Every Sunday, we share 21 Fantasy Rambles from our writers at DobberHockey. These thoughts are curated from the past week’s 'Daily Ramblings'.

Writers/Editors: Ian Gooding, Michael Clifford, Alexander MacLean, Brennan Des, Grant Campbell and Dobber

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1. Mid-Season Award Winners

Now that we are at the mid-season mark, I thought I would name the three finalists for each major award so far in my opinion.

(At time of writing:)

Art Ross Trophy – Leading Scorer 

Nikita Kucherov – Tampa Bay – 69 points in 42 games
Nathan MacKinnon – Colorado – 67 points in 42 games
Connor McDavid – Edmonton – 56 points in 36 games

Kucherov was running away with the scoring lead but MacKinnon has had 39 points in his past 21 games while McDavid can never be counted out as he has had 43 points in his past 22 games. (jan13)

2. Hart Trophy – Most Valuable Player

Nathan MacKinnon – Colorado
David Pastrnak – Boston
Nikita Kucherov – Tampa Bay

This is going to be a tight race as there is still McDavid and Auston Matthews in the running. (jan13)

3. Calder Trophy – Rookie of the Year

Connor Bedard – Chicago
Luke Hughes – New Jersey
Brock Faber – Minnesota

I think this award is Bedard’s if he can play 60 games. If not, Hughes puts up better offensive numbers than Faber, but Faber is already a top-four defender and should be in the conversation.

Adam Fantilli and Logan Cooley could still have a strong second half, but college players can find the 82-game schedule a long haul. (jan13)

[Follow the link for more…]

4. NHL Power Ratings – updated to January 10

I’ve done this for a few years now on my own, but I take my player ratings and plug them into each team’s roster and then give the team an overall rating, and then break it down for wingers, center, defense and in goal. I usually like to use a period of the past two seasons, so that there is less volatility daily.

I posted this table about 12 games into the season when I last did the Ramblings. The Canucks were first then and I never thought they would continue to be there after 41 games.

These ratings are based on current rosters only, so don’t include injured players (see New Jersey near the bottom). The ratings are based on current stats up to January 10. (jan13)

[Follow the link for the complete rankings]

5. Anton Forsberg of the Ottawa Senators was put on LTIR with a groin injury and is expected to miss a few weeks. The concern when he went down was that he had re-injured his knee which he had surgery on in the off-season. It might be a relief for the Senators that it doesn’t appear to be related.

Mads Sogaard was promoted to replace the injured Forsberg. Sogaard played 18 games with Ottawa last year and showed some flashes in between some inconsistencies. He’s had a good year in the AHL with a save percentage of 92.0 in 16 games. Ottawa has not had very good goaltending so far this season, so perhaps Sogaard can give them a much-needed boost. (jan13)

6. We got a Jeff Skinner injury update, as he's now listed as week-to-week. It sucks that the Sabres have been fighting injury basically all season and have rarely had their top three lines intact. For a developing team, losing key pieces like Skinner is especially problematic. (jan12)

7. In a brutal double-whammy for the Ducks, they announced forward Trevor Zegras (ankle) will be out 6-8 weeks and defenseman Pavel Mintyukov (shoulder) about the same. Considering this team already trade Jamie Drysdale, the roster is starting to thin out quickly. It doesn’t bode well for the second-half of this season, fantasy-wise. (jan12)

Meanwhile, Leo Carlsson may be back next week, which is great news considering how bad that injury looked at first glance. (jan11)

8. Some very good news on Gabriel Landeskog: That he is back skating after no games played for 19 months and counting is a good sign. Clearly, he’s going to need a lot of time to get up to speed. There is no official timeline update so the expectation is that he may still miss the entire 2023-24 regular season. My personal hope is that he can return sometime in late March and get a handful of games in before the playoffs, but we’ll wait for more information from the team. (jan12)

9. With the understanding that All-Star festivities are (and should be) geared to young fans, my one quibble will always be that there must be a player from every team represented. I get why they want that – keep each fanbase engaged with the All-Star Game – but there has to be a better way than the current setup because so few players are actually named. But I digress.

Andrew Santilli’s Capped column on a cap-compliant Team Canada gave me inspiration to do something fun: what would fantasy all-star teams look like with the current All-Star rules in place, but with the current salary cap and East/West instead of divisional teams? (jan12)

[Follow the link for the rest of the breakdown…]

10. Some big news about Connor Bedard, who underwent surgery early last week and is expected to miss approx 6-8 weeks. That timeline could carry Bedard right into March, so this is a huge blow to the team and to fantasy managers. At least it’s nothing like a knee/back injury so he should be his normal self when he returns.

11. Every year, the fantasy hockey gods provide us with players who give us a lot of fantasy value relative to their draft cost, and those surprises can often be league-winning options; Andrei Kuzmenko and Erik Karlsson are two examples from 2022-23.

