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

—

1. I want to run through some goalie thoughts for a moment. There has been a lot of ink spilled on Jacob Markstrom and Linus Ullmark being traded to different teams, and Ian covered some of the bigger names on the goaltending market in his July 6^th Ramblings. Let’s dive into some of the others here.

Detroit Red Wings

Ian did already cover Cam Talbot, and I agree with his assessment that Talbot will likely be the opening night starter. After that though, Ville Husso will likely either be on LTIR or be traded, as it seems like he has fallen out of favour in Detroit and the cap hit could be better allocated elsewhere. Alex Lyon would fit well as Talbot’s backup for 30-35 games, meaning Jack Campbell on his league-minimum deal is likely set to be put on waivers. Whether he gets claimed likely depends on if there is a major injury or two to other goalies across the league in training camp. (aug7)

2. Los Angeles Kings

Moving on to LA where Talbot leaves David Rittich as one half of the previous year’s timeshare, with Rittich sporting the better numbers. He had a better win percentage, save percentage, and goals against average, while the quality start percentage was hovering very close to 60% for both. The biggest difference though lies in the really-bad-start percentage, where Rittich’s 4.2% was more three times better than Talbot’s 14.8%. Out of 24 starts, Rittich had a single “really bad” game last year, which is all the Kings needed out of their goalie on a lot of nights.

Los Angeles made a big splash this summer for their replacement, bringing in Darcy Kuemper in a deal that was likely more about dumping Pierre-Luc Dubois than it was about filling the goalie hole. Kuemper’s numbers were worse than Talbot’s last season, and he still carries three more years at $5.25 million left on his contract. That contract will likely get him the opening night start, and a bit of a longer leash than Rittich and his $1.0 million cap hit, but by the end of the year I expect Rittich to have the better numbers again. Phoenix Copley should make it through waivers and end up down at the AHL level. (aug7)

3. Washington Capitals

Taking Kuemper’s place in Washington will be Logan Thompson, after Charlie Lindgren stole the starter’s role last year, even garnering a Hart and Vezina vote. Lindgren is 30 years old, and his 50 games last season make up 44% of his career NHL games to date. Regardless, he had three superb quarters out of four, while posting a very solid quality-start to really-bad-start ratio. There’s no reason he can’t put up similar numbers behind an improved Washington squad this year.

All that to say, we could realistically see a reduction in games from Thompson as he is the one coming in and will need to adjust to the team, giving Lindgren and his contract the upper hand. Still, 30 games with a .910 save percentage on a playoff bubble team has some value for Thompson, though the Wins will be tougher to come by than they were through his Vegas career.

This is hands down the most economical tandem in the league based on cap hits though, finishing one and two in value on my latest cap rankings list. (aug7)

[Follow the link for more…]

4. One other thing I noted in running through goalies, is just how many the St Louis system has produced over the last number of years. It feels like more than your average NHL team. Running down the list, you have St. Louis products in Jordan Binnington, Joel Hofer, Charlie Lindgren, Ville Husso, Jake Allen, Phoenix Copley still currently on NHL rosters. Not exactly actionable, but interesting nonetheless.

Are there any other NHL teams with more of their former farm-team goalies from the last decade floating around? (aug7)

5. The nice thing about fantasy sports is the wide range of options for players. There are traditional one-year leagues, there are keeper and dynasty formats, there is daily fantasy like DraftKings and FanDuel, there are box pools and guillotine leagues, and others I’m overlooking.

One of the formats I like to play is best ball. For those unfamiliar with them, they are simply draft-only leagues. A roster is drafted like a typical one-year league, but there are no in-season moves. There is no waiver wire, trading, or free agency. The roster that is drafted is the roster for the entire year. Each week, only a portion of the team’s roster is counted to the overall standings. It can either be head-to-head each week, or a running tally of each team’s score added to an overall total. These types of leagues are great for people that don’t have a lot of time during the NHL season to make waiver moves, or to set lineups, or whatever else.

A few days ago, I did my first best ball league over at Underdog Fantasy. I used projections from the 2024-25 Dobber Hockey Guide draft list and converted those numbers to relevant for this league. Here is how Underdog best ball works:

• The Best Puck Classic is a contest with 15 000 entries, but they are split into 12-team drafts. Points are counted for 18 weeks and after those 18 weeks, the top-3 in each 12-team sub-league advance to the playoffs.
• There are 16 rounds in the drafts and the positions are centre, winger, defence, and goalie.
• One centre, two wingers, one defenceman, one utility skater, and one goalie count each week for the overall points standings.
• It is a points format where goals are worth six, assists are worth four, each shot and blocked shot is worth one, and each power play point and hit is worth 0.5. Netminders get six points for a win, 0.6 points for each save, and lose three points for a goal against.

