With injuries mounting and the team not looking very strong to begin with, the Flyers are facing a huge uphill battle from the outset. New coach John Tortorella, who is very much known for not going easy on his players, didn't take long to make his mark on this roster on the first day of on-ice sessions:

Charlie O'Connor would later tweet that Ryan Ellis is out indefinitely and may not return at all this season. There had been a lot of concern here but to see it a bit more concrete information is always a downer. He had really turned himself into one of the top defencemen in the league and now his career appears very much in jeopardy. Let's hope that's not the case.

*

Not-so-great news for new Canadiens captain Nick Suzuki:

Nick Suzuki is out two weeks with a lower body injury. @CanadiensMTL

— Renaud Lavoie (@renlavoietva) September 22, 2022

A couple weeks isn't a big deal as that would put him in line to return a week before the season starts. Let's just hope this is nothing that lingers, though the Canadiens don't have much in the way of expectations this year from fans or the public.

*

An important update on Colorado captain Gabriel Landeskog:

Gabriel Landeskog "won't skate anytime soon," Jared Bednar said. He's dealing with an injury from last year and will miss the start of the year.

— Peter Baugh (@Peter_Baugh) September 22, 2022

That is a big update here. It is a vague timeline, but that he’s not even skating with whatever injury it is surely can’t be a good sign. There will be more news posted as we get it, but this could be good news for the upside of guys like Artturi Lehkonen, Alex Newhook, and Evan Rodrigues. They could all end up in the top-6 forward mix to start the year with at least one of them getting top power play time. How the lines shake out as we progress through camp will be a story to follow.

*

There were a lot of line combination tweets that came with the first day of training camp so I'm going to highlight a few that stuck out to me. At the risk of being Captain Obvious, things can and will change quickly all through the preseason. These may not even be line combinations by tomorrow. But it gives us an idea as to which players coaches want to try to push to the top of the lineup, and a player being given an opportunity for high levels of success is what we want to see. All any of us can do is hope for an opportunity and then make the best of it.

Let's start with Florida line combinations:

It was just yesterday in my Ramblings that I talked about Matthew Tkachuk probably being overvalued. If continues not skating with Aleksander Barkov at even strength, we should start to worry.  

*

We got some interesting New Jersey line combinations:

Alexander Holtz is a guy I have pegged as a potential Calder Trophy winner as the league's top rookie. He scored a half-goal per game in the AHL as a rookie last season and it certainly seems the team will try to make it work in a top role for him. His fantasy value may be a bit iffy because of the concern over top power-play minutes but skating next to Jack Hughes at even strength would be a nice start to our Holtz 4 Calder campaign.

*

A one-stop-shop for all your Vegas trio needs:

So now that we've seen all 3 groups, here are the lines/pairs for the top players:

Kessel—Eichel—Smith
Marchessault—Stephenson—Stone
Howden—Karlsson—Amadio
Carrier—Roy—Kolesar

Martinez—Pietrangelo
McNabb—Theodore
Hutton—Whitecloud

— Jesse Granger (@JesseGranger_) September 22, 2022

*

I had been writing a bit over the summer about potential Tampa Bay line combinations. The first day of camp blew all my thoughts out of the water:

an *EARLY* look at the lines from Day 1 of the #Bolts training camp:

Stamkos – Point – Kucherov
Killorn – Paul – Hagel
Koepke – Namestnikov – Colton
Maroon – Bellemare – Perry

Hedman – Foote
Sergachev – Cernak
Cole – Myers
Fleury – Perbix

— Gabby Shirley (@Gabby_Shirley_) September 22, 2022

Stacking the top line is an interesting approach. It would kill the value I had hoped from Ross Colton if this persists but it's still extremely early in training camp. We'll see how things go.

*

Calgary gave us what many assumed would be their top line with an interesting wrinkle to the second line:

Lines and pairings of interest from #Flames first on-ice session of training camp:

Huberdeau-Lindholm-Toffoli
Milano-Kadri-Eakin (placeholder for Mangiapane, I suspect)
Dube-Backlund-Coleman

Hanifin-Andersson
Weegar-Tanev

— Derek Wills (@Fan960Wills) September 22, 2022

Sonny Milano is on a professional tryout with the team. He had a good year in Anaheim last season and has some strong playmaking/transition numbers (and has for a few seasons now). Sometimes, on-ice value doesn't align with underlying stats, but it looks he'll at least be given a real good chance at prime roster spot. It's something to monitor anyway.

*

Some funky Blues line combinations:

A look at the twosomes the Blue have in their line combos:

Neighbors-O'REILLY-KYROU
Bolduc-THOMAS-TARASENKO
SAAD-BROWN-Frk
BARBASHEV-ACCIARI-Kostin

Meanwhile, Schenn is centering Highmore-Pitlick.

If Buchnevich is w/Thomas-Tarasenko, would Schenn be LW with O'Reilly-Kyrou?

