Winger Carl Hagelin suffered an eye injury late in the 2021-22 season and missed the entire 2022-23 season as a result. He announced on Wednesday that he would be retiring from hockey as a result of the injury. The 35-year-old ends his NHL career with 110 goals and 296 points in 713 games, winning a pair of Stanley Cup with Pittsburgh years back. The offensive numbers belie a player who was great at both ends of the ice and was a huge part of the Cup teams on their third line, the famed HBK line with Nick Bonino and Phil Kessel.

It is always unfortunate to see any player have their career taken like this, but it was a great career from a champion. All the best to him and his family moving forward.

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To cap off this recent series of Ramblings focusing on draft targets, we're going to turn our gaze to the Central Division. This past Tuesday saw the Pacific Division get covered, with the Metro and the Atlantic the week before.

Pre-training camp fantasy drafts offer the opportunity for value due to imperfect information. They are gambles, but they can pay off handsomely when they work out. As mentioned in the article on the Pacific, no one is drafting Quinton Byfield, but if he shows up on the top line and second PP unit in camp, his ADP will rise. That is the kind of value we're discussing here.

As usual, data will be from our Frozen Tools or Natural Stat Trick, unless otherwise indicated. If a player's ADP is listed as 'N/A', it's because they're outside the top-250 forwards or top-100 defencemen being drafted.

** Don't forget to grab your copy of the 2023-24 Dobber Hockey Fantasy Guide!**

Arizona – Nick Schmaltz (ESPN ADP: 225.7, Forward 139)

It is curious to see Clayton Keller with a sixth-round ADP, in the neighbourhood of Sebastian Aho and Jordan Kyrou, while Keller's line mate that has averaged 76 points/82 games over the last two seasons goes 13 rounds later. What hurts Schmaltz in some leagues is he may be listed as centre-only, which is insane considering he has just 339 faceoffs over the last two years, fewer than TJ Oshie (349) in 24 more games played. Alas, fantasy sites!

Assuming Schmaltz earns a winger designation at some point, this is a guy primed for a point-per-game season. The only thing holding back him and Keller from higher highs is the power play. Now that they don't have defencemen who love bombing shots from the point with the man advantage, maybe the PP turns itself around.  

I am not saying Schmaltz and Keller are equals; Keller is the better offensive talent and shoots the puck a lot more. Schmaltz, however, is a very underrated offensive talent in his own right and he'll still get top billing in all the important offensive minutes. He is much preferrable to other options in his draft range like Tyler Seguin, Matias Maccelli, and Blake Wheeler.

Chicago – Taylor Hall (ESPN ADP: 215.5, Forward 125)

My Ramblings over the last few weeks have made it clear that I think Connor Bedard's draft value is being sucked out (he's all the way up to a 20^th overall ADP on ESPN). On the flipside, it seems like fantasy owners aren't too keen on drafting the guy with whom Bedard will be skating all his offensive minutes.

Hall has seen his production decline with age but that oversimplifies things. Over his two full seasons in Boston, Hall skated 900:16 with David Pastrnak at even strength, posting 41 points in those minutes. That works out to 2.73 points/60 minutes, which is the same rate that Jesper Bratt, Artemi Panarin, and Mikko Rantanen posted over the last two years. Now, we can't expect Bedard to be Pastrnak out of the gate, but if fantasy owners are expecting 40 goals from Bedard, who do they think is passing him the puck?

With genuine top-line offensive minutes and a full-ish season, Hall can get to 50 even-strength points, something Hall has done three times in his career (and got to 46 in 2021-22). Add all the power play points in and Hall has 70 points in his sights. I would rather draft Hall outside the top-200 players than Bedard in the top-20. For anyone with Bedard on their rosters, take Hall in the 17^th round and enjoy.

Colorado – Ross Colton (ESPN ADP: 229.7, Forward 226)

Colorado's 2022-23 season was marred by injury and a lack of depth forced them to play their top guys a lot; there were 24 regular forwards in the NHL to play 20:10 a night and five of them were from Colorado alone. This offseason was spent reloading the Avalanche depth and that includes bringing in Ross Colton.

If we look at Colorado's top-6, all the spots may be taken with four key returnees plus Ryan Johansen and Jonathan Drouin. We have seen issues crop up with Valeri Nichushkin (injury or otherwise) while Drouin is far from a sure thing to thrive with the Avs. They would likely want to see Colton on a balanced third line with Miles Wood, Ben Meyers, Logan O'Connor and the like, but as the Avs saw just last season, we don't always get what we want.

