Timothy Liljegren has signed a two-year extension with the Toronto Maple Leafs, locking him up for his age-23 and age-24 seasons. Liljegren is coming off his first full-ish season with the Leafs, totalling 23 points in 61 games. The terms of the deal are here:

Leafs sign D Timothy Liljegren to a two-year contract extension. The AAV is $1.4 million.

— Lance Hornby 🇺🇦 (@sunhornby) June 27, 2022

For the fantasy game, there could be some very good multi-cat value here. He put up 147 hits+blocks in those 61 contests, skating under 16:30 a night. If he can add a 2-3 minutes per night in ice time, then 200 hits+blocks are in play for him, with good point production because of the team's offensive environment. His upside is capped without Morgan Rielly's PP minutes, but that doesn't mean he's irrelevant, even in mid-sized multi-cat leagues.

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The Florida Panthers made a similar signing, extending Matt Kiersted for two years:

We have re-signed Matt Kiersted to a two-year contract!

📝 " https://t.co/BNGNUWsNBK pic.twitter.com/YhYQyeTk5Q

— Florida Panthers (@FlaPanthers) June 27, 2022

Kiersted was signed out of college 16 months ago but has played just 17 games with the team. They do need to start developing more of their own blue liners as Ben Chiarot and Robert Hägg are free agents and unlikely to return. There is also just one year left on MacKenzie Weegar's exceptionally cheap deal, and one year on Radko Gudas's acceptable deal. They need to start replenishing and that work has to start now with Kiersted. His Dobber Prospects profile is here.   

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The 2022 Hockey Hall of Fame group was announced:

Class of 2022 @HockeyHallFame:

Henrik Sedin
Daniel Sedin
Daniel Alfredsson
Roberto Luongo
Riika Sallinen
Herb Carnegie (Builder)

— Frank Seravalli (@frank_seravalli) June 27, 2022

I’m going to have a bit more on this in my next Ramblings. For now, all I’ll say is that the first four names are very much deserved and I’m glad to see them all go in together.

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Chicago announced that Luke Richardson will be the team’s next head coach. Dobber had his take on this published here.

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Don't forget to grab your copy of the 2022 Dobber Hockey Prospects Report before the Entry Draft next week!

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Colorado finally climbed the mountain with this current core and claimed the Stanley Cup on Sunday night. They did it in impressive fashion, losing just four games all postseason, including two sweeps. Despite potentially losing some key players in free agency this summer, there is still a lot of top-end talent on that roster. It'll be interesting to see how they rebuild their second and third lines if guys like Andre Burakovsky, Nazem Kadri, and Valeri Nichushkin all move on, but stars are the hardest thing to acquire. And they have a lot of stars all over the roster.

Tampa Bay has kind of the same deal going on. This team, per Cap Friendly, is already over the cap for 2022-23 with Ondrej Palat, Nick Paul, and Riley Nash all set to hit free agency. If they want to keep either of the first two, they'll have to move some money out. If they don't, they'll have to replace them internally. Regardless, they still have a slew of their top-end players all under contract for at least one, if not two, years, so they'll be able to fine-tune the roster and get back at it next season.

Let's peruse the Tampa roster a bit more thoroughly, touch on what they have to do (or could do) this offseason, the upside some of the players have in the fantasy game, and anything else that is relevant.

We should start with Ross Colton. Yes, there are a lot of top-end players all over the roster but as mentioned, they need to start replacing the depth. They lost the entire third line of Blake Coleman, Yanni Gourde, and Barclay Goodrow a year ago and did their best to fill that gap with guys like Corey Perry, Brandon Hagel, and Paul. The latter is UFA though, as mentioned earlier, so he likely won't be back. Alex Killorn has just one year left on his deal so that's another key piece that will need to be replaced soon, too.

