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 and Dobber

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1. If Mark Stone is ready just in time for Game 1 of the playoffs, there have to be changes to the salary cap system allowing a team unlimited cap space for the playoffs. Or at least more transparency regarding the nature and duration of injuries. I don’t know what those changes would be or what is even possible, as salary cap management is not my specific area of expertise. Yet the focus should be on whether this passes the smell test, particularly if it’s happened multiple times with the same player. (apr13)

2. The Canadiens have signed Lane Hutson to a three-year entry-level contract. Hutson’s season ended when Boston University was eliminated from the Frozen Four. In his Dobber Prospects profile, Hutson is a perfect 10 in terms of fantasy upside, which means you shouldn’t waste any time in adding him in keeper leagues (38% rostered in Fantrax). Hutson has demonstrated ability to score at the NCAA level, amassing 97 points in 77 games over two seasons. He has upside to be a top power-play contributor, and I’d expect the Habs to provide him with time on the power-play immediately. The big question is whether that tantalizing skill set for the undersized Hutson (5-10, 161 lbs.) translates to the NHL level.

Meanwhile, Macklin Celebrini is this year’s Hobey Baker Award winner. Celebrini scored 32 goals and 64 points in just 38 games as a freshman for Boston University this season, improving his stock as the potential first overall pick in the coming draft. He is the youngest player to ever win the Hobey Baker. (apr13)

3. Anaheim announced that forward Jakob Silfverberg is going to retire at the end of the season. The 33-year-old winger has over 800 regular season games to his name, amassing 168 goals and 205 assists, and 69 playoff games with 18 goals and 26 assists in that time. He hasn’t had much fantasy hockey relevance over the last few years, but had a couple of good seasons earlier in his career. All the best to him in retirement. (apr12)

4. Noah Hanifin has signed an eight-year extension with Vegas worth $7.35M per season. Good for him but that’s a hefty price tag in cap leagues for a guy who will be fighting for prominent offensive ice time. (apr12)

5. I’ve said it a few times this year but I’ll reiterate: Lucas Raymond is a player I’ve come completely around on from his first couple seasons and he has all the makings of a high-end offensive winger for the next decade. (apr12)

Raymond just turned 22 and is on pace for 68 points this season (at time of writing). I don’t think he’s received enough recognition for the level of production he’s managed at such a young age. With Alex DeBrincat and Patrick Kane in the fold this year, Raymond hasn’t seen the consistent top-unit role with the man advantage that he’s seen in years past. However, when he’s gotten that opportunity, he’s made the most of it. It goes without saying that if Raymond’s on your fantasy roster, you want him to see prominent minutes with the man advantage. Perhaps that becomes easier next year with Patrick Kane and David Perron set to become unrestricted free agents this summer. (apr8)

6. Entering Saturday, Jack Quinn had nine goals in just 25 games played while averaging just under 16 minutes a game. For a guy that has had brutal injury luck over the last year and just cracked the 100-game mark at the NHL level, he still looks like he’s going to be a special player. (apr12)

7. Timo Meier went into the All-Star break with nine goals in 34 games and had 27 goals in 67 games entering Saturday action. He has crested both the 200-shot and 100-hit mark on the season, too. Meanwhile, teammate Jesper Bratt has tied his prior career high with eight power play goals and has surpassed the 80-point mark for the first time (he had 82 before the Devils game on Saturday). And Luke Hughes, with 47 points, needs three points over the final two games to be just the fourth rookie defenseman this century to reach 50 points (Quinn Hughes, Cale Makar, and Moritz Seider). (apr12)

8. Kyle Palmieri 's solid multi-cat season continues. He is up to 28 goals on the year, the second-highest total of his career and highest since 2016-17. That goes with his 18 power play points, 82 hits, 43 blocks, and 210 shots. (apr12)

9. Kevin Fiala started the season fine enough with 29 points in 30 games, but he had just six goals in that time. Entering Saturday, he had just 42 points in his last 49 games, but 22 goals in that time. He has cracked 70 points for the second season in a row and has a chance for his second career 30-goal season. A good year for a player who has been moved all around the Los Angeles lineup. (apr12)

10. If someone told me that Quinn Hughes was going to push for 90 points, I would have believed it. If someone told me that Hughes would lose a minute per game in ice time and still push for 200 shots, I would not have believed it. And yet, here we are.

Hughes’s shot rate was much higher in the first couple of months of the season than it has been since, but he added a big dimension to his fantasy profile that had been missing his entire career. If he can maintain that, great. If he can ever add some blocked shots, that’d be even better, but progression is still progression. (apr12)

11. Big news for a Minnesota prospect: Liam Öhgren, who was called up this week. A first-round pick from 2022, Öhgren had 19 points in 26 games in the Swedish league this season. He figures to be a big part of Minnesota’s future, but he’ll need to develop quickly if they want to get back to the postseason during Kirill Kaprizov‘s current contract. (apr11)

12. In Tuesday’s Ramblings, we went over some preseason predictions among forwards in 2023-24. Today, we’ll keep that theme going and look at defensemen. The list we’re picking from was written about in the middle of September and can be viewed here.

