Another day, another slew of training camp notes:

• Anaheim has signed RFA forward Trevor Zegras for three years with an AAV of $5.75M.
• The Leafs announced defenceman Conor Timmins has some sort of significant lower-body injury and is considered week-to-week for now. Timmins was playing very well in the preseason and showed well last year as a puck-mover and defender. This injury all-but-assures that Timothy Liljegren will be a regular in the lineup to start the year.
• Filip Chytil was not at Rangers practice on Monday but the hope is that it's nothing too serious. It is a bit of a concern that so many Rangers forwards appear to have minor injuries in camp but it hasn't amounted to much (yet).
• Montreal had Josh Anderson on the top line with Cole Caufield and Nick Suzuki. It was a lineup that had Rafael Harvey-Pinard, Juraj Slafkovsky, Sean Monahan, and Brendan Gallagher so Anderson wasn't a place-filler. This Habs fan would prefer to see RHP get a turn but we don't always get what we want, do we?
• Once again, the winger duo of Jakub Vrana and Sammy Blais lined up together for a preseason game. This has been the norm all camp long and is really not a good sign for Vrana's fledgling fantasy value.
• Nikolaj Ehlers has been listed as doubtful for the team's last preseason game later this week. It really doesn't look like he'll be ready to start the season and we saw his ice time get nuked into oblivion last year when he returned from injury. Not that he'll have that happen again, but this training camp has not been good for his fantasy value.
• Former Flames prospect Matthew Phillips, now with Washington, was on the top line with Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom. Phillips appears to be having a good camp and may crack the roster for opening night.
• Michael Eyssimont was skating on Tampa Bay's second line with Brandon Hagel and Anthony Cirelli. Anyone who has read my Ramblings over the last six months knows how much I think of this player. There may be legitimate fantasy value bubbling to the surface here.
• Zach Benson (13^th overall in 2023) remains on Buffalo's top line, even with most of the NHL roster around. It seems a near-lock he'll start the season there and it's just a matter of whether he plays more than nine games.
• Mikael Granlund was back on the ice for the Sharks, along with Kevin Labanc, though they were in a group separate from the main NHL roster so a return is not quite there yet.

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This is the last week without regular season hockey for a while, which means fantasy draft season is coming to a close. Anyone that needs a bit of help preparing for a draft, be sure to pick up a copy of the 2023-24 Dobber Hockey Fantasy Guide! It has everything fantasy managers need to get caught up on their NHL information: Projections, line combinations, prospects on the way, goalie rankings, and a number of articles from our writers. Help support what we do and give yourself a head start on your league mates by grabbing this year's fantasy guide.

The second piece of help here is a mock draft. I am currently participating in a slow mock draft with people from around the industry to see where we have players valued. This is a 14-person draft done on FanTrax with the following parameters:

• Skater Categories – Goals, Assists, Power Play Points, Shots, Blocks, and Hits
• Goalies Categories – Wins, Save Percentage, Goals Against Average
• Twenty players per roster with three centres, three left wings, three right wings, four defencemen, one utility skater, and two goalies starting.
• Head-To-Head system so players with long-term injuries like Max Pacioretty and Brandon Montour have particular values.

As for the participants, they are as follows: Eric Young (Fear The Noise), Pete Jensen (NHL.com), Nick Alberga (The Leafs Nation), Kenneth Le (Fear The Noise), Anna Dua (NHL), Matt Larkin (Daily Faceoff), Neil Parker (Sportsbook Review), Jesse Blake (Steve Dangle Podcast Network), Shayna Goldman (The Athletic), Chris Meaney (Fear The Noise), Dom Luszczyszyn (The Athletic), Dimitri Filipovic (PDOCast), and Drew Livingstone (Steve Dangle Podcast Network). That was also the draft order, with yours truly slotting in 13^th between Dimitri and Drew.

My personal draft approach is to not be dogmatic to any one draft approach. I mine for value where I can, but each draft is unique and I like to stay flexible, which is also why I do yoga before each pick. These formats keep positions at the forefront so that is also a consideration, but my general approach is that accumulating the most value on draft picks will win the day. How that value is achieved is the entire exercise. Let's start with my roster.

