This is the last week before training camps start, though there are rookie camps that will be happening all week long across the league. For anyone that even pays cursory attention to social media for hockey clips and information, it is probably worth taking a bit of time about what we should look for in these practices and games.

First, we are looking for injuries occurring or players returning from one. That is one of the most important pieces to search out when this time of year hits. Every player is expected to be in the best shape of their lives, but are guys who had offseason surgery/rehab like, say, Patrice Bergeron and Joel Farabee, ready to go? It's an obvious move but checking in on team reporters to see what they have to say about returning players is one important aspect of camp.

The other is line combinations. With the caveat that lines will change through camp and all season long, how a coach views a player during practice and exhibition can tell us a lot. Teams are usually split into two squads which means we could have a couple dozen forwards in uniform. If someone slots on the third or fourth lines of a split squad, it's pretty obvious the coaches don't think much of their ability to make/impact the main roster. Players can and do impress during exhibition games so fortunes will change, but if Nick Robertson, or Philip Tomasino, or Marco Rossi, or any number of names aren't at least in the top-6 of a split squad, we should be concerned.

Things to avoid include "Player X is in great shape" or "Player Y looks hungry" or anything of the sort. Players are supposed to be in great shape; they're in the NHL. They are also supposed to be driven/determined as, again, they're in the NHL. If a writer makes a specific note about a player looking out of shape, that might be worth something, but it could also be a top-of-roster player not wanting to push themselves too hard too fast.

A lot of information coming from camps will be useless. Players from every team (except maybe Chicago) will expect to be playoff contenders but they're not all going to make it. Coaches will expect to get the best out of their roster but they all won't do that. Be sure to filter out what is useful and what is not because just absorbing all this information as if it's all useful is one way to absorb very little useful information.   

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Such an example would be this:

Flyers center Sean Couturier said he's fully cleared for training camp from February back surgery. "I feel good. I had a long recovery, took longer than I thought, a lot of ups and downs, but now I'm feeling good and ready to go. Excited to get going again."

— Adam Kimelman (@NHLAdamK) September 12, 2022

That Couturier is cleared by doctors from his back surgery is great news. That the recovery took longer than he expected is refreshingly honest, but also a sign that he may not have had close to a full offseason of training. Something we need to keep in the back of our heads.

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Be sure to grab the ever-updated 2022 Dobber Hockey Fantasy Guide!

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We should take this final opportunity to talk some offseason stuff before training camps and exhibition games become the daily topics. Today, it's talking about veterans that had breakout seasons last year. Enough offseason ink was spilled on players like Troy Terry, Robert Thomas, Jesper Bratt, and the like. Having young, talented players explode isn't a huge shock. What can come as a shock is when a player with 300+ games of NHL experience suddenly breaks out at the age of 25 or 26. Sometimes the player has shown flashes in the past, sometimes not, and figuring out whether it's a one-year deal or part of a trend means a lot when it comes to draft day. Let's talk about some of these guys, using Natural Stat Trick and Frozen Tools as our data sources.

Ryan Hartman

Minnesota's pseudo top-line centre had 58 career goals parts of seven seasons before exploding for 34 goals and 65 points in 2021-22. Raw totals can be a bit misleading, though. From 2016-19, when he played for three different teams, he managed 0.74 goals per 60 minutes of 5-on-5 ice time. That may not seem great, but that's inside the 63^rd percentile of the league, or basically the top-third of an NHL roster. That's not a bad mark but it's his shot rate that really stood out: 85^th percentile of all regular forwards in that stretch. If he could get to that percentile in goal scoring rather than shots, he'd be scoring as often as guys like Jonathan Marchessault or Filip Forbserg. If his shooting percentage ever came around, well, the upside is now obvious.

The shooting percentage at 5-on-5 in 2021-22 was 15.7%, by far a career-best for him having set a career-high the year before at 10.2%. A conversion clip of 15.7% would put Hartman near the 90^th percentile of the league in this regard, which is a massive turnaround, and speaks to caution here. Even a mark of 12%, which would clear every season but his most recent, would knock 5-6 goals off his total and bring him below the 30-goal mark.

