It should go without saying at this point, but the landscape of the NHL is going to change dramatically on a daily basis for the near future. Every player is at risk of landing in COVID protocols and that can take any player, or any combination of players, out of the lineup for a team. We got a glimpse of that shifting power balance with the news that came out on Monday. For example, the Toronto Maple Leafs don't have enough defencemen to ice a team. That is in the entire organization. Even getting a couple back might leave them with a very weak blue line. Over in Philadelphia, they're now missing Ryan Ellis, Sean Couturier, and Carter Hart, among many others. That was announced on the same day that Nikita Kucherov and Brayden Point returned to practice for the Tampa Bay Lightning. We are going to see wild roster swings like this for the foreseeable future, and that means fantasy owners will have to be on their toes daily.

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Significant updates in Pittsburgh:

Sullivan: Guentzel is sick with non-COVID illness. Seems to be feeling better.

Malkin and Rust were full contact. Appeared to do very well.

Zucker is week to week with a nagging lower-body injury. #Pens

— Wes Crosby (@OtherNHLCrosby) December 27, 2021

It should also be noted that Evgeni Malkin was skating on Sidney Crosby's wing, along with Rust on the other side. That is something we have not seen with any frequency in their careers, outside of the last few minutes of a close game or something. Whether it sticks or not, we'll see. But that would be a pretty big change to his fantasy outlook if it's something that has any duration.

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Neither Mark Stone nor Max Pacioretty were at practice for Vegas on Monday afternoon but they’re not in protocols. They’re just good ol’ fashioned injured, and are officially game-time decisions for Tuesday night.

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Brutal news for Brandon Tanev in Seattle:

Kraken announce Brandon Tanev has suffered a season-ending ACL injury. #SeaKraken

— Ryan S. Clark (@ryan_s_clark) December 27, 2021

Though generally thought of as a defensive guy, he was on pace for over 20 goals and 40 points before this injury. That is what will make him hard to replace in fantasy. He was on his way to a Tom Wilson-esque season and those guys aren’t available on the waiver wire. It’ll be improvement by aggregate.

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This is an incredibly busy time of year for hockey fans, or it's supposed to be, anyway. The NHL has pushed back the resumption of play following the holiday break for very good reasons. There will be some cancellations or postponements moving forward, both in the NHL and elsewhere. That started with the IIHF announcing the cancellation of all events beginning in January – the outcome of all that is still to be determined – and continued with the NHL giving teams and players some extra time to sort out their affairs.

For fantasy owners, like I wrote earlier, this is going to be frustrating. At the best of times, fantasy rosters can be decimated by just regular injuries. As we've seen over the last six weeks, this new wrinkle of protocols and postponements can shred even the top fantasy contenders in any league. Games were postponed on the 27th and one-third of the games on the 28th and 29th are postponed as well, so far.

To that end, I think it's worth talking with your league mates to see if there are any updates to your own league's rules that may need to be made. Changes like two-week H2H matchups instead of one week, expanding pick-up rules, expanding injured lists, adding FAAB dollars, or anything else that leagues can come up with. Maybe individual leagues don't want to change anything and are willing to just let the chips fall where they may. It does seem that there are some fantasy owners that are getting to the breaking point about not caring about the rest of the season and it's hard to blame them.

Regardless of the decisions made, I do think it's a good idea to at least talk about some rule changes now. Get the idea planted in the heads of league mates so that when things quiet down in the summer, perhaps it'll be easier to make changes then as we prepare for the 2022-23 season.

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How about this play from Brad Lambert in Finland's game yesterday against Austria?

Brad Lambert (#2022NHLDraft) waits, drives around the net, and feeds Ville Koivunen (#LetsGoCanes) to open the scoring for Team Finland. Samuel Helenius (#GoKingsGo) picks up the secondary assist.

📹: @TSN_Sports pic.twitter.com/rHhaLPKBRT

— EP Rinkside (@EPRinkside) December 27, 2021

He is a player I'm excited to see where he lands because he does seem a future star. How high is the upside? I'll leave that to the smart scouts, I just think he'll be a high-impact player, and it may not take long.