Early Building Blocks

Picking 13^th overall necessarily means you won't be getting one of the Big Four centres, and none of the super-elite wingers. When the draft reached my first pick, no defencemen and no goalies were off the board. I passed on both – and both Cale Makar and Igor Shesterkin went at the 1-2 turn – and decided to start my draft like this:

Full disclosure here: I have Tim Stützle ahead of Elias Pettersson in my personal rankings in this format. The reason for drafting the Vancouver pivot first is that, in looking at a lot of projections and rankings over the last month, I've noticed Pettersson is often ahead of Stützle. My view was that I had a better chance of Stützle not being drafted on the turn than Pettersson. Both ended up on my roster and thanks to their positional flexibility, they are two of my starting left wings.

Stützle is someone I've really, really come around on over the last couple seasons. Last year, his playmaking metrics improved considerably, according to tracking from AllThreeZones, and his shot rate also increased. He is a great dual-threat offensive weapon that can be a big contributor in every category except for blocks, and even there he'll help a bit. There are very few players that have the legitimate potential and role for a 40-goal, 100-point, 250-shot, 125-hit season, and Ottawa's top middle-man is one of them. A lot of my fantasy teams will be banking on his success.

Filling The Gaps

As we proceeded to the third round, one thing became blindingly obvious: With the way FanTrax is allotting positions, there is much less depth at right wing than left (this is the case across various sites in general, too). There are a few super-elite right wings like David Pastrnak and Nikita Kucherov, but both were drafted before my first pick. After my second pick, much of the next tier was taken with guys like Timo Meier, Mitch Marner, and William Nylander going off the board. By the time my third pick rolled around, there was one right winger remaining in my second tier of wingers, so I took him. That was followed up by a defenceman I haven't been drafting a lot but just could not pass on in the fourth round:

Alex DeBrincat is not a player I've been often targeting but he has dual-wing eligibility, which always comes in handy, and is a genuine threat for 40 goals, 80 points, 250 shots, and 100 hits. Once he was off the board, the rest of the right-wing list are very good players, but ones with holes in their fantasy profiles like Clayton Keller (lack of hits), Cole Caufield (lack of assists and hits), Alex Tuch (lack of hits and possible move to Buffalo's second line), and so on. Sometimes, the way the draft unfolds dictates the picks to be made, and this was one such case.

Hamilton was taken because six defencemen were off the board and it would have been 24 picks until I made another selection. If I passed on him here, I was staring down the barrel of relying on Moritz Seider or John Carlson to anchor my blueline, and that wasn't appealing.

These two selections got me the last right winger in my second tier and the last defenceman in my top tier of rearguards. All in all, I was pretty happy.

Missteps

My general rule on goalies is that there are 5-6 reliable netminders year-in-, year-out and the rest are all at the mercy of luck and the quality of the team in front of them. Every goalie is at the mercy of the luck factor, but it goes double for unproven starters on middling teams. When my fifth pick rolled around, there were nine goalies already taken, so I wasn't getting a top guy. If I passed on taking a goalie at my 5-6 turn, chances were slim I would have a top-12 goalie on my roster. I am not one to often pay a premium for goalies, but waiting and relying on a trio of Darcy Kuemper, Sergei Bobrovsky, and Adin Hill, for example, was not appealing. I decided to draft Stuart Skinner, a starting goalie from a team that should push for tops in the Western Conference, and came back with a triple-eligibility Ottawa Senator:

Last year, Claude Giroux managed 0.26 secondary assists/60 minutes at 5-on-5. That rate was the lowest for him since the 2013 lockout and in the season following his two lowest campaigns by this measure since 2013, he more than doubled his prior-season rate. In other words, if nothing else changes for Giroux but his second assists regress positively, he could be a point-per-game player. With good peripheral contributions and his C/LW/RW eligibility, Giroux made a lot of sense here.

As for picks 7 and 8, there was one guy I really wanted: Joel Eriksson Ek. Unfortunately, he was taken four picks before my next selection so a pivot to Pierre-Luc Dubois was made. I have concerns about his usage in Los Angeles but as a selection just inside the top-100, it seemed fine. There is a case for going towards another right winger – Tyler Toffoli, Jesper Bratt, Valeri Nichushkin, and Martin Necas were all available – but there were a few right wingers I was very high on still on the board, and not so much for centres. Taking PLD may be a misstep but if I can get 25 goals, 60 points, 20 PPPs, 200 shots, and 80 hits from him, I'll live.