Alright, I wanted to break this down into two Ramblings with today’s covering my personal approach to the draft. With the obvious caveat that this was the first week of August and a lot will change in the next two months, check out how my draft went picking from sixth overall. (aug8)

[Follow the link for more…]

6. In yesterday’s Ramblings, I went over my first fantasy draft of the season. It was a best ball draft over at Underdog Fantasy and it was part of their Best Puck Classic. The Ramblings yesterday discussed my approach to my team, and today I want to discuss the picks of the entire draft, some thought process, positional ideas, and ADPs. Again, I used Dobber’s projections from the 2024-25 Dobber Fantasy Guide, which can be purchased through that link.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the draft. The very top doesn’t really surprise. It is once we get past the first eight picks that things get interesting.

Here are a few examples:

I worry about production from Jason Robertson. It isn’t because he’s not elite – he is – and it’s not because he plays on a bad team – Dallas is a Cup contender – but it’s the way they run their team. Robertson skated 18:19 per game last year and was under three shots and one hit per game. Taking him in the middle of the second round ahead of guys like Sam Reinhart or Mitch Marner, who could both easily clear him by a couple of minutes per game in 2024-25, feels like an overreach. If we knew that Robertson was going to skate 20:30 per game on a team that drew a lot of penalties, he’d be a first-round pick. But this is where team context matters, and Dallas spreads its ice time too much for me to rely on him over similar big-minute players. (aug9)

7. Connor Bedard going 29^th overall is interesting. It is about where he went last year, but now he’s a year older, has a better team around him, and should play huge minutes. The trio of he, JT Miller, and Elias Pettersson all going one after the other is a fun group because they’re three different players: Bedard is The Guy on his team and should rack up a lot of shots, Miller can bring a lot of hits with high rates of production, while Pettersson has 50/50 potential every season. (aug9)

8. Ilya Sorokin being the eighth goalie off the board is one of those “how did he fall that far”-type picks. Not that it’s completely unwarranted – his .908 save percentage in 2023-24 was a career-low – but he was elite for three years before just being above-average last season. In a dynasty points league I’m in, that above-average season still led to him being the ninth overall goalie. Any sort of rebound from him probably means a top-5 fantasy goalie on the season. Getting him in the middle of the fourth round feels like great value to me, and he’s one of the guys I’d be perfectly content having as my number-1 fantasy goalie as I load up on skaters in the first few rounds. (aug9)

[Follow the link for more…]

9. Oliver Kylington was on the free agent market longer than he should have been considering that a $1.05 million AAV was all it took to get him signed. In Colorado there is a log-jam of defencemen, with Cale Makar, Devon Toews, Josh Manson, and Samuel Girard taking up the top-four spots, and Kylington joining a cast of Sam Mlinski, Erik Brannstrom, and Calvin De Haan fighting for two spots on the bottom pair.

As the last to join the group, Kylington could be on the outside looking in at the beginning, but by the end of the season (or even mid-season) I would expect him to separate himself as the best option of that set. When he was with the Flames he was put in a position to succeed, and had a period scoring at a 35-point pace. With the Avalanche, Kylington could get some favourable deployment to go with an excellent crop of forwards that he can facilitate moving the puck to. Despite the crowd, it's nearly an ideal landing spot for him. (aug7)

10. It might be the middle of summer, but there’s lots happening here at DobberHockey. Doesn’t seem like a holiday to me.

– The DobberHockey Fantasy Guide is now available for download! It’s the same Guide that you’ve come to know and love every year, which includes player projections for scoring and peripheral categories in PDF form by team and by Excel list. Included are sleepers, draft review, Calder nominees, stock drops, goalies, and much more.

As for our French-language version, Le Guide des Poolers, it's also available and you can order it here.

– In addition, the Dobber 2024-25 projections are now in the Fantasy Hockey Geek system! If you have tried to generate Geek rankings with no luck, please regenerate them to receive the update. I will be playing around with the Geek projections in my leagues very soon. They’re important to me, starting with…

… Bubble Keeper Week, which will be from August 11-17. In case you’re not familiar with it, our writers will share players that are on the bubble on their various keeper teams. I have a few interesting names already picked out, which I’ll share with you that week.

– The Offseason Fantasy Grades articles for each team are underway. We started with Anaheim and are working our way down the alphabet. Follow along at this link.

– And, over at DobberProspects, the 32-in-32 Series, an annual event is underway! Every day in August, the DP crew will bring you a complete breakdown of a team's Draft crop and insights into their off-season movements (thus far). Following this up in September, DP writers and scouts dive into every team's prospect depth chart with fantasy insights and implications for the upcoming seasons. Check back often here.