— Jeremy Rutherford (@jprutherford) September 22, 2022

A few times this offseason, it’s been mentioned that one of Saad or Schenn will be stuck on a checking line and away from all the team’s forward stars. The early nod seems to be going to Schenn jumping into the top-6. That would make a big difference in his fantasy outlook. We shall see.

*

We got early confirmation on what the top line for Columbus might look like:

As promised, Johnny Gaudreau skating with Patrik Laine and Boone Jenner today when #CBJ goes with lines.

Kent Johnson is with Victor Rask and Yegor Chinakhov to start.

The D are cycling (there's an odd number) but Zach Werenski did some reps with David Jiricek.

— Jeff Svoboda (@JacketsInsider) September 22, 2022

This would be an interesting trio to see together, and it would mean tremendous things for Boone Jenner's fantasy value. I will reiterate that all line combinations listed today are probably going to change in some form sooner rather than later, but I would bet on Jenner being the top centre for a while.

*

Despite all the goings-on around Jesse Puljüjarvi all offseason, he may start on Leon Draisaitl's wing:

Oilers training camp Day 1, lines and pairings (Group 1):
Hyman-Draisaitl-Puljujarvi
McLeod-RNH-Foegele
Holloway-Malone-Virtanen
Petrov-Philp/Hambilin-Chiasson

Nurse-Wanner (no Ceci — hamstring)
Broberg-Barrie
Niemelainen-Demers
Peters-Kesselring

Campbell
Fanti
Rodrigue

— Daniel Nugent-Bowman (@DNBsports) September 22, 2022

There has been lots discussed about the winger this summer, but if he can really stay in the top-6 most of the year, a shooting percentage rebound could mean tremendous value in banger leagues.

*

In yesterday's Ramblings, I started exploring projections I have been working on over the last week. These were just my initial run of 2022-23 skaters that didn't include rookies or goalies. The intent was to just start the process of refining my final projections and being able to track value changes over the next few weeks.

Today, we're diving back into the projections, with some adjustments made. As mentioned in those Ramblings, I borrowed a concept from a fantasy baseball player named Tanner Bell. That concept is called Standings Gained Points, or SGP. We use this method because it tells us how much a player contributes to an individual roto category and how that translates into gaining points in roto formats. It tells us, for example, how much Connor McDavid can contribute to roto value through his assists vs. how much Alex Ovechkin can contribute with his shot rates. We totalled how much each projected player counts in our categories to give us a single overall number that indicates total value.

But as I noted, there were more adjustments to make. One of them was for replacement-level value. There is no reason to compare McDavid with, say, Jake Evans or Luke Glendening. Those latter two players just aren't relevant in the vast majority of fantasy leagues. Rather, we should compare how much value McDavid can bring over centres like Ryan Strome or Sam Bennett.

The second adjustment was for positional scarcity. How do we compare McDavid to Cale Makar? Or how do we compare Alex Ovechkin to Aleksander Barkov? They play different positions that provide different results, and we need to calculate how the positional differences affect overall value.

I did the replacement and positional adjustments and came up with what I believe are more accurate projections. Keep in mind that this is for multi-cat roto leagues with goals, assists, power-play points, shots, blocks, and hits as our categories. Adding things like faceoffs or takeaways would change the equation, as would subtracting stats like hits and blocks. And, again, we still don't have rookies or goalies while assuming 12-team fantasy leagues.

To that end, here are the top-20 skaters by replacement SGP according to my first adjusted projection run:

We can see how positional scarcity adjusts things here. McDavid is still the clear number-1 fantasy player and the gap between him and number-2 is larger than the gap between number-2 and number-7. Some people may not like drafting first overall because it's such a long wait to get your second and third picks, but McDavid is still head-and-shoulders above everyone, even at the deepest position in fantasy. But all that aside, Makar jumps up two number-2 on our list, given how elite he is at a position that doesn't typically produce what Makar can. He paced for over 90 points last year and did so averaging north of three shots per game with 200+ blocks/hits combined. He could put up Jonathan Huberdeau-like production with much better peripherals. There is a real case for taking him with the second overall pick in almost any fantasy format.

The positional scarcity also bumps up the other top-end defencemen. Roman Josi sneaks into the top-5, slightly ahead of Leon Draisaitl, with Victor Hedman grading out to a first-round pick in 12-team leagues. There is also Adam Fox and John Carlson – whom we talked about extensively yesterday – getting into our top-15 skaters. That is the power of adjusting for positional scarcity.

Now, I'm not outright advocating taking Roman Josi ahead of Leon Draisaitl in fantasy leagues. The values are close and raw numbers do matter. Maybe someone reading this thinks they have another defenceman they can take later who can compare with Josi, or they're expecting Josi to decline a bit, or any other number of reasons. This isn't a perfect science, as much as we pretend it sometimes is. But it is better than blindly taking who we think is the best player and moving along.

