through the neutral zone, an indication he could do it on the power play as well.

All that being said, this is probably the easiest question we have today. I think Bean is the PP1QB come October, though that doesn't necessarily mean he's play 20-21 minutes a night, too.