In a fourth straight one-goal game, and one-goal win, over Carolina, the Florida Panthers are off the to the Stanley Cup Final for the second time in franchise history. Matthew Tkachuk put home a power-play feed from Aleksander Barkov with five seconds left in the game to lift Florida to a 4-3 win and a 4-0 sweep of the team with the second-best record in the league. They have now beat teams ranked first, third, and fourth so far these playoffs in what has been an historic postseason run. Florida can now try to claim a Cup that eluded them in 1996 when they were swept in the Final.

The heroics from Tkachuk will be the stuff of legend as he ends up with three game-winning goals in the series. Two of those were in overtime, including the four OT game, and this one with mere seconds remaining. He also had the primary assist on the only goal from their Game 3 win. Sergei Bobrovsky was very good again in this game, stopping 36 of 39 in the win, but Tkachuk is also a big reason why this series is over in four games.

Jesper Fast scored late for Carolina to tie the game 3-3 with under four minutes left but a Jordan Staal penalty led to Tkachuk sealing the deal. It was another solid game for the 'Canes and in another universe, this series is 3-1 either way, or just 2-2. Such are the margins of the playoffs, but that won't make this loss sit any easier for the Hurricanes.

Florida gets the winner of Vegas/Dallas and the Golden Knights have a chance to wrap their own series in a sweep on Thursday night. It would make an entertaining matchup. A lot more on the Final (and the other series) across the website in the coming days.

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Be sure to pre-order your copy of the Dobber Prospects Report!

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The fallout from Dallas's 4-0 Game 3 loss to Vegas was going to likely be steep. Early in that game, Dallas forward Jamie Benn took one of the dumbest penalties in recent NHL memory, considering the context in which it happened, earning a five-minute major and a game misconduct for trying to injure Mark Stone. It was just an unbelievably stupid play early in a game where his team was already trailing, and down 2-0 in the series. Benn was given a hearing with the Department of Player Safety on Wednesday and this was the result:

Dallas' Jamie Benn has been suspended for two games for Cross-checking against Vegas' Mark Stone. https://t.co/YBf8qihuCh

— NHL Player Safety (@NHLPlayerSafety) May 24, 2023

Game 4 goes Thursday night in Dallas.

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Staying with the Stars, Max Domi was fined for a slash from that same game, while Evgenii Dadonov appears as though he won't play:

Pete DeBoer calls Evgenii Dadonov doubtful. Said he's getting some tests today.

— Jesse Granger (@JesseGranger_) May 24, 2023

The line of Dadonov-Benn-Johnston out-chanced Vegas 13-7 at 5-on-5 through the first three games of the series. Though they hadn't scored, they were playing well, and had been since the regular season. It will be interesting to see how the Stars manage without their second line intact.

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In the search for a new general manager, it appears Pittsburgh will not be hiring Eric Tulsky, who is currently in management with Carolina. Tulsky was one of the most prominent online hockey analysts in the 2010s and has been with Carolina for several years now. His name always pops up in these discussions, so maybe it's a matter of when he'll make the jump, and not if, but it won't be for the Penguins.

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We are starting to wind down the offseason fantasy reviews of each of the non-playoff teams. San Jose and Montreal were the most recent franchises discussed, and that means we have reached the bottom-3 teams in league standings. The first of those teams is the Chicago Blackhawks.

These Ramblings will discuss the fantasy successes/failures and the improvements/declines of the team and players, as well as where the franchise goes from here. When you get to the dregs of the league, some of these segments may be fairly short from a fantasy perspective.

As usual, data will be taken from Frozen Tools as well as Natural Stat Trick.

Successes

Like I said, some of these segments will be short.

Standard Yahoo! scoring saw exactly zero (0) Blackhawks skaters finish inside the top-200 fantasy options this season. Only one skater – Seth Jones at 217^th – finished inside the top-250 fantasy options, and only two – add Andreas Athanasiou at 274^th – finished inside the top-325 fantasy options. That means in 12-team leagues with 25-man rosters, precisely two Chicago skaters were fantasy viable for most of the season. Even then, variance in performance made them drags on fantasy rosters for weeks at a time. Max Domi led the Chicago roster in points with 49 and he was traded on March 3^rd. So, yeah, not much fantasy success here.

He only played 23 games, but we should shout out Lukas Reichel. In limited action, he finished third on the team in points per 60 minutes, trailing Domi and Kane. League-wide, he compared to players like David Perron and Rickard Rakell. It was just 23 games, but a pretty good showing from a 20-year-old on a team trying to actively be the worst in recent NHL history.  

Alex Stalock and Petr Mrazek, Chicago's goalie tandem, saw fantasy value at different times of the year but neither was a season-long hold in most formats. Neither goalie played half the season and even though Stalock performed well, he was on such a bad team that his GAA was over 3.00 and he had nine wins in 24 starts. Successful at times, but not successful all year.

Failures

*Doing my best Gary Oldman impression from 'Léon: The Professional'* EVERYONE! No, seriously:

• Patrick Kane's Yahoo! ADP was around the 40^th pick. He did not come anywhere close to that.
• Seth Jones's Yahoo! ADP was around the 130^th pick. He did not come anywhere close to that.
• Max Domi's Yahoo! ADP was around the 150^th pick. He did not come anywhere close to that.

