Training camps have opened, though the first day of camp is a lot of off-ice work, including team physicals. To that end, there really wasn't a lot of information to pass back to the reader, but there are always injury updates. First, we got one from Toronto, which includes the timeline for Timothy Liljegren's injury:

Dubas: Engvall (ankle, out until early Oct.) Liljegren (hernia operation, six weeks) Abramov (back), Woll (shoulder) out for a bit.

— Lance Hornby 🇺🇦 (@sunhornby) September 21, 2022

This is interesting for a number of reasons. Liljegren played very well in a small sample last year and a full season of that performance level would be a difference-maker for the Leafs blue line. It also puts a bigger spotlight on Rasmus Sandin, who still needs an RFA contract.

Liljegren could have been a good fantasy option this year but this throws a Sandin-sized wrench into things.

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This is an important injury update for Detroit:

Yzerman says he anticipates Fabbri out until sometime after New Year. Pysyk similar. Walman approximately mid-November.

And Andrew Copp had abdominal surgery in the offseason, he's expected back the first week of the regular season but not expected to play in preseason

— Max Bultman (@m_bultman) September 21, 2022

The Red Wings made a lot of upgrades over the summer but still aren't in a position to afford losing key depth pieces if they hope to push for a playoff spot. If Copp can be back in less than a month and be 100%, it's likely no big deal.

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A more-of-the-same announcement from Tampa Bay:

Julien BriseBois said Brayden Point is fully healthy for start of camp. Cirelli and Bogosian still on same timetable for late November/early December

— Joe Smith (@JoeSmithNHL) September 21, 2022

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An update on the progress for restricted free agent Jason Robertson's contract:

Jason Robertson will not be at Stars training camp when it opens tomorrow. Jim Nill: "We've had negotiations, ongoing steadily the last couple weeks, but unfortunately won't be there. Hoping he gets there as soon as possible."

— Matthew DeFranks (@MDeFranks) September 21, 2022

I don't have much concern that a deal will be done, and he'll be in camp before the season starts. The issue is what it might do to their cap situation depending on how much he gets. Hopefully this depresses his ADP a bit because he has true 90-point upside if he can play a full year.

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Calgary locked up the last restricted free agent they had:

#Flames have re-signed C Adam Ruzicka to a two-year contract. $762,500 AAV.

Two-way deal for year one, one-way in year two.

— Pat Steinberg (@Fan960Steinberg) September 21, 2022

With the depth the team has accumulated up front and the prospects they have coming, Ruzicka will be fighting for fourth-line minutes, in all likelihood. Should injuries hit, maybe he moves up the roster a bit but for now we're still waiting for him to establish any fantasy value outside of super-deep leagues.

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We got a bit of lineup news. With the caveat that things can change quickly in camp, it looks like Chicago is going to split up Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane:

Luke Richardson says he's going to put Max Domi and Patrick Kane on a line together to start camp. He thinks they have good chemistry and Domi's speed will complement Kane well.

— Ben Pope (@BenPopeCST) September 21, 2022

If the top line include Lukas Reichel, that would interest me a lot from a fantasy perspective. My guess, though, is we see a lot of varied lineup combinations from what should be a bottom-3 team in the league.

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We also got some inkling on Vancouver's lineup:

Bruce Boudreau: We want to start with Bo, Petey and JT up the middle. #Canucks @Sportsnet650

— Brendan Batchelor (@BatchHockey) September 21, 2022

This really isn't a big surprise but it's not great for some fantasy value. It is a way for a coach to spread out ice time and talent but that doesn't do fantasy players any favours. We want good players playing with good players and very few teams, if any, have enough top-end wingers to help maximize the upside of three different centres. It might be good for the team in real life but it's not the situation fantasy owners would hope for.

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The Rangers tipped their hand about the lineup and:

Gallant also says that the plan is for Sammy Blais to start at RW on the top line with Kreider and Zibanejad. #NYR

📢 advertisement:

— Vince Z. Mercogliano (@vzmercogliano) September 21, 2022

It seems implausible that Sammy Blais spends any real length of time on the top line, but I once saw Zack Kassian spend nearly half a season alongside Connor McDavid. Queue up the Kevin Garnett video after the Celtics won the championship.

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An update on Jakob Chychrun's injury status:

Jakob Chychrun said he had to have bone spurs removed from his ankle this summer in addition to the wrist surgery he had.
No timeline yet for when he might get on the ice.

— Not the country music singer Craig Morgan (@CraigSMorgan) September 21, 2022

He would continue to say that facilitating a trade to a contender is still a priority, so whenever he returns, he may not be playing a lot of games for Arizona.

