The Minnesota Wild made some adjustments to their blueline on Wednesday by trading Calen Addison to the San Jose Sharks, then turning around and getting Zach Bogosian from Tampa Bay. I wrote up a bit on the Addison trade already so go check that out if you haven't already.

I will say that it's one of those no-risk trades the Sharks should be making. At the worst, if Addison is a third-pair power play quarterback as he has been, it's an upgrade for them. If he fulfills the potential some of us (present company included) thinks he has, it's a home run. There still isn't a ton of value change fantasy-wise, though.

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Bo Horvat travelled with the team to Boston for tonight's game with the Bruins. The Islanders are off to a fine 5-3-3 start but can ill afford to let these injuries keep piling up. Oliver Wahlstrom stayed on the top line in practice for the Islanders with Horvat off the ice, so maybe it's just to keep Horvat around the team for now, but we'll find out more Thursday.

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Jake McCabe and Conor Timmins were both skating with the Leafs on Wednesday:

McCabe, Timmins among the nine #Leafs D-men on the ice for the morning skate.

— Terry Koshan 🇺🇦 (@koshtorontosun) November 8, 2023

The team also said that Timmins will be going to Sweden for the Global Series they're set participate in next week. That is good news for his injury progress.

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Igor Shesterkin was a full participant for the Rangers at an optional skate on Wednesday. That seems to indicate he's ready to return, but he may need one more game off to get right. We will find out Thursday, but with two days off after Thursday until a game against Columbus on Sunday, it might not be the worst idea for the Rangers to rest him a bit more.

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Jakub Lauko was at Boston practice yesterday:

Jakub Lauko is skating in a red, non-contact jersey with a cage. pic.twitter.com/h5vE3OPVi9

— Conor Ryan (@ConorRyan_93) November 8, 2023

Remember that he took a skate to the face and got a nasty gash around his eye. He was lucky to not have any severe damage, which is a weird thing to say about a player that took a skate blade to the face, but here we are.

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Matt Duchene was back at practice for the Stars after missing a game on Monday. The team being able to roll three (sometimes four) lines is clearly their approach this season so keeping those guys healthy is paramount.

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Dylan Cozens was back at Sabres practice on Wednesday:

Dylan Cozens on ice for Sabres practice after missing last two games.

— Ryan O'Halloran (@ryanohalloran) November 8, 2023

Cozens had seven points in 11 games before missing the last pair of contests. Casey Mittelstadt has been playing exceptionally well basically since the All-Star break last year, so it's a wonder where Cozens stands in the lineup once they get healthy. Their next game is Friday night at home to Minnesota.

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Vegas center Chandler Stephenson missed the team's matchup with Los Angeles on Wednesday night due to an upper-body injury. He will also be out for Friday's game, per the coach Bruce Cassidy. With the team off to the start they are, they can afford to have players take an extra game or two if they need it, physically.  

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Jordan Eberle took a bad skate cut to his leg at Seattle practice on Wednesday and had to leave the ice immediately. He is fine, relatively speaking, but GM Ron Francis said they need MRIs done to determine if there’s any tendon damage. We will update as we get it.

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It was a tough game for the Toronto defence as a couple of bad turnovers and own-zone miscues led to more than a few goals against as Ottawa came in and took a 6-3 win in the first matchup of the season in the Battle of Ontario.

The line of Claude Giroux (two goals, one assist, one hit), Tim Stützle (one goal, three assists, one block, two hits), and Mathieu Joseph (three assists, three shots, one hit) did most of the damage and all had great fantasy performances.

Dominik Kubalik had a pair of goals, one of them being a fortunate bounce off Mark Giordano's skate. Jakob Chychrun had a goal and an assist on two shots with a block.

Nick Robertson, William Nylander, and Tyler Bertuzzi replied for Toronto.

Joseph Woll was in goal for all six tallies against, stopping just 21 of 27 shots, though most of them were not his fault.

Joonas Korpisalo stopped 28 of 31 in the win, just his third of the campaign.

Stützle is now up to 15 points in 11 games, posting 34 shots and 13 hits along the way. His multi-cat season just keeping chugging along. Chychrun, meanwhile, is up to a point-per-game status with 5 goals and 6 assists in 11 contests. More hits would be nice but he's having a great fantasy season through the first month.

Ottawa turns around for a home matchup with the red-hot Vancouver Canucks while Toronto has a back-to-back at home this weekend with Calgary and Vancouver.

