There were a couple of big injury updates that came on Monday with both regular season and playoff fantasy hockey implications.

As for the playoffs, the leg fracture suffered by Tampa Bay defenceman Mikhail Sergachev looked absolutely gruesome at the time and very much put his season in doubt. Whether he would be back in time for the postseason was a big question, but he was back skating with his teammates on Monday. He is in a non-contact jersey and will have to take a lot of steps before being ready for game action, and the postseason is under two weeks away. All the same, very good news for the blue liner and that could affect some playoff pools.

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The other big injury news, this one about the regular season, was that Vegas forward Tomáš Hertl suited up for the Golden Knights on Monday night. He underwent a procedure on his knee two months ago and hadn't played since but was traded by San Jose at the deadline. He started on the left wing of the second line but will presumably move to the middle once he gets his legs back under him.

Vegas lost that game 4-3 in Vancouver. They didn't really ease Hertl in as he skated 20:20 with top power play time, so fantasy managers have an idea of what to expect moving forward.

Conor Garland had a pair of goals (one on the PP) while Brock Boeser scored his 40^th goal of the year. To register both his first 30-goal and 40-goal season in the same campaign is quite the effort from Boeser.

JT Miller had a trio of helpers while Quinn Hughes had a goal and an assist (both PP). Hughes finished the game with four shots, two blocks, and a hit.

Jack Eichel had two goals and an assist (two of those three points on the PP) while Noah Hanifin had a goal and an assist on the man advantage.

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More good news, this one about Nino Niederreiter:

#NHLJets Bowness says Niederreiter (leg laceration) will travel with the team to Nashville/Dallas/Denver but it's undetermined whether he will skate while on the road. @TSN_Edge

— John Lu (@JohnLuTSNWpg) April 8, 2024

At least it gives him a chance to get a few games in before the postseason starts.

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It was the proverbial barnburner in Toronto on Monday night with Pittsburgh in town. The Penguins are in a fight for the playoffs and were desperate for two points. They managed one, but an overtime goal from Jake McCabe lifted the Leafs to the win and the extra point.

Rickard Rakell gave the Penguins a lead late in the first period but goals in the second and third from Matthew Knies and Auston Matthews gave Toronto the 2-1 lead. Drew O'Connor scored with fewer than seven minutes left to go to help Pittsburgh get a much-needed point.

Matthews's goal, his 65^th, came on the power play and he assisted McCabe's goal. Matthews also had a couple of blocks and a hit, too. He needs one more block for his second straight season of at least 90 blocks. For as elite as a goal scorer he is, in our fantasy game, his ability to put up those kinds of peripherals as a scoring forward helps separate him even further.

McCabe had the goal on three shots with a block, two PIMs, and a pair of hits in a very good multi-cat fantasy effort.

Ilya Samsonov was again stellar for Toronto by saving 29 of 31 shots in the win. That makes 57 goals allowed in his 23 starts in calendar 2024, or a goals against average under 2.50. That is an excellent turnaround to his season.

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Including tonight's games, we have just 10 days left in the regular season. Most fantasy leagues are still ongoing, whether it's head-to-head finals or the last push in roto/points formats, but starting reviews now feels like the right time. Next week will be all about the real-life playoffs, so taking this week to review the season behind us will be the focus.

Before the season, I made some predictions on breakout players. There is a list of forwards here and here, improvements/declines for established forwards here, and some defencemen here. We will exclude players like Filip Chytil and Kirby Dach that missed the vast majority of the season due to injury.

Let's start with forwards with additional data from Natural Stat Trick or Frozen Tools.

Arthur Kaliyev

My projection was for Kaliyev to get to 48 points in 82 games; his current pace is for 24 points in 82 games. This was a huge miss, and after three seasons in a Kings uniform, maybe this is a player that gets moved this summer in a 'change of scenery' trade.

Kaliyev is a big culprit of lack of production, but it's something that has affected most of the Los Angeles roster: Adrian Kempe's per-game goal scoring fell over 20% from the prior two seasons; Anze Kopitar's shots per game fell significantly; Kevin Fiala's per-game point production was 14% higher last year; Pierre-Luc Dubois will fail to reach 50 points after being over 60 each of the prior two years. But Kaliyev is on another level of disappointment, which is unfortunate.