Of course, we have to look to Kirill Kaprizov here. He has shown to possess one of the league's top offensive skillsets and he helps drive goal scoring better than almost anyone in the NHL. His ability to finish and setup teammates are both among the elite in the league, per HockeyViz:

As long as Hartman stays next to Kaprizov, maybe he doesn't threaten 35 goals every year, but falling off a cliff doesn't seem likely.

However, the team is adding Marco Rossi to the fold this year and part of me doesn't wonder if he sees some time with Kaprizov and Mats Zuccarello. Relying on Rossi and Matt Boldy, with fewer than 50 combined NHL games of experience, as a second scoring duo seems to be levying high expectations on them. We could see the centres switch up to balance things out a bit.

What could help Hartman is a permanent and productive power-play position. He had one PP goal last year, scoring once on 44 shots, or 2.3%. That is absurdly low and could easily help balance any drop in 5-on-5 shooting percentage. He has to earn and keep that role first, though.

The upside of having Hartman in multi-cat leagues is that even if he loses five goals or so, he lays some hits, shoots a lot, and can add a lot of face-off wins to float his value. The same role and better luck on the power play could see him add to his 34-goal total, though. He's one of the guys where we'll have to watch his positioning in training camp.  

Timo Meier

One guy whose role is not in question is Timo Meier. He is the top left winger on the Sharks' roster and will be on the top power play all season long. Having that kind of role certainty is a big deal when we talk about a player coming off a 35-goal season. While his breakout technically came in 2018-19 when he popped 30, he followed that up by scoring 34 goals in his next 124 games. Concerns were starting to mount a little bit about whether Meier could flourish offensively on a declining team.

Like Hartman, Meier saw an explosion of ice time in 2021-22. He had never skated more than 17:17 a game over the course of a single season, averaging under 17 minutes a game for the three seasons heading into 2021-22. That shot up over 19 minutes a game in a thinned-out Sharks lineup and the raw totals with it. All that extra ice time is what got him to 326 shots on goal, by far the highest total of his career. At 5-on-5, his shot attempt rate per 60 minutes (21.6) wasn't even the highest of his career (22.6 in his rookie season) and was in line with the year before (20.2). Betting on him to get over 300 shots again seems like a reasonable one to make, and that provides some safety in his goal scoring rates.

The other part of it is his power-play role. He added nearly a full minute of PPTOI per game compared to the COVID 2021 season. This guy had 13 career power play goals in his first 317 regular season games and scored 12 in 77 contests last year. The additional ice time with a high PP shot rate helps here, as does him shooting 19.4% with the man advantage. That seems high, but that's not even 75^th percentile of PP finishing. It's kind of high but certainly not excessive.

I don't have specific concerns that he can reach 30 goals and 40 assists again now that he's playing 19 minutes a night. I do have concerns that he can take another step in production and be a Stamkos-type player who can post 40-goal, 50-assist seasons. Both Tomas Hertl and Logan Couture are very good players, but they're not necessarily great playmakers. Couture has never reached 45 helpers in any single season and has averaged 32 per 82 games the last three years. Meanwhile, Hertl has never reached 40 assists in a single season, averaging 36 per 82 games in his last three seasons. The team also lost Brent Burns in the offseason with Erik Karlsson, though still very good offensively, an injury risk. Long story short, his environment worries me.

With his massive hit and shot rates, Meier can do a lot more than just rack up points. He should still have very good goal/assist totals, I'm just worried that his upside is capped until the team gets better (which could take a few years) or he's traded.

Phillip Danault

Danault is one of those players whose real-life value has long outstripped his fantasy value. He was a reliable defensive centre who could chip in offensively but had reached 50 points just once in his career. Following the 2021-22 season, he's now reached it twice, and set a career-best with 27 goals. It probably doesn't need to be said, but he set a career-high in shooting percentage at 13.9%.