With that in mind, let’s review some players that have been surprises so far in 2023-24, which are sustainable moving forward, and which are not:

(At time of writing:)

Valeri Nichushkin

This hurts me, because Nichushkin is a player I’ve believed in offensively since before he’s been drafted, and the last few seasons have been awesome to see in that regard (injuries aside). However, the injured Artturi Lehkonen is with Colorado on their current road trip, so his return seems imminent. It’s no guarantee he’s back in the next couple of weeks, but things certainly look that way.

In Lehkonen’s 12 games to start the season, he was a fixture of the top power play unit over both Nichushkin and Jonathan Drouin. Of late, it seems as if Drouin has finally found chemistry with Nathan MacKinnon both at 5-on-5 and on the power play. The former Montreal Canadien was acquired for that exact purpose, so taking him out of those roles when Lehkonen returns seems unlikely. In sum, Lehkonen’s return should not only ensure that Nichushkin remains on the second line, but also on the second power play unit.

Since Lehkonen’s injury, nearly 44% of Nichushkin’s production has been on the power play, including 11 of his 18 of his goals. If he loses that role, and is stuck playing on a non-MacKinnon even strength line, his fantasy value is crushed. There is no guarantee he will drop the PP spot to Lehkonen, but he very well could, and then go from a top-50 fantasy skater to a fringe option in shallower formats. (jan11)

12. Robert Thomas

If St. Louis were a better team, we’d probably be hearing more about Thomas being in the 94^th percentile of all forwards in points/60 at 5-on-5 this season. His rate of 2.74/60 is, as of Wednesday morning, higher than JT Miller, Sidney Crosby, Jack Eichel, Roope Hintz, and Auston Matthews. That is very, very impressive. What is holding back Thomas’s production, even as he’s on pace for a career-high 86 points, is the St. Louis power play; his points/60 on the man advantage is the lowest for him in any season where he’s played at least 35 games, and it’s even lower than his 5-on-5 rate.

There are two reasons why things can be even better in the second half, though. First, he’s getting a lot of ice time – since Craig Berube was fired, Thomas has averaged 21:37 per game, over a minute more than he did under Berube.

Second, and more importantly, is that the St. Louis power play has seen a big turnaround in some respects. Under Berube, the current top PP configuration registered just 55.9 shots per 60 minutes, a number that has exploded to 75.1 per 60 minutes under Drew Bannister. An awful 3% shooting is keeping their goals minimal, but there should be a huge turnaround if they can keep it up: the 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons saw 32 instances of a player being on the ice for at least 70 shots per 60 minutes on the power play, and none of those 32 instances saw an on-ice goal rate lower than 8.2/60 minutes (and well over half those instances exceeded 10 goals per 60 minutes). It would be a huge outlier for the St. Louis power play to keep up their current shot rates and not see a goals explosion, and that’s why Thomas’s season should not only continue being as productive as it’s been, but likely even better. It’s a matter of the coach not getting frustrated by the lack of goals and breaking up their PP unit.  (jan11)

13. Joel Farabee

The top three marks by points/60 at 5-on-5 this season belong to Elias Pettersson, Connor McDavid and… Joel Farabee? It seems improbable, but he went into Wednesday night’s action as one of three regular forwards to be north of 3.0 points/60 at 5-on-5. It has helped him to 30 points in 40 games, and it seems all but assured that he cruises past his career-high of 39 points set a year ago.

Of course, that level of production should cause fantasy owners to perk up a bit and there is cause for concern in the second half. Not only just because he plays on a Flyers team whose line combinations are about as reliable as a 1972 Ford Pinto on a cross-country road trip, but because he’s registering a point on 90% of the goals scored with him on the ice at 5-on-5. For reference, there were zero forwards in either of 2021-22 or 2022-23 to skate 900 minutes at 5-on-5 and crest the 90% mark; Pettersson led all of those forwards last year at 86.2%, and he was the only one over 85%. Farabee is on pace for over 1000 minutes at 5-on-5.

All this is to say it seems very likely Farabee’s production takes a dive in the second half, and without a good Flyers power play, there aren’t other ways to soften the cushion of that decline. Expect 20-25 points over his next 40 games, rather than 30-plus, unless his PP production rises sharply. (jan11)

14. With the midseason guide now out of the way and off the to-do list, the next thing for me in the fantasy hockey realm is to get the next iteration of the Cap League Rankings out at the end of the month, and augment those with the salary projections for the top-100 or so upcoming free agents.