Everyone else might have had some streaming value at times, but when Athanasiou leads the non-traded players in points with 40, and no one scores more than 20 goals, the value was very inconsistent. Maybe not outright failures outside of the three mentioned, but certainly no successes outside of maybe Taylor Raddysh in very deep banger leagues. Jake McCabe was fine in Chicago for multi-cat formats until the trade deadline, so, there's that.

On the topic of Jones, he really wasn’t that bad for fantasy. His entire problem came from the power play: he averaged one power-play point every 4.1 games in 2021-22 but just one every six games in 2022-23. That difference largely made up his per-game production drop from the season prior. His drop in ice time of nearly two minutes didn’t help his per-game rates, points/shots/otherwise, either.

Improvements

When an already-bad team trades Alex DeBrincat and Kirby Dach, and lets Dylan Strome walk for nothing, all in hopes of ending up the worst roster in the league, there are unlikely to be improvements. The team's expected goals-for rate at 5-on-5 did improve by 5.2%, but the league's rate went up, so how much of an actual improvement it is remains an open question. The team's overall shooting percentage rose a bit from 2021-22? That is about it.

Declines

*Doing an improvised Gary Oldman impression from 'Léon: The Professional'* EVERYWHERE! No, seriously:

• Expected goals against per minute while short-handed rose 12.5% which led to a goals-against increase over 4%.
• Expected goals for per minute while on the power play declined 3.3% which led to a goals-for decrease of 20%.
• Expected goals against per minute at even strength rose 25% which led to a goals-against increase over 4%/
• Shots for per minute at even strength declined 6.9% which led to a goals-for decrease of 4.2%.

The only relevant increase was the aforementioned rise in expected goals-for at 5-on-5 (around 5%) but as often mentioned, that number rose league-wide from 2021-22, so calling in an improvement isn't quite accurate. It also isn't a failure, but there is a reason why I said there were declines everywhere – there are declines everywhere. Not sure what else we should have expected.

Where They Go From Here

Though they made all those important moves listed earlier last offseason, there is still a lot more turnover to come. Jonathan Toews is not returning, and is potentially retiring, while Cap Friendly has nearly the entire roster with contracts running out this offseason or next. The only non-ELC skaters they have signed past 2023-24 are Seth Jones and Connor Murphy. Everyone else is a UFA or RFA over the next 14 months.

For this offseason, staying the course is the likely option (though this team does really dumb stuff seemingly every summer, so we'll definitely take a wait-and-see approach here). They can sign their veteran UFAs like Athanasiou and Alex Stalock to reasonable contracts, then do the same with their RFAs because they've already traded most of their good, young talent. They can then nibble around the edges to fill out the roster as they did last summer, either by signing cast-offs to cheap deals (Domi) or taking on bad contracts (Tyler Johnson). Not only because it's their only real option, but because like the 2023 Draft, they have two first-round picks in 2024, including their own. Getting two extremely high picks seems to be the course of action here.

If they do go the route of filling the roster with marginal players, it's hard to see them being much better next season in any real way. We could see good breakout performances from guys like Lukas Reichel or Wyatt Kaiser, but like this 2022-23 season, it's hard to see any one player having sustained fantasy success that makes him a viable roster option in any league with fewer than 200 drafted skaters. Once we get to the medium-sized formats, then guys like Jones, Athanasiou, Reichel, or Mrazek could have some value, but it won't be a lot.

The team winning the Bedard lottery probably doesn't change this (though we can add him to the potential fantasy draftees list). Not sure if anyone has checked out the top UFAs this offseason, but we're looking at Ryan O'Reilly, Tyler Bertuzzi, Dmitry Orlov, Vladimir Tarasenko, and maybe Max Pacioretty if he's healthy. Then we're getting to players like Jason Zucker, Matt Dumba, John Klingberg, and so on. In other words, Chicago can't really go out and sign a couple UFAs and suddenly have two pretty good scoring lines for a short-term fantasy boost. They might be able to manage one, so we'll see what they do this summer.

From a non-fantasy perspective, Chicago is taking a huge, huge gamble. We saw the Buffalo Sabres do something similar in 2014-15, not end up with Connor McDavid, and they spun their wheels for a half-decade. Edmonton has fared better with McDavid, but it's fair to wonder if even their moderate success would have been achieved without Leon Draisaitl asserting himself as a top offensive weapon in the league. All that is to say, there is considerably more here they need to add besides just Bedard and with no current star on the roster they can hold over (mileage may vary on Seth Jones), they have 19 roster spots to fill in the coming seasons to put together a playoff team. Players like Reichel and Kaiser should help, but prospects are not guarantees, and the team has so far to go.  

From a fantasy perspective, this is another disaster in the making. We have seen teams come out of nowhere to over-perform in the regular season, but just to be a league-average offensive team, we'll need to see a 30% improvement in goal-scoring. Unless they strike it rich in the Draft, the lack of help coming this summer means another awful fantasy season in Illinois for the vast majority of the roster.   

Previous Offseason Reviews:

Buffalo

Calgary

Pittsburgh

Nashville

Ottawa

Vancouver

Detroit

St. Louis

Washington

Arizona

Philadelphia

San Jose

Montreal