What also needs mentioning here is a career-high in shots at 194, having never had more than 133 in any single year. That is a huge jump and is cause for concern. One reason for this jump was just how good his line was. The trio of Danault, Viktor Arvidsson, and Trevor Moore managed 72 shot attempts per 60 minutes at 5-on-5. Their shot rate was nestled between Colorado's top line and Toronto's top line. Arvdisson and Moore shot much more than he did, but with so many shots to go around, he was going to absorb some of them. And we should note it's not as if he had a monster shot rate when looking at the league as a whole, coming in the 62^nd percentile. It's high for him, but not high in comparison to all forwards. What's even better was his penchant for taking a lot of good shots, as his individual expected goal rate set a career-high (again from HockeyViz):

The other part is his additional power-play role. He was often on the top PP unit down the stretch, and earned a career-high in PPTOI both per game and in total. While he had just 25 shots with the man advantage, he had 23 for his career before the 2021-22 season. Yes, he had more PP shots last year than he did in his first 392 games.

A big problem facing Danault now is that he's unlikely to earn a top PP role. The addition of Kevin Fiala gives Danault a lot of competition for that spot, along with Arvidsson and Arthur Kaliyev. If Danault loses those shots, it would drop him to around 170 if he repeats the same performance. Then we have to worry about him being used in an even more defensive role, depending what happens with Quinton Byfield.

All told, I think there's reason for concern here. Danault wasn't reliant on PP production for his goals, but he will likely lose his power-play spot and repeating a career-high shooting percentage is always a worry. It wouldn't shock me to see him settle back into his Montreal pattern of roughly 15 goals and 30 assists with meagre shot totals. We will see what training camp line combinations look like.

Andre Burakovsky

On the topic of high shot rates, Burakovsky set a career-best with 149 total shots in 2021-22, or 1.86 per game (down slightly from the 1.92 in the COVID 2021 season). That he reached 22 goals wasn't a huge shock, as he averaged 29 goals/82 games in his first two seasons with the Avalanche. What was a shock was the 39 assists, by far a career-high, and in excess of his 82-game pace from those first two Avs seasons (37). The Austrian signed in Seattle, a team that finished 28^th in scoring last year, so how he could follow up his career year is a good question.

Two things to note here. First, his 16:16 a game in 2021-22 was a career-best, having never had a season over 15:12 before; the additional ice time is always nice. Second, he has long been a very good 5-on-5 producer on a per-minute basis. From 2018-201, he managed 2.25 points per 60 minutes, nearly a 90^th percentile point rate, and sandwiched between Mika Zibanejad and Teuvo Teravainen. It is just that between Washington and Colorado, he was never a focal point of the offence at any strength, so he was often given middle-6 minutes with secondary power-play time.

Going to a second-year expansion team doesn't guarantee him more ice time, though. On the wing, they still have Jaden Schwartz, Jordan Eberle, and Oliver Bjorkstrand. The team also used Jared McCann on the wing last year, so there could be four legitimate NHL producers fighting with Burakovsky for top TOI. Not only that, but as I've mentioned a few times this offseason, Seattle likes to split its power play, as they had eight forwards within a minute of each other in PPTOI. There's no guarantee Burakovsky gets much more than the 2:09 per game he managed in his three Colorado years.

If he can get close to 60 points again, that should be a seen as a huge year. On a team that could have two rookie centres on their second/third lines, with split PPTOI, 20 goals and 30 assists would be a good season for him. I'm not sure he replicates his 2021-22 season right away.

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Colorado signed forward Evan Rodrigues to a one-year deal with a $2M cap hit:

A new part of the squad 😎#GoAvsGo https://t.co/wglSLqjXFg

— Colorado Avalanche (@Avalanche) September 12, 2022

Rodrigues had a career-high 19 goals and 43 points in 2021-22.  

I did a deep dive on Rodrigues back in May so go read that for more on his season, his improvements, and how he could help a Colorado team that doesn't have their 2C role locked down. I am not sure he is the guy for a 2C role on a Cup contender, but it gives the team options, along with J.T. Compher and Alex Newhook. (My guess is Mikko Rantanen ends up the 2C eventually but that's just a guess.) If nothing else, he brings good two-way depth to a team that doesn't have a lot of it after losing a couple key forwards in the offseason.