Readers will also notice there isn't much change in most winger value. David Pastrnak, Nikita Kucherov, and Alex Ovechkin were all graded as end-of-the-first-round values in yesterday's Ramblings and remain here today. A lot of top-end wingers, either on the right or left side, tend to produce relatively similar values so adjusting for positional scarcity on the wing won't affect winger value a lot. But their relatively constant value affects centres, and since there are more centres that can produce what top-end wingers do, it makes the next tier of wingers under Pastrnak/Kucherov/Ovechkin more valuable than the next tier of centres under McDavid/MacKinnon/Matthews/Draisaitl. Economics!

Alright let's get to some things that interested me in these new rankings, like this glut of defencemen:

A reminder that everyone in my projections, as of today, is projected to play 82 games. It is quite obvious that won't happen, and Charlie McAvoy doesn't belong in this group because of the time he's expected to miss recovering from knee surgery. But we still have four defencemen being valued extremely close together, as the SGP separating them is a fraction of what the difference is between McDavid and Makar, our top two picks. If we look at Yahoo! ADP, the difference between the highest-ranked player on this list (Aaron Ekblad, late third round) and lowest (Seth Jones, middle of the 11^th round) is a chasm. That holds, though not to as severe a degree, when looking at Underdog Fantasy as the highest-ranked player by ADP from our list (Moritz Seider, early fifth round) and the lowest-ranked player by ADP from our list (Noah Dobson, early in the 11^th round). This is how sharp fantasy players can accumulate value as we get later in our drafts: if Seider and Dobson are expected to bring similar value in a particular format, what's the point of drafting Seider 50^th overall rather than Dobson outside the top-100?

It shouldn't need to be said, but: projections are not gospel. No single projection system is perfect, or anywhere near perfect, even. It is quite possible, using this scenario, that Seider ends up the number-3 defenceman in fantasy while Dobson pulls back a bit and only returns his value. That is just the game that we chose to play. But, in the long run, I'd wager that making projections like this in the search of draft value will help far more than it will hurt. Just ask the people who waited and drafted guys like Timo Meier and Joel Eriksson Ek last year rather than reaching for Andrei Svechnikov or Elias Pettersson.

Let's keep this train rolling with some more stuff that interests me and look at centres. Yesterday we discussed how some guys may be over/under-valued and when looking at the deepest position, that only gets more obvious. Here we have a list of 17 skaters immediately following the defence glut posted above and at least eight of them are centres (likely more, depending on how positions are assigned for William Nylander and Sam Reinhart):

Between the top centre listed here in Sebastian Aho and the guy at the bottom in Brayden Point, we have a separation of 0.58 SGP. That is roughly half the SGP between our top two centres in McDavid (8.31) and Matthews (7.12). The discussion we just had about the defence glut and ADPs applies here as well. If we're to look at Yahoo! ADP (which, as always, take with a grain of salt the size of a Hopewell Rock), Mika Zibanejad and Sebastian Aho are going in the middle of the third round with Sam Reinhart and John Tavares going in the middle of the sixth round, and both Point and Roope Hintz going outside Round 10. If we're to look at Underdog – which has done well over 200 money-league drafts, so their ADP isn't a bad gauge – the differences remain significant. All of Zibanejad, Aho, and Jack Eichel are going early in the fourth round with Tavares, Point, Pettersson, and Hintz going somewhere between the middle of the sixth round and late in the seventh. Reinhart, meanwhile, is going in the ninth round. If we're expecting similar values between Aho and Reinhart, why take Aho in the fourth when you could go well above Reinhart's ADP and still get him in the eighth? We would have to have faith in our projections to do this, but if we do have that faith, there might be a lot of centre value we could attack and use earlier picks to fill out our other positions.

The last thing we're going to look at are mid-range wingers. Sometimes these guys can be reaches by ADP, sometimes they can be tremendous values. We have 20 skaters listed here, all outside the top-100, and centres/defencemen have been left in for comparison's sake:

There was a discussion in yesterday's Ramblings about Evander Kane's value so go read that for why he appears this low.

It is an interesting grouping because Underdog ADP has guys like Pavel Buchnevich, Jesper Bratt, and Tyler Bertuzzi going between the middle of the seventh round and the end of the eighth round. At that point, we're still looking for building blocks of our roster. Meanwhile, there are flanks like Clayton Keller and Blake Wheeler going outside the first 10 rounds. There is an SGP gap between them that is meaningful when we start getting outside the top-100 picks, but Wheeler, for example, is still averaging 76 points/82 games over his last two seasons. How confident are we that Bratt will out-produce Wheeler by five or six rounds of value? That is how this approach can help.

Readers don't have to agree with my rankings, and these will be refined over the next few weeks. But I've found this approach helps in any fantasy sport and can really aid in identifying players that are undervalued.