(At time of writing:)

Sean Durzi

We’ll start with a miss that didn’t end up as poorly as it could have as my 82-game projection for Durzi was around 35 points and he reached 36 points before the end of March. He also did that in 67 games as he missed a couple of weeks earlier in the season so a full year would have almost certainly seen him reach 40 points.  

What I noted in the preseason article was there was a wide gap in his outcomes predicted from various publications and it’s not hard to see this season turning out much differently. The duo of Clayton Keller and Nick Schmaltz struggled to produce at even strength for the first five months of the season, and if they’re at their usual levels all season, maybe Durzi pushes for 50 points in an 82-game season. But they didn’t, so he won’t, and here we are.

This is a nice reminder that young teams go through a lot of struggles as they grow together. We are seeing something similar in Buffalo this season and Arizona will have a couple more years of this as they wait for their prospect defensemen to get to the NHL. Durzi has been able to provide reasonable peripherals and skating 23 minutes a game will help in this regard, but the team needs their forwards to play well consistently before Durzi takes his next step fantasy-wise. (apr11)

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13. Including last Tuesday’s games, we had 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.

As mentioned above with regard to defensemen, I made some predictions on breakout players before the season started. There is a list of forwards here and here, improvements/declines for established forwards here, and some defensemen here. We will exclude players like Filip Chytil and Kirby Dach that missed the vast majority of the season due to injury.

(At time of writing:)

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 offense. 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.

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14. Jack Hughes is done for the season. He finishes the campaign with 74 points in 62 games, which is just shy of a 100-point-pace. That’s his third season in a row pacing between 94 and 104 points, which would seem to be his production wheelhouse.

However, Hughes began the season with 17 points in seven games, and 19 in nine games (plus three minutes of game 10) before his first injury absence. He then put up 24 points in 22 games before he was injured again, and scored 29 points in his last 30 game stretch. The scoring dipped (albeit mildly) with each successive injury, and you do have to wonder if he wasn’t 100% after returning from his first absence.

He should pace for around 100 points again next year (hopefully on a playoff team with stable goaltending this time) but the games missed from Hughes may continue to be an issue for another few seasons. The star players whose games are less based on power do tend to figure out how to remain healthier as time goes on though. I remember acquiring Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Aleksander Barkov for cheaper than they should have been in their early 20s because they had a few injury plagued seasons, and those deals turned out to be steals.

With New Jersey out of the playoff hunt now, shutting him down regardless makes sense at this point. (apr10)

15. I have had Juraj Slafkovsky on my list to talk about for a few weeks now, and I keep either forgetting him, or running out of space or effort to put him into the Ramblings that week. Well, he finally got tired of being overlooked by me, and scored a hat trick this week to bring him within spitting distance of a 50-point season. He has taken huge steps in his development, and addressed a lot of the shortfalls that were the main issues with his game around his rookie season.

It won’t be until the beginning of season four that Slafkovsky reaches his breakout threshold, and while he may not be a 100-point threat, he could be a Rick Nash type player who is a dominant force but mostly around a point-per-game pace. (apr10)

17. The player who many thought was going to go first overall, Shane Wright, is up to four points in his last three games, despite still playing less than 16 minutes per game. As much as you can be a post-hype sleeper as a fourth-overall pick from two years ago, I think that’s somehow the category that Wright is falling into in many cases in fantasy right now. Take the chance on the recent run and the very long runway. (apr10)

18. Alex Ovechkin scored his 30^th of the season this week to set the NHL record with 18 such seasons. The consistency is tailing off, but it still feels inevitable that he will beat Wayne Gretzky’s goal scoring record. Not to be forgotten, Nathan MacKinnon's second goal on the same night as Ovie's 30th marked his 50th of the season. The MVP race this year is one I'm glad I don't have to vote on and come up with a good answer for, there's a great winning case for at least four players. (apr10)

19. Carolina has recently signed Scott Morrow, Gleb Trikozov, and Bradly Nadeau to their entry level deals. For Trikozov this means crossing the pond and playing in North America next year, while Morrow and Nadeau may get a game or two before season’s end. All three are fantasy relevant in dynasty leagues, and it will be nice to see them all playing closer to meaningful games. (apr10)

20. The leg fracture suffered by Tampa Bay defenseman 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 last Monday. He was in a non-contact jersey and will have to take a lot of steps before being ready for game action, and the postseason is looming. All the same, very good news for the blue liner and that could affect some playoff pools. (apr9)

21. Brady Skjei? The 30-year-old blueliner has a career-high 47 points in 80 outings this season. He was barely seeing any power-play time at the start of the campaign but has since earned a nice role on the second unit as a result of his strong play. He entered this season with just 20 power-play points in over 500 career games. He has 12 PPPs this year. (apr8)

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Have a good week, folks!

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