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Reviewing some power-play data from the season to date, there are some very interesting names we need to be talking about. These stats are from Frozen Tools or Natural Stat Trick.

Oliver Wahlstrom

Leading the league in shot attempts per 60 minutes with the man advantage? He wouldn't be listed here if it weren't for him. It really is remarkable that he's edging out names like Alex Ovechkin or Mike Hoffman in power-play shot rate, even if it's only been one-third of the season.

Saying that Wahlstrom will continue to lead the league in shot rate at 5-on-4 feels like a bridge too far, but there are good signs for it remaining high. For one, this is back-to-back seasons of a big shot-rate jump, which for a player drafted for his offensive upside, well, that makes sense. He was the team's top producer with the man advantage last year on a per-minute basis, and also led them in shot rate by a significant margin. Like I said, this could just be the progression of a talented player.

Seven of his 15 points on the year have come with the man advantage. Given all the injuries and COVID issues the Islanders have endured, it feels as if Wahlstrom is being short-changed with his TOI, skating 13:14 a night. He now finds himself on the COVID list, so he'll be out for a few games. Regardless of power-play shot rates, it's hard to sustain fantasy value when skating 13 minutes a night. He needs more ice time and better line mates when he gets back if there is going to be hope of being fantasy-relevant over the next four months.

Victor Olofsson

Sitting inside the top-10 forwards for 5-on-4 shot rate this year is a guy who lost his centre due to a trade. That is why seeing him where he is is such a good sign; he's doing all this skating without Jack Eichel. Sometimes, when a player skates a lot with an elite talent, we can attach one player's value to another, and it gets hard to envision them succeeding without that talent. Well, Olofsson has 17 points in 22 games, and he looks to mesh real well with Tage Thompson on the top line.

What is curious is the shooting percentage. Olofsson has one goal on 19 shots, shooting just over 5%. For his career, he's a 23%+ shooter with the man advantage. If he were shooting his career norm on the power play, he'd be close to a point-per-game player right now. It really has been a great start for him.

Olofsson is a guy whose power-play prowess was coveted when Eichel was around, but we generally, collectively, lost interest in the offseason. That interest should be back now because it's clear both Dylan Cozens and Tage Thompson have revived, or pushed ahead, their fantasy value this season, and that means he'll get a talented centre to play with. Once those shots with the man advantage start going in, he could have a very big second-half of the season.

Josh Norris

It really is funny just how good the Ottawa top line is. Norris is on his way to a 30-goal, 60-point season, and he has six more goals than assists as a centre. That is just not something we see often in the league, as the centres are the distributors, and not the finishers. But that's also what makes the Ottawa top line so dangerous: each player is a 30-goal threat. Teams can try and key in on Brady Tkachuk and shut him down, but Norris has 31 goals in his last 84 games and Drake Batherson has 26 tallies in his last 79 contests. That Norris is also among the league leaders in shot rate on the power play just adds another dimension to this line that can terrify opponents.

Norris is on pace for about 15 power-play goals this year and is shooting 20% at 5-on-4. That isn't really that high with the man advantage, so as long as he keeps shooting, maybe he gets to 15 PPGs. This is just something to monitor as we move forward here. It is hard to see him staying in the top-10 for shot rate across the league, because there are only so many shots for that line to take with the man advantage. We do need to monitor this, because if this can persist, it would not only make Norris a 30-goal threat, but possibly a 40-goal threat as well.

Roman Josi

The only defenceman in the top-10 is Roman Josi, which probably both a surprise and not. If someone were to tell me that a defenceman in 2021 was shooting a lot on the PP, Josi would be on the short list. But the Nashville Predators have had a bad power play for years now, and high shot rates generally don't follow bad power plays. That has changed this year as the Preds are generating more shots per 60 minutes at 5-on-4 this year than any season in his career, and more goals as well. Whether that persists for 50 more games remains to be seen, but again, he's one of the few defencemen capable of doing exactly what he's doing for an entire season.

It is possible Josi puts up between 30 and 40 PPPs this year if his shot rate and the team's goal rate at 5-on-4 both continue as they have. There have been a lot of disruptions to the season but Josi's ability to seemingly improve even as he skates in his age-31 season is truly something to behold.