My last Ramblings of the year comes in with three days worth of games left on the schedule. Playoff drafts are just around the corner, and I want to go over a few thoughts and strategies entering those.

How to win is pretty simple. Whether it's a bracket or a player pool, you need your teams to advance, and likely to get at least one of the finalists. With the added complexity of picking players, you also need to figure out how to weight the players to the top teams, and when to pick depth players off of top teams versus the best players off of lesser teams.

Sometimes it seems a little easier to pick the winner of a conference, but this year there seem to be more options than usual. In the East, Boston has had a historically good season, but would it really be a big surprise to anyone if any of the top six teams won the conference? I can see a path for each of them, though whichever two teams end up in the wild card spots are going to have very long odds in my books to even make it past round one.

Over in the West, there is a little more parity, but the top-tier of teams does seem like the most likely place for us to find a finalist. The top-four teams, the Avalanche, Oilers, Golden Knights, and Stars, are where I would be focusing my efforts. I wouldn't be too surprised at a run from the Kings either, but I don't think they can outplay Connor McDavid at the moment, especially with their goaltending.

If I had to put money down on two teams right now, it would be the Oilers and the Rangers in the Cup final. Luckily though, I don't have to put any money down at this point, and can take what the draft gives me as far as available players when my turn in up.

There are a few strategies I have seen and used in playoff pools to various degrees of success, but the keys usually come down to focusing your picks across no more than five teams (and no more than three from one conference), and having a few top players from at least half of them. Occasionally it can work out to select players from just two teams, the one in each conference that you think will make the finals, but all it takes in that case to derail your postseason pool is one funky series and then you're too far behind to catch up even if the other team does end up winning the cup.

Assuming your pool has about 12 players that you get to pick I find that the farther you expect a team to go, you select double the amount of players from that team than you take from a team you expect to be out a round sooner. To split up 12 players evenly across four or five teams, you would have four or five skaters from each of your expected teams in the finals, at most two from your next two teams, and then maybe an odd player from the Kings who didn't have many players gone by the last round.

*Note I do like to find a team in the last one-to-three rounds that has almost no one selected from them, and take whoever of their top players are left. If they go on a run, then it's a big win, and if they don't and only play six games in the first round, well the five points they scored won't be much less than the eight points that third-liner on the cup-finalist team gets you anyways.

What this might look like in a 10-team draft where 12 players are taken per team (assuming a minimum of two defencemen) is:

Round 1) Leon Draisaitl

2) Ryan Nugent-Hopkins

3) Vladimir Tarasenko

4) Vincent Trocheck

5) Edmonton Goalies (More on that in a bit)

6) Alexis Lafreniere

7) Mattias Ekholm

8) Dawson Mercer

9) K'Andre Miller

10) Tomas Tatar

11) Phillip Danault

12) Alex Iafallo

Ideally in this kind of scenario, your four teams are in four separate quarters of the bracket, and especially not playing each other in the first round, but with the matchups not set yet I just pulled four example teams at random here.

Any questions? Feel free to ask me in the comments or on Twitter.

Or, even better… You can buy the Dobber Hockey playoff guide now – get it here. Get ahead of your planning, run through hundreds of iterations if you want to in order to get the perfect bracket and draft sheet set up, and you can always re-download it for the most up-to-date rankings up to the end of the season.

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Goalies are a whole other topic that I wanted to briefly mention, and the best way to do it is to stay away from them, unless the pool has you selecting a team's goalies and not individual goalies, and there's some good value at the draft table. Especially with the way the offensive side of the game has exploded in the last number of years, there is a lot more to lose in almost any pool by selecting goalies earlier at the expense of better skaters (mainly forwards).

On that note, outside of the top handful of defencemen, you are also much better off picking forwards earlier, and looking for bargains among the defencemen. Often times in the playoffs there are a few cases where a second or third defenceman down the pecking order ends up out-pointing those above them. Players such as K'Andre Miller, Samuel Girard, Mattias Ekholm (who scored again last night for Edmonton), Matt Grzekcyk, Justin Schultz, and others of similar talent often have solid post-season runs. These are the ones you stack your D-core with later in the draft, while the David Pastrnaks, Mitch Marners, and Mikko Rantanens should litter the first three rounds or so until all the top-tier forwards are gone.