At a different publication, I wrote about what's gone wrong and the gist of it is that Kaliyev is playing one-track offence. One thing that stands out about Columbus's Kirill Marchenko is he can score goals in a variety of ways; that is not something Kaliyev has done because he does not play off the rush very much and it's kept his shooting percentages very low for his career. Maybe things will be different in a different franchise, but we have to see it before we can believe it.

Luke Evangelista

Evangelista will have a fine rookie season as he pushes towards 20 goals and 20 assists, but that's about 15 points shy of where my projections landed for him. When looking at what happened, my projections had Evanglista with nearly 16 and a half minutes a game. However, that was with an even strength role consistent to 2022-23 with top power play time for most of the year. In reality, he lost nearly 1:40 per game in even strength ice time and over a minute per game on the power play. If he has that ice time at his current production rates, he's closer to a 45-point player than a 35-point player. Still not close to my projection, but better.

It was not a good season to have any faith in the depth forwards from Nashville being productive because of the ice-time allotments. Colton Sissons has often been between 16-17 minutes, but there's no other forward outside of the top line on this roster that is over 15 minutes (Yakov Trenin pushed just over that mark but was traded a month ago). It is hard for guys like Evangelista, Cody Glass, Tommy Novak, and Kiefer Sherwood to have consistent fantasy value playing 12-14 minutes.

Pavel Zacha

Zacha's point pace is for over 60 points and my projection was for 67 so we'll call that a win. It seemed odd that the Bruins were pushing all their chips into Zacha and Charlie Coyle as top-6 centres but some fantasy managers did not want to draft either as if they'd often be playing with David Pastrnak or Brad Marchand (or both), but I digress.

With a little luck, Zacha could have the first 60-point season of his career and could end up with back-to-back 20-goal seasons. Tracking data from AllThreeZones has him with the third-highest scoring chance assist rate at 5-on-5 (helpers on teammate chances) on Boston's roster, trailing only Pastrnak and Danton Heinen. He even improved his hit rate from last season and broke 100 hits for the first time in his career. The multi-cat value isn't great because of modest power play totals with below-average shot and penalty minute totals, but fantasy owners that took the chance on him are probably happy.

Brandon Hagel

Sometimes we get to the right destination for the wrong reasons, and that's what happened with my Hagel projection. He reached the 70-point mark last week and my projection for the season was 71 in 82 games. However, the reason my projection was so lofty was that I assumed he was going to get a lot of top power play time with Alex Killorn taking off for Anaheim. That is, quite painfully, not what happened as Nick Paul has been a top PP mainstay for the Lightning. Hagel could easily be a point-per-game player if he were in Paul's role, but he wasn't.

The even strength scoring saw a huge jump and there's been some good luck (huge rise in on-ice shooting percentage from his line mates) but he has a high-end scoring chance assist rate and leads Tampa Bay in zone entries per 60 minutes as he's been the engine of the offence at even strength for the second line. It is worth noting he has spent just 37% of his EV ice time next to Kucherov, too. He has really turned into a great two-way winger, but he'll need more power play time to maintain this production level next season.

Aleksander Barkov and Sam Reinhart

It is funny how hockey works, sometimes. I had Barkov pencilled for over 100 points in 82 games, a pace he won't reach without a supernova stretch of games coming up. I also had Reinhart pegged for a 35-goal, 70-point season and he obliterated both those totals. That they've usually been linemates this season is what makes that so fun.

Of course, Barkov's problem was a loss in ice time. On the season, Barkov sits with 19:36 per game, the first time he's dropped below 20 minutes since 2016-17, and a huge drop from the 21:13 he earned last season. Had he stayed close to that number with this level of production, his 82-game pace would be for around 100 points, and nearly in line with my projection. This is a miss, but predicting coaching decisions remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma and locked in a safe to be thrown into Hudson Bay.

As for Reinhart, well, improving your three-year shooting percentage by roughly 50% (relatively speaking) always helps.

Joel Eriksson Ek

My projections were for 34 goals (he has 30), 24 assists (he has 32), 247 shots (he has 254), 52 blocks (he has 50), and 136 hits (he has 164). It has been a tremendous multi-cat season for Eriksson Ek as he has often skated with Kirill Kaprizov both at even strength and on the top power play. I am as big a fan of Marco Rossi as the next guy, but it always seemed likely Eriksson Ek would get heavy usage on a thin forward roster, and that's what happened.

Not much to review here. He got great deployment with top wingers for most of the season and the rewards have been obvious. Sometimes, a plan comes together as we hope it will.