Finally, Jakob Chychrun. He is not likely to be the consistent top PP defenceman, but he also never racked up big PP point totals in Arizona; his last three full seasons with the Coyotes saw an average of 11 PPPs every 82 games. He still managed over a 40-point pace, over a hit per game, 2.8 shots per game, and 1.5 blocks per game. This is also a case where I may be overvaluing him because I project everyone for 82 games played, but the upside is obvious if he can manage even 75 outings.

The misstep here was taking both Dubois and Chychrun. I am not enamoured with either and Devon Levi was still on the board. He is a guy I am enamoured with this year and though taking him as the 13^th goalie probably drafts the value out of him, it would have solidified my net (to whatever extent that's possible) and allowed me to focus on my skaters for the rest of the draft. Alas, poor decisions were made and here we are. My life story summarized by two fantasy hockey picks.

To this point, I was happy enough with my draft. All my forwards are multi-position eligible, and most can contribute across the board while my two defencemen were drafted at value (per my rankings).   

Elsewhere

Let's take a look at some other picks. Here is the entire draft board for the first seven rounds, which gives us 98 picks. My general rule of thumb is the first 100 picks of any draft, in any format, are the building blocks for rosters and the rest are where the gaps are filled. So, here are the first seven rounds:

What stood out to me first was Anna Dua's start. Picking fifth overall, she took Jack Hughes. It initially raised my eyebrow, but thinking on it more, he's one of very few players that could supplant one of the Big Four centres this year. He wouldn't have made it back to her in Round 2, so the more I thought about it, the more it made a lot of sense to take him here.

Next are the goalies. Waiting on netminders has finally started to catch on and that was apparent in this draft. There are a handful of participants I would consider as possessing an 'analytics' bent (not sure how else to phrase it) and they are Ken Le (kle18), Neil Parker, Shayna Goldman (HayyyShayyy), Chris Meaney, Dom Luszczyszyn (omgitsdomi), and Dimitri Filipovic. Others may lean the same way, but I just don't know their process as well. Anyway, among their collective first seven picks, just two goalies were taken. Three other teams had two goalies each by themselves. It was a clear strategy for a number of drafters and it's something that will vary from league to league.

Connor Bedard went at the 4-13 pick (55^th overall). I have spent the offseason saying Bedard is being over-drafted, but those are cases where I've seen him drafted inside the top-35 picks, and even the top-25 picks. Taking him outside the top-50 selections is perfectly fine, I think, and actually presents a value opportunity.

This draft started a few days before the Andrei Vasilevskiy injury, so I wonder if the Vasilevskiy drafter (thegoldenmuzzy) had planned to take Thatcher Demko all along or whether that was a result of losing their second-round pick for a month or two.

Aleksander Barkov is someone I have as a tremendous value in most formats: he is my 18^th-ranked forward – ahead of Tage Thompson, Alex DeBrincat, and Steven Stamkos – but he's going 62^nd overall on Underdog, 57^th on Yahoo, and 35^th on ESPN. Seeing him go 39^th overall is the highest I've seen him drafted in one-year leagues this draft season. To be specific, it's the highest in one-year leagues where I didn't draft him because I have him valued as a fringe second-round pick in 12-team leagues.

Seeing Bo Horvat go 65^th overall is the highest I've seen him drafted. That it came from Goldman – someone whose writing I read and value a lot – made me re-think my projection for him. Not that I'm low on him – he's inside my top-100 skaters – but other drafters do not seem high on him. Whether he can create magic with Mat Barzal remains to be seen but there is 40-goal upside here.

The more I look at Matt Larkin's start, the more I'm impressed with it. He got Ilya Sorokin early to lock down his goalie spot, but four of his five other picks were heavy goal- or point producers (or both). There were peripherals missing, so he went and got a lot of them by grabbing the Edmonton duo of Evander Kane and Darnell Nurse. An impressive start that helped round out his categories.

Ok those are my thoughts on the first 98 picks. What are yours?