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I have finally started putting together my projections. This is usually one of the last things I do during the preseason because there is so much that can change through training camps. There are stand-out rookies, unexpected line combinations, injuries, and other issues that can crop up and change projections quite a bit. But I decided to get ahead of the curve a bit and post what I have so far.

A few notes on these projections:

• They are far from finished. There aren't rookies in my dataset yet, so projections for guys like Alexander Holtz, Mason McTavish, Matty Beniers, Owen Power, and others aren't included. Rookies are a specific type of projection that will be added over the next few weeks.
• To that end, goalies aren't included, either. Goalies are also a different beast. I do them separately and that's also on the list for the next couple weeks.  
• These won't be specific category values i.e. we aren't posting Connor McDavid's assist total, Alex Ovechkin's shot total, or Brady Tkachuk's hit total. Rather, a cumulative stat called Standings Gained Points (SGP) is used. This is a concept I borrowed from a fantasy baseball player named Tanner Bell. (I am not sure if the provenance of this idea is his, but it's where I became familiar with it.) This is an attempt to tell us how many roto points a player can add in a fantasy league, given how much a player contributes in a single category. So, if I find in one my leagues that every 20 goals adds a roto point to my total, and a player is projected for 40 goals, then 40/20 = 2, or two SGPs. That player has added two SGPs in the goals column, and we repeat this process for each category we have. After that is all done, we sum the SGPs from each individual category to give us an overall number. That is what will be used in this article.
• There are still two more calculations that I need to do, and that will be part of my Ramblings tomorrow. The first is to gauge replacement value. In other words, if we're drafting 200 skaters in a league, we don't really need to compare Connor McDavid's assist value with Derek Stepan's. The latter just isn't relevant in the league. But we do need to compare McDavid's assist value to players that will be on the cusp of being draftable in this league, like Ryan Strome or Anton Lundell. The second adjustment is to provide position-specific value. Unless you're in a fantasy league with 12 flex spots as the skater lineup, we need to differentiate between what a left winger and a defenceman do because the expectations for each position are very different. For now, we are just using overall value, but these projections will be adjusted for positional scarcity.
• All players are projected to play 82 games.

With all that said, let's get to my initial projection run and the SGPs they produce. We are going to use a multi-cat format as our base with goals, assists, shots, hits, blocks, and power-play points as our six categories.

Here are the top-20 by total SGP value in this first estimation:

We see right away some differences from what we see in some places across the industry. This SGP ranking has Kaprizov as the 15^th skater which, if we might include a couple elite goalies like Igor Shesterkin or Andrei Vasilevskiy, pushes the Wild winger to the middle of the second round. Without monster peripherals or skating on an elite power play, his overall value suffers. For reference, the elite centres like Connor McDavid and Nathan MacKinnon provide anywhere from 30-50% more value on the PP, which is partly why there is a significant gap between the top four forwards and everyone else. A true top-tier power play performance from him would change the equation.  

There is another winger stuffed down the list a bit as well and it's Jonathan Huberdeau. Like Kaprizov, if we include a few elite goalies going in the first couple rounds, his initial value looks to be around the 2/3 turn of a fantasy draft. Conversely, his Yahoo! ADP is the end of the first round with his Underdog ADP being somewhere in the middle of the second round. Not that a few draft positions are a huge deal generally, but it helps to show how things can vary depending how you value a player vs. how he's valued on a given site.

Our next 10 players by SGP includes a plethora of wingers as well as a defenceman that is valued much differently than he is elsewhere:

Immediately, it's John Carlson that sticks out here. Yahoo! has him as the sixth defenceman off the board, sporting an ADP in the early fourth round. ESPN's initial fantasy rankings have him drafted outside the top-50 players and the 10^th defenceman on their list. NHL.com has Carlson valued roughly where Yahoo! has him while Underdog is closer to ESPN's, having him between player 50-60 by ADP. Even if I were to include the four goalies that are being drafted most heavily just about everywhere – Shesterkin, Vasilevskiy, Juuse Saros, and Jacob Markstrom – it would still leave Carlson as a top-30 player by SGP. When we're talking about options going inside the first five rounds of a 12-team league, a difference spanning a half-round to two rounds is a huge gap. I might need to investigate this a bit more.

What jumps out next is the Brothers Tkachuk. It'll depend on league settings, obviously, but if we're including hits and shots, these guys will be drafted very highly. Matthew is going in the early-mid second rounds with Brady perhaps a round later. While I have Brady initially valued around where many others have him, Matthew's is much lower than almost anywhere else. Here, he's just inside the top-25 skaters and if we include a couple goalies, he's easily valued as a third rounder. Even in leagues without hits and shots as categories, it's hard to imagine the new Florida Panther going that late. The issue seems to be some regression coming in the form of fewer goals and fewer power-play points. Though he is going to a team that had an excellent power play, how that team performs without Jonathan Huberdeau – one of the top playmakers in the league – remains uncertain. This is one valuation that I agree with but could see being very wrong in six months' time.