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Thirty-six-year-old Evgeni Malkin was finally healthy through the fantasy playoffs, and has 27 points in his last 25 games. His PIM numbers have jumped back up, his shot rate is still excellent, and he looks like he has at least another three good years in him.

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We'll see who starts game one for Boston in round one. In the meantime, it wouldn't surprise me to see them rest both of their main goalies, and give their last start on Thursday to Brandon Bussi.

Concern would be a groin strain for Ullmark

Time off depends on grade of injury

He also may just be exercising caution considering the time of season https://t.co/n0BeqEAUSP

— Dr. Harjas Grewal (@Harjas_Grewal) April 12, 2023

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Matthew Knies made a much better impression last night in his second NHL game than he did in his debut. He launched three shots on net, nearly scoring on one (with Ryan O'Rielly picking up the rebound for Knies' first NHL point). With the big guns out of the lineup, he saw some more power play time. Overall though, he looks like he is making an effort to be a big-game and heavy player, which is the fastest way that he can earn himself a regular spot in the post-season lineup.

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Last week I said I would look into a few players that I think could be on next season's iterations of the surprise and disappointment lists that I had in last week's Ramblings.

Surprise

The breakout threshold group: Owen Tippett, Alexis Lafreniere, Kaapo Kakko, Cody Glass, Quinton Byfield

This group all comes with very little time to their breakout threshold, and some high draft pedigree to boot. Fantasy owners will have varying levels of patience with these players, but I like them all for at least 60 points next season. There is also Dawson Mercer, who I mentioned last week. He doesn't have the same top-10 draft pedigree that the others do above him on the list, but as I have mentioned before he has all of the markers to be set up for success next year. A jump for him is coming, the question just becomes: how big?

It's less exciting to find someone who breaks out just on time though, so let's take a look at a few others.

Vitek Vanecek – I hate trying to project goalies, and usually I will just take what falls to me in the draft, because outside of someone young coming in like Devon Levi, Dustin Wolf, or Jesper Wallstedt, there aren't usually a lot of very expected jumps. Especially before you know for sure what the starter/backup situation is going to be like for each team. I like Vanecek though as he has now had time to adjust to a new team in front of him, adjust to a new starter's role, realize how he needs to train in the offseason to manage that role, and be a good enough goalie that the young and fantastic team in front of him wins a lot more games than they lose. He already has the most wins (32) in a season for the Devils among goalies not named Brodeur, but I think he topples that mark with ease next year, tying Brodeur for third all-time on the franchise list with 44 wins.

Samuel Girard – Despite a miniscule team shooting percentage under seven percent, Girard still put up a 40-point pace. In the second-half of the year, his pace has been a 52-point mark. With a healthier set of Avalanche forwards next year, on top of Cale Makar dealing with injuries now, Girard looks primed to take a big offensive step forward.

Disappoint

Nugent-Hopkins – Looking into his stats yesterday, it blew my mind that he passed 50 power play points a week ago. Odds are that Nuge does not approach 50 power play points again next season, so a 20-point reduction there will bring him back within the range of where his usual production falls. At even strength he is his usual 50-point self, on top of an inflated set of percentages this year. He played and produced this year most with Connor McDavid, and it's no guarantee that the lines aren't shuffled next year.

Bo Horvat – Exactly as we all expected, Horvat's shooting percentage has dropped back to right in line with his 16% number from last year. The combination of moving to the Islanders and hitting a statistical regression wall meant that the slump kicked in hard and fast. However, with Horvat having gone on such a heater, he built up such a lead over his usual production pace that he still smashed his career high in goals and points. Being a disappointment next season will depend on the expectations, but in the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately business, his 40-goal pace will likely lead to him still being over-drafted even though everyone is aware he likely just set his career highs.

Filip Forsberg – After his explosion for a 100-point-pace in 2021-22, Forsberg fell right back down to his usual numbers in a concussion-shortened season. What his injury-shortened campaign masks is that his ice time has dropped for the last two years, and he's going to be trying to carry the scoring for a non-playoff team next year that is going to have to shelter a lot of young players that are just starting out in the league. That is really going to increase the defensive need, and the quality of the matchups against Forsberg.

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See you next Wednesday. In the meantime, you can find me on Twitter @alexdmaclean if you have any fantasy hockey questions or comments.