Colton is coming off a 22-goal season where he skated under 13 minutes a night. Last week, I wrote about how he had a great participation rate in his team's scoring chances, whether taking them himself or setting up teammates. The team did good work replenishing depth with cheap signing and trades, but what set them up for long-term success all those years ago was drafting – all of Nikita Kucherov, Brayden Point, Steven Stamkos, Anthony Cirelli, and Victor Hedman were drafted by the franchise. As some of those guys age, they need the next group to step up, and I think Colton is primed to do just so.

We won't go on much longer about Colton's potential impact because I did write about him in depth a week ago, but he's the guy that needs to step up for them. He could become a fixture for them in the top-6 and just that TOI jump alone puts 20 goals, 50 points, and 150 hits well within range for him in 2022-23. He is turning 26 so now is the time for him to make his mark on the franchise, and I believe he will. With Palat likely moving on, Colton could slide into his role alongside either Point or Cirelli and the team probably won't miss a beat.

One big question is how Stamkos will keep aging. He has had a few major injuries over the last decade but he still put up monster production in the regular season – 42 goals and 106 points in 81 games – and was great in the playoffs with 11 goals and 19 points in 23 games. He has never been an elite play-driver when looking at underlying metrics, and that has persisted. The issue for him is that he relies on percentages and when those dry up, there isn't much else to offer. When a player like that comes around, I look to their shot locations to see if they're getting lucky from sharper angles or are generating a lot from dangerous areas. From HockeyViz, here are his shot locations in 2021-22:

That is a lot of shooting from the low-slot, plus his favourite spot in the left circle. Add in the back-door tap-ins that this team loves to employ, and we shouldn't be worried about those percentages. Without inundating with charts, his 2018-19 shot map looks very similar, with some more tap-in locations added in of late. In other words, it seems to keep up his percentages, he's become acclimated to sliding up and down his wing, looking for the right opening, rather than forcing a shot from the top of the circle. Adding that dimension may have added years to his scoring.

One interesting fantasy wrinkle is that of Brayden Point. Since his 92-point season, he has 170 points in 188 games, or roughly a 74-point/82-game pace. What I wonder is how much this is related to the injuries of Kucherov, who missed the entire COVID 2021 regular season, and miss 35 games in 2021-22. It undoubtedly has hurt Point a lot, as, from Natural Stat Trick, the team's 5-on-5 goal rate rises 40% when Point is with Kucherov than when he's with anyone else, over the last three seasons:

When we're talking about 4.2 goals per 60 minutes, we're talking lines like the top Nashville line, the top Ottawa line, and Florida's elite second scoring line. Having Kucherov on his wing, unsurprisingly, brings Point from a good top line to an elite one, at least offensively. This is a centre who is very good on his own, but the difference between 70 points and 90 points is likely the health of his all-world Russian winger. It is never fun drafting a centre who is reliant on one player to reach his fantasy upside.

The crux of all this is Point showed a new dimension this season with his hitting. He had 75 hits in 66 games, having posted just 78 hits over his prior 201 games. One reason I never liked drafting him in multi-cat formats is he would often be drafted as a top-10 centre (or close to it), but he clearly needed Kucherov's health and more prowess in the peripheral categories to reach those heights. In this instance, we mean the tier including the likes of Aleksander Barkov and Mark Scheifele. Barkov has been a point-per-game centre in three of the last four years, with Scheifele doing that in six straight seasons. Point has done it once in six seasons and generally lacked the hits to make up for 10-20 points he would be missing compared to those peers. Having Kucherov healthy, and being able to put up 80-90 hits, is a game-changer for his fantasy value. Asking him to be a top-10 fantasy centre is still probably his ceiling, not the expectation, but we should feel better about it going into 2022-23.

A better question is what to do about Victor Hedman. He did not seem his healthy, usual self in the final two series of the playoffs, and especially in the Final. I imagine we'll hear more about this in the coming days, so a lot hinges on whether he was just banged up or needs a serious surgery. We'll see.