Once I have everything up to date there, William Nylander‘s number will be interesting to see before the extension (8x$11.5M) gets inputted. The AAV does seem a little high, but for a GM that has caved to big contracts before, and was set up with huge AAVs already on the books as starting points, there wasn’t really much doubt that this was where it was going to end up. At least it wasn’t a drawn-out process, and the Leafs can focus on this season and the path forward. Hopefully for you Nylander owners he doesn’t take the foot off the gas now mid-season with his contract locked up. I think his pace in the second half will be a great indicator of what we can expect and hope for out of him now that he’s no longer in a “contract year”. (jan10)

15. Cliffy had some thoughts on the Cutter Gauthier/Jamie Drysdale trade with his Ramblings and Fantasy Take. I think he hit the main points, though I just wanted to dive into a few things myself. It feels like Gauthier is being raked over the coals in Philly to an extent that we need to question what management’s role is in all of this too. It all sounds a little fishy, and it makes me question how many others may be asking out of Philly soon as well. Something to think about with their players.

On the Anaheim side, Gauthier should be making his debut as early as this spring, and could make an immediate impact. Drysdale had taken the bulk of the power play opportunities since his return, but didn’t have much to show for it. Pavel Mintyukov should be back on the top unit, but he had already started to cool a little from his early-season run. He does get a boost with the trade, but it’s not a boost above his current numbers, it’s really just to maintain them. (jan10)

16. The Blue Jackets are fully embracing a run for the bottom, and may have something in the works to move on from their number-one goalie, Elvis Merzlikins, who hasn't played since December 29.

He has a GAA of 3.25 and a save percentage of .907 this year (nearly identical to his 2021-2022 numbers), and eventually he may rebound to his numbers from 2020-2021, but it’s tough to see it with Columbus, and it’s also getting difficult to imagine another team taking him on and giving him a long enough leash with his current contract. A buyout after this summer would be possible, costing close to $2 million a season for six years, so it wouldn’t be ideal. Columbus is trying to open their competition window now though, and that makes it very difficult to stomach a $5 million cap hit that isn’t helping you at all (just ask Philly or Edmonton).

All that to say, I think this is a sign that it might be a while before Merzlikins is fantasy relevant again. (jan10)

17. I keep waiting for the Mikael Granlund bubble to burst, but looking under the hood his underlying numbers actually show that he might be looking at more points moving forward rather than less. What is keeping Granlund afloat above the low percentages is the heavy usage, with nearly three minutes of power play time per game, and 20 minutes overall. If Grandlund gets traded and loses that ice time, he loses a lot, and someone is going to have to step into all that time. (jan10)

18. Last week, one of my Ramblings discussed improvements in 5-on-5 scoring chance assists/60 minutes among forwards. It is a stat tracked over at AllThreeZones, and it measures which players are providing teammates with scoring chances. It is something that can project year to year and lead to more team goals. That seems important to the fantasy game.

For posterity, some important benchmarks:

• In 2022-23, the average SCA/60 rate of all defencemen with at least 100 tracked minutes (223 rearguards in the sample) was 1.24. A rate of at least 1.75 SCA/60 was necessary to be one standard deviation above average, or roughly the rate necessary to be a number-1 blue liner by this measure.
• So far in 2023-24, the average SCA/60 rate of all defencemen with at least 100 tracked minutes (181 in the sample) is 1.27. A rate over 1.95 SCA/60 was necessary to be one standard deviation above average, or roughly the rate of a number-1 blue liner.

With all that out of the way, let’s dig in: (jan9)

19. The Top Five

It is an eclectic mix, of sorts, at the top:

The highest SCA/60 rate, by a country mile, belongs to Cale Makar. It isn’t a surprise that he leads the NHL, but that no one else is really that close to him demonstrates his unbelievable offensive skill and helps contextualize his incredible production. There is also John Klingberg, who is now injured. Erik Karlsson seems to be making the transition to Pittsburgh just fine, too. It sucks that Shea Theodore is still injured as he was off to an incredible start but hasn’t played since American Thanksgiving.

Of course, the name that really stands out is Pavel Mintyukov. Anaheim is much more dangerous with him on the ice than on the bench, both by this measure and by expected goals-for, and the power play is better with him on the ice, too. It has been a great half-season for the rookie. (jan9)

[Follow the link for the complete breakdown]

20. Brandt Clarke made his season debut last Sunday, seeing 15 and a half minutes of action. More importantly, he saw 44% of the Kings’ total power-play time. Drafted 8^th overall in 2021, the 20-year-old defenseman has been tearing up the AHL this year, posting 32 points in 30 games. A significant role with the man advantage should help him post a few points with LA this year. (jan8)

21. At time of writing, the Red Wings were implementing a new approach on the power play recently, spreading their talent across two units. For the most part, it’s been Dylan Larkin, David Perron, J.T. Compher, Lucas Raymond and Shayne Gostisbehere on one unit, while Patrick Kane, Alex DeBrincat, Robby Fabbri, Daniel Sprong and Mortiz Seider are on the other.

If Detroit sticks with this balanced configuration, it’s unlikely that anyone sees a high enough volume of power-play opportunity to post massive numbers with the man advantage. (jan8)

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