Alright let's look at specific positions. First, we'll start with centres, and the glut that appears after the first eight centres at the top of my list:

If you notice the difference in value between Sebastian Aho at the top and Anze Kopitar at the bottom, they are separated by less than one SGP. Those are 14 centres within one SGP of each other, whereas at the top of my list, there is a bigger gap between my number-1 pivot (McDavid) and my number-2 middle-man (Matthews). Even if we want to preclude Evgeni Malkin because of his extensive injury history and Elias Pettersson because of the aforementioned Three Centre Problem in Vancouver, it's still a dozen very good centres valued closely with each other. This is a case where accounting for positional scarcity and value above replacement matters, so there's nothing to get too tied up about right now.

With that said, I think we can start precluding some players from this tier. As I've mentioned a few times this summer, I'm very worried about Patrice Bergeron's fantasy value. From Natural Stat Trick, over the last three years at 5-on-5, the team has generated 14% fewer expected goals and 37% fewer actual goals when Bergeron is on the ice without Brad Marchand. The expected goals remain fairly consistent on the power play but the actual goals scored is a lot less (though it's a small sample, so there's noise here). Marchand is back skating but isn't expected to return until November at the earliest following double hip surgery in May. A 34-year-old who relies on agility and explosive cuts coming off double hip surgery and being dropped into a regular season is a huge concern for me. Can Bergeron post 30 goals and 70 points if Marchand comes back in the middle of November and isn't close to his usual self? Why take that risk when Roope Hintz or Mark Scheifele can provide similar value and don't have the same concerns (assuming Robertson is signed soon)? I need to adjust my Bergeron ranking, is the next thought that came to mind. (As always, ADPs will fluctuate, I'm just going by a few different sources and trying to aggregate.)

What else stood out to me is John Tavares. I wonder how many people realize he's only averaged 30 goals/82 games over the last three years. This is a guy who has five seasons exceeding 30 goals and scored 47 as recent as 2018-19. The flipside to the decrease in scoring is he's one of two centres in this group I have projected for 50 assists (the other being Kopitar), but his balanced fantasy value helps a lot: 30 goals, 50 assists, three shots per game, 25 PPPs, and a hit per game. That kind of balanced profile is very helpful in multi-cat fantasy leagues. With all that said, I'm still not sure I agree with his projection, and we'll see where he stands when I clean this up a bit.

What about defencemen? My top-10 looks similar to other spots, with one notable exception at the 10-spot:

This is a case where the multi-cat format plays into Jones's strength. If he can play an 82-game season, he absolutely has the upside for 10 goals, 40 assists, 200 shots, 20+ PPPs, and 250 hits+blocks. My projection has him flirting with all those marks and again, having broad fantasy value is important in multi-cat formats. In points-only leagues, especially considering the likelihood of Kane and Toews being traded at some point, Chicago is bad enough that Jones could be a run-of-the-mill 40-some point guy. He could be a very good value in multi-cat leagues (that don't include plus/minus) but is nowhere the same guy if we're just looking at points.

Speaking of values, just after Jones in my SGP ranking is Noah Dobson. Other than ESPN, he's ranked much lower in most places, with a commensurate ADP. It is worth noting that Dobson skated over 22 minutes a game once the Islanders got through the first couple months of the season and they were a mid-pack scoring team. He also brings a balanced profile in multi-cat leagues and is only getting better. The Islanders are a question mark but 10+ goals, ~40 assists, 200 shots, 20 PPPs, and 230+ blocks/hits is very, very plausible. Should the Islanders really figure it out offensively, he could be one of the best defence values available.

Quickly, here is a group of wingers that interested me:

By overall value, all these guys are interchangeable. But they do bring different skill sets. For example, Jesper Bratt is projected for 50 assists but under 40 hits while Evander Kane is projected for 31 assists but over two hits per game. Meanwhile, Jonathan Marchessault is projected for over three shots per game and roughly 70 hits while Clayton Keller makes up his value with a 75-point projection. This is where, in a roto league, looking at what categories are needed after those first few picks will determine who the right player is because while overall value is similar, individual value in many categories is not.

I should also note that Evander Kane's projection here is much lower than where he's being drafted. Anyone following this list just won't get him, seeing as he's literally my 100^th skater while most spots have him ranked or with an ADP somewhere between the third and sixth round. It basically comes down to whether he's a staple of the PP or not. I don't have him on the top unit permanently, but if we get a different indication in exhibition games, this could change a lot.

Alright, those are my initial impressions. As mentioned earlier, we are going to have a new projection tomorrow that factors in replacement value and positional scarcity. Leave any thoughts in the comments.