Regardless, he shot 9.1% this regular season, and that led to a 20-goal campaign. We should note he set a career-best with 65 assists, but his 20 goals are what stand out. It was a five-year high in him for shooting percentage, and he averaged 6.8% over the prior three seasons. Yes, the NHL was a higher-scoring environment, but not to the tune of an increase of shooting percentage by nearly one-third. Again, we'll look to the shot location tool at Hockey Viz and see where he was shooting from, at least at even strength:

That doesn't look out of line for the vast majority of defencemen but we also have to mention where he actually scored from. These are the locations where he tallied his goals (darker red is a higher deviation above the league average, blue is below league average):

That's a lot of finishing from the mid-high slot, which was a new wrinkle for him. He never had a season where he scored well from both the mid-slot, high-slot, and his left-point position. He had seasons where he did well from those individual areas, but not all three at the same time.

That kind of worries me. He did see his second-highest high-danger shot rate of his career (1.02 per 60 minutes, with his highest being 1.29 in 2018-19, and was below 0.6 each of the last two seasons). Can he bring it all together again in 2022-23? If he can, 20 goals are in the offing once more. If he can't, it's more that 12-15 range, which is still very good, but not elite.

There is also the question of Individual Points Percentage (IPP), or the rate at which he garners a point when a goal is scored by Tampa with him on the ice. He was over 46% at even strength, a 5-year high, having never been above 41% since 2016-17. Just dropping to 40% – which is completely normal for him – with the same goal rate would cut 6-7 points of his total. Add in a handful of goals because of shooting percentage regression, and we could be looking at a 70-point defenceman, not an 80-point defenceman. That means a lot when we're talking about a guy who could be a top-5 pick at the position.

The last guy we'll touch on is Cirelli. I don't think it's egregious to say that he's solidified himself as one of the best, young two-way centres in the league. He has two top-5 finishes in Selke Trophy voting over the last three years and with guys like Patrice Bergeron, Ryan O'Reilly, and Anze Kopitar on the downsides of their career (though they're all still very good-to-elite), it may only be a couple years before he is consistently in the top-3 of voting.

But, as fantasy owners, we don't get points for great defensive play, and Cirelli is averaging 46 points/82 games over the last three seasons. Going into his age-25 season with nearly 300 regular season games, he's in his prime, and we want to see more. There are a couple things keeping him from achieving that "more" and it's his shooting, and his power-play role.

Over his last three seasons, the pivot has 17 power-play points in those 194 games. He's largely been kept to a secondary role, and it's because he's not a great offensive driver yet. From Evolving Hockey, he's been unbelievable defensively (of course) but the offensive play isn't there:

He's not bad, but he's not great in this regard, and when you have guys like Kucherov, Stamkos, and Point all locks when they're healthy, there's a fight for the final forward PP1 role. Ondrej Palat is likely gone, but Alex Killorn is still there for another year, and the aforementioned Colton could make a push. Cirelli needs at least one injury to make a viable run for PP1 minutes, and he's not been great on the top PP unit in his limited minutes as is. He's not quite Philip Danault in his Montreal days, but it's not far off, and we should adjust our expectations for that reality, even if he's skating 18 minutes a night on the second line.

Tampa has a bit of finagling to do this summer. They're already over the cap and have a couple depth spots to fill out. The obvious answer is to move Alex Killorn, but he has a 16-team no-trade list. I don't wonder if they move a defenceman Mikhail Sergachev or Erik Cernak to free up meaningful cap space now and rid themselves of worrying about a longer extension when their deals are up next summer. They have $63M in commitments for 2023-24, and those two plus Colton and Cirelli will all need new (likely long-term) deals. Tampa Bay won't be able to keep them all, so despite almost every player being under contract for 2022-23, we could see a non-core piece or two on the move.

All told, though, there's no reason to think this team takes a big step back next season. A healthy Kucherov for 80 games would make a big difference, and Stamkos seems to have adjusted his game to extend his high levels of production. They should be a top-10 scoring team again with potentially big seasons from Point and Colton on the way, depending how roles and health work out.