11. I won’t feature Miro Heiskanen during Bubble Keeper Week because he is a sure-fire keeper on one of my teams. In a shallower league, Heiskanen might be a bubble keeper, though.

I’m guessing that Heiskanen might be a top-searched player because people might want to know whether he can rebound to 70+ points in 2024-25. Heiskanen’s production fell 21 points from 2022-23 to 2023-24, albeit in eight fewer games. He was still rosterable in nearly all standard-sized fantasy leagues, although he went from finishing seventh in scoring among defensemen (just three points out of second place) to 15^th place among fellow d-men.  

A look at some of the underlying numbers doesn’t suggest anything radically different, although 13 of the 21-point drop can be accounted for as power-play points. The Stars as a team experienced a slight reduction in power-play effectiveness, although it was insignificant compared to Heiskanen’s power-play point decline.

The emergence of Thomas Harley, and perhaps to a lesser extent Nils Lundkvist, should not be discounted. As mentioned in the Fantasy Guide, Harley had eight points and Lundkvist had four points in the 10 games that Heiskanen was out of the lineup. Harley in particular offers enough production to be rosterable in most fantasy leagues despite second-unit power-play time, while Lundkvist may finally be a full-time NHLer this season without the worry of healthy scratches. Dallas is a well-rounded team, and that is certainly the case when it comes to the fantasy value of their blueliners.

As for Heiskanen, I’d be skeptical about him reaching 70 points again. However, 60 points seems like a more reasonable expectation if he is healthy for nearly all of the season. (aug10)

12. Quinton Byfield recently made headlines after signing a five-year contract with a cap hit of $6.25 million. The 2020 second overall pick registered career highs all around in 2023-24, which included 20 goals, 35 assists, and 161 shots. At age 21, Byfield appears ready to build on those totals.

For starters, Byfield is a large forward (6-5, 225 lbs.), so at his age and number of games played (179) he may need a few more seasons to reach his true breakout potential. As well, the offseason departures of Viktor Arvidsson and Pierre-Luc Dubois should create a full-time spot on the top power play for him.

Byfield’s most frequent linemates in 2023-24 were Anze Kopitar and Adrian Kempe, which should also help him out. However, the fact that Dubois has left could create a spot back at the center position for Byfield. If that happens, he could have Kevin Fiala on his wing, which could work for both players. Fiala has registered back-to-back 70+ point seasons as a King in spite of never seeming to play on the top line.

In the recently opened Yahoo Fantasy Hockey (in case you missed it) Byfield currently has RW eligibility. By my research, right wing is the shallowest of the three forward positions, which would help Byfield’s value. Byfield’s extremely early Yahoo pre-draft ranking is 156, which seems a bit low. His ADP might adjust itself accordingly, and I admittedly haven’t had much time to dive into the Yahoo rankings. Yet from initial glance, Byfield could provide strong return on investment in Yahoo drafts. (aug10)

13. During an NHL season, we’re able to pay close attention to everchanging storylines and circumstances. The media – including awesome columnists at DobberHockey – keep us up to date on hot streaks and dry spells around the league so we can adjust our fantasy lineups accordingly. However, when a season ends, we lose a lot of this detail and specificity. Microscale views shift to macroscale perspectives as we look back on a player’s overall production from the campaign to assess how well they played and to make projections for the upcoming season.

Such a strategy might cause us to miss events that happened in a small sample, which could have given us more information about how a future season will play out. For example, say someone had a strong start to the year but then circumstances changed, causing them to produce at a more modest rate the rest of the way. That’s a story you might miss when looking at overall production.

To gain a better appreciation for some of last season’s small-scale storylines, I thought I’d review production from each quarter. Here are some of my noteworthy findings:

Filip Hronek

The 26-year-old defenseman had an outstanding first quarter, racking up 22 points in his first 22 games. Notably, eight of those points came on the power play, even though he was only seeing 33% of Vancouver’s total time with the man advantage. I’ll always be skeptical of a player’s production when a significant portion of their output is comprised of power-play production but they don’t have a stable role on the top unit. That caution was well founded in Hronek’s case as he posted just 26 points – including just three on the power play – in his final 59 appearances. (aug5)

14. Alex DeBrincat

The fun-sized sniper had an incredible showing not only in the first quarter, but the first half of last season, posting 38 points in his first 41 outings. It seems his output was propped up by special teams as 13 of those points came on the power-play, with DeBrincat enjoying a 61% share of Detroit’s total PP time. Unfortunately, the script flipped in the second half as his share dropped to 44% and he managed just six PPPs and 29 total points in his final 41 games. Fortunately, David Perron, who may have taken some PP time away from DeBrincat last year, isn’t in the picture anymore after signing with the Senators. (aug5)