Over his last two seasons in Tampa Bay, Colton's 5-on-5 goal rate was 88^th percentile across the NHL and higher than names like Timo Meier, Pavel Buchnevich, William Nylander, and Andrei Svechnikov. He will provide value in banger formats regardless but he's not far from playing 17-18 minutes a night with the Avalanche, and he has genuine 30-goal upside.

Dallas – Thomas Harley (ESPN ADP: N/A)

It was between the two young players for Dallas, and I don't mean Logan Stankoven. It was Harley or Wyatt Johnston and for sake of including a defenceman today, we'll go with Harley.

A couple months ago, I wrote about Harley and his ascension on my personal blog. For much more extensive thoughts on his development path and 2022-23 season, go read that. For a shortened version: it isn't hard to argue that Harley was Dallas's second-best defenceman in the postseason behind Miro Heiskanen. He had a similar performance to Bowen Byram in Colorado during the 2022 playoffs. Byram has 41 points in his last 72 regular season games with little PP production. That is the path for Harley.

Dallas is absolutely loaded up front and should be able to roll one elite scoring line and two good ones. Even without the top PP role, there should be enough scoring to support a second 40-point blue liner, provided Harley can get close to 20 minutes a night. There are a number of blue liners on the wrong side of 30 on the Dallas roster so it doesn't take much imagination to see him supplanting a soon-to-be 39-year-old Ryan Suter in short order.

Minnesota –Marco Rossi (ESPN ADP: N/A)

I had a Ramblings last week going over what would have to happen for a non-Connor Bedard rookie to win the Calder Trophy. Among the players listed was Marco Rossi, so a lot of my thoughts on this are contained in those Ramblings.

Rossi has a clear path to top-line, top PP minutes alongside Kirill Kaprizov. He has to earn it, and he's fallen short of that for a couple seasons now, but the hope is his stunted development due to his long-term COVID issue is behind him and he starts scratching the upside he's long shown outside the NHL. This is a guy I want to take a chance on at the end of all my fantasy drafts.

Nashville – Luke Evangelista (ESPN ADP: 228.7, Forward 163)

This should be an interesting ADP to follow as it's been dropping on ESPN. Some people seem high on Evangelista, some people are not, but it's clear that he'll have the opportunity to succeed. One issue is that Nashville loves their checkers so even after Ryan O'Reilly and Filip Forsberg, Evangelista may get less 5-on-5 ice time than forwards like Yakov Trenin and Colton Sissons. He was a fixture of the top PP unit down the stretch but with Forsberg and ROR in the mix now, two of the four forwards that got regular PP time late in the 2022-23 season will not get that to start the 2023-24 season.

A lot will depend on where they put their centres. Guys like Cody Glass and Tommy Novak are centres, but ROR was brought in, and they have Juuso Parssinen and Mark Jankowski in the fold. One of those guys could be moved to the wing and if it's a talented forward like Glass or Novak, that could cut into Evangelista's role even more.  

After Forsberg and Roman Josi, every Nashville skater is a gamble in the fantasy game. Evangelista could get a lot of prime offensive minutes, or he could be relegated to the bottom-third of the roster. He has the talent and opportunity to succeed, though, and we can't ask for much more than that as a late-round dart throw.

St. Louis – Joel Hofer (ESPN ADP: 229.7, Goalie 62)

I wanted to include at least one goalie on today's list and options were limited. Hofer was covered in these pages a few weeks ago so we won't go long here except to say this is one of the goalies I will be taking as my fourth goalie in some leagues.

Winnipeg – Nikolaj Ehlers (ESPN ADP: 207.4, Forward 120)

It is absolutely wild to see Ehlers at this ranking. It may be a bit low but he's still a 14^th round pick on Yahoo!, so not entirely off-base. For a guy that has been a top-60 pick in more than one recent season, this is a steep decline.

The issue here is the coaching staff, plain and simple. Hopefully it was just injury related, but Ehlers's ice time was completely nuked when he returned from said injury last season; after posting an even-strength points rate similar to names like Kevin Fiala and Mark Stone from 2019-22, Ehlers got his lowest TOI per game of his career in 2022-23, and spent his final 20 games under 15 minutes a night. If he's anywhere close to healthy, that is unacceptable from the coaching staff. If he was so hurt that he could barely play third-line minutes, maybe he should have still been resting.

Even at 15 minutes a night, Ehlers is more than efficient enough with his offence to be a top-125 forward. If he can get to 18 minutes a night with top PPTOI, he can be a point-per-game player. It all depends on whether Rick Bowness plays him like he's a top-line forward or like he's Mason Appleton. At his ADP, it's a gamble worth taking, though, in all honesty, I just want him to get away from that team in the fantasy game.