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An early overtime goal from Sam Reinhart lifted the Florida Panthers 4-3 over Washington. It was Reinhart's second point of the night, having assisted earlier on an goal from Aleksander Barkov, while Barkov assisted on the OT winner. Evan Rodrigues and Oliver Ekman-Larsson also had one of each.

Anthony Mantha scored twice for Washington while Connor McMichael had a goal and assist on six shots and a hit. That makes three goals in 11 games for McMichael though his overall point total (5) is still low. Mantha left the game halfway through the period after taking a shot up high and did not return.

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The Stephenson-less Golden Knights lost 4-1 to Los Angeles thanks to two-point games from Adrian Kempe (1+1), Anze Kopitar (1+1), and Jordan Spence (0+2). Pierre-Luc Dubois and Trevor Moore both scored on the power play, which highlights one of the secrets of this team: two power play units that can score well, though the second unit has been more efficient than the first.

William Karlsson scored for the Golden Knights as he continues to lead all NHLers in 5-on-5 points with 13. I only saw the first half of the same but they didn't seem to be playing poorly with Michael Amadio as the second-line center. Might be something to continue with for a few games, even if Stephenson is healthy?

Cam Talbot's great season continued by saving 37 of 38 shots he faced in the win. He has given up more than three goals just twice, never more than four, and is sporting a .930 save percentage.

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In my Ramblings on Tuesday, I brought up that the league was seeing a lot fewer shot attempts actually land on goal. The result was that for every 100 shot attempts this season, roughly five fewer of them would end up on goal as compared to just a couple years ago. It would change a lot for fantasy hockey as it relates to everything from shot totals, to block totals, to save percentages, to goals against averages, and so on. I didn't dig deep further at the time but did look into this a bit more.

To back things up a bit, over the summer I wrote about how the 2022-23 season saw a huge jump in blocked shots from 2021-22. The overall total was a rise of 8.6% in shots blocked per game, with a large chunk of that coming from the penalty kill. It resulted in considerably more players (111) registering at least 100 blocks to the year before (88). That is what is meant by the equations changing for fantasy hockey if something like that persisted.

Using data from Natural Stat Trick, let's look at what's going on so far in the 2023-24 season, with data as of the afternoon of November 8^th.

Across 189 regular season games played, teams took a total of 23 102 shot attempts. Of those attempts, only 11 706 ended up on target. That is an attempt/shot rate of 50.7%. As mentioned in my Tuesday Ramblings, the number last year was 53.7% and it was 55.8% the year before. Even when looking at just similar early portions of those seasons, the rates were 54.6% and 55.4%, respectively. It seemed as if it was a steady decline anyway, but the jump from last season to this one has been huge.

Are players just missing the net more or is shot blocking becoming even more prevalent?

To reiterate what had been done in prior seasons, here are the per-game numbers across most of the fantasy hockey stats we use going back to 2018-19:

And here is where the shots, attempts, and blocks per game stand thus far in 2023-24:

It is another sizable jump in blocked shots going from 0.818 blocks per player per game to 0.872. Compared to just two seasons ago, the average player has seen his shot blocks per game rise over 16%, and that is a big, big number for such a short timeframe.

It doesn't stop there. Back in the 2021-22 season, 79.63% of all shot attempts were either blocked, or landed on target. That means 20.37% of all shot attempts missed the net. So far in the 2023-24 season, 76.33% of all shot attempts have either been blocked or landed on goal, and that means 23.67% of all shot attempts have missed the net. Not only are players blocking more shots, but players are missing the net more, too.

Back in 2021-22, the average 60-minute shot attempt rate across the 32 teams was 56.0 per 60. So far in 2023-24, that number is 60.36/60 minutes. Teams are attempting more shots – for now, we'll see where it stands in April – but they are both missing the net more than ever, as well as getting their shots blocked more than ever. (Well, maybe not ever but certainly over the last half-decade.) On top of that, a large chunk of the rise in shot attempts have come from power plays, so, in theory, the extra shot attempts should be more dangerous.

What is happening is obvious, but why it's happening is another matter. Teams have greatly altered their approaches offensively over the last 4-5 years, but the same can be said about penalty killing. Whatever the causes are, the game has changed a lot in a short span and fantasy hockey owners need to be on top of this; a player finishing with 104 blocked shots just isn't as valuable as it used to be, while more goalies could see low-volume nights. We are seeing that already as Hockey Reference has this season as the lowest in saves per team per game – excluding the Bubble season – since 2016-17 despite that rise in shot attempts and relatively consistent goal scoring for a few years now. Again, we'll have to see where things stand when April rolls around, but any further rise in attempts missing the net or being blocked will just impact the fantasy hockey game more and more.

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