15. Casey Mittelstadt

In Mittelstadt we have another player who performed very well in the first half but fell off in the second. His offensive decline is partially explained by a role reduction that began shortly before he was traded to Colorado at the deadline and continued as he closed out his campaign with the Avalanche. Mittelstadt posted 33 points over his first 40 games, skating nearly 19 minutes a night. However, he tallied just 24 points in the back 40, with his average ice time dropping to under 17 minutes per game. (aug5)

16. Adin Hill

It’s easy to forget because his overall numbers weren’t all that special, but Hill had a fantastic start to last season. He was arguably the league’s best goalie in quarter one, posting a .933 SV% and 1.96 GAA in 13 games and stopping 11 goals above expected (via Evolving Hockey). He was hinderd by injuries thereafter, so let’s hope for a clean bill of health this year. (aug5)

17. Blake Coleman

Looking at Coleman’s overall numbers from last season, it seems like he was able to achieve a career-high 54 points thanks to an expanded role with the Flames. After averaging around 15 minutes of action a night during his first two campaigns in Calgary, he was up to 17 minutes last year. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. In fact, Coleman’s numbers were largely bolstered by an incredible second quarter that saw him tally 25 points in 21 games. His production outside of that stretch was largely underwhelming – even though he continued to see a high volume of ice time in the third and fourth quarter. Another red flag is the fact that he scored on 15.7% of his shots, which is a significantly greater conversion rate than anything he’s posted in recent years. (aug5)

18. Nikolaj Ehlers

It’s no coincidence that Ehlers’ most productive quarter largely overlaps with the stretch that Kyle Connor missed with an injury. During quarters one, three and four, Ehlers was stuck around 15 minutes a night and stuck in a secondary power-play role. The second quarter saw him skate 17 and a half minutes a night while enjoying a majority share of power-play time. The extra opportunity fuelled extra offense as he tallied 22 points through 21 appearances in Q2. Ehlers is a very talented player who has largely been underutilized so far in Winnipeg. Let’s see if new Jets’ head coach Scott Arniel finally maximizes the shifty winger’s potential. (aug5)

19. Alex Kerfoot

When an injury to Barret Hayton launched Kerfoot into a bigger role, he made the most of his new opportunity. During the second quarter, Kerfoot racked up 18 points in 20 games while skating 19 and a half minutes a night. He enjoyed a 63% share of Arizona’s power-play time during this stretch and cashed in with seven power-play points. Outside of that span, he was stuck with a minority share of PP time and averaged around 17 minutes a night. Unfortunately for Kerfoot, given the team’s abundance of up-and-coming talent, he’s unlikely to match that second quarter deployment this year. (aug5)

[Follow the link for more…]

20. Even if the Flyers are in a bit of a retool, they didn’t waste much time in signing Travis Konecny to an eight-year extension with an $8.75 million cap hit (to start after this season). That contract will expire when Konecny is 36 years old. He is easily the Flyers’ most important player, leading the team in goals (33), assists (35), and points (67). He has also led the Flyers in scoring for three consecutive seasons. On top of that, Konecny’s goal and point totals have all increased over each of the past two seasons.

There’s still time for the 27-year-old Konecny to grow on that point total. Philadelphia has numerous young forwards with promising upside. At the top of the list is Matvei Michkov, who has to be an early favorite for the Calder Trophy and may surpass Konecny for the team scoring lead one day. Scoring increases from the likes of Owen Tippett, Tyson Foerster, Morgan Frost, and Bobby Brink could also boost the Flyers’ offense and ultimately Konecny. Only five teams scored at a lower rate than the Flyers (2.82 GF/GP), but that number could turn around in 2024-25. (aug4)

21. Pyotr Kochetkov didn’t sign a contract over the summer. That is because he will be entering the second year of a four-year contract with a cap hit of $2 million. That seems like a bargain for the goalie who appeared in more games among any other Carolina goalie (42) in 2023-24. He could lead the Canes in games played again, although Frederik Andersen still has one year remaining on his contract and still has the larger cap hit ($3.4 million).

As I mentioned in the Fantasy Guide, I think Andersen is probably the opening-night starter. But our projections have Kochetkov appearing in more games. That’s what an injury-related timeshare looks like. Although Andersen is not listed as a Band-Aid Boy, he has been limited to 24, 34, and 16 games over three of his past four seasons. That is why I’ll say if you’re drafting a Carolina goalie (which isn’t a bad choice), you should be drafting Kochetkov. (aug4)

—

Be sure to also grab your copy of the 2024 Dobber Fantasy Hockey Prospects Report!

—

Have a good week, folks!

Thanks for continuing to support the website and if you’re bored and need a fantasy hockey fix – visit the gang in the forum here.