The Winnipeg Jets and Pittsburgh Penguins swapped prospects Rutger McGroarty and Brayden Yager yesterday. I wrote up my thoughts on the trade here.

In yesterday's Ramblings, I went over some players whose ADPs I think are good value as we round into fantasy draft season. Today, it's only right to go in the other direction and go through some players I think are overvalued. For this, I am going to use ADPs from Underdog Fantasy because it is a multi-cat points format and there have been nearly 200 drafts done for their big tournament. For now, it'll give us a better measure of where the early-bird fantasy drafters are actually taking players rather than relying on Yahoo! where some people join a mock draft just to go on auto-draft.

The points format is goals (6), assists (4), shots and blocks (1), and hits and power play points (0.5). For goalies, it is weighted heavily for wins. Left and right wingers are combined into one 'winger' category, too. With the caveat that these are surely to blow up in my face in eight months, here are some players being overvalued right now.

Brayden Point (ADP: 42.8, C10)

I always have concern when a player the magnitude of Steven Stamkos is moved from a franchise. Outside of whatever off-ice/dressing room changes that may cause, the key to the Tampa Bay Lightning's fantasy value has been their power play. Taking off a major producer like Stamkos and replacing him with Jake Guentzel just adds a lit bit of uncertainty to the mix.

The problem is that Point just doesn't bring much for peripherals when considering he's going as the 34^th skater off the board. He has been roughly a top-30 skater in the last two seasons, it's not that the value is bad, but he's being drafted basically at his upside and if he has a season where he shoots 15% instead of over 20%, he doesn't shoot, block, or hit enough to make up the difference. When we add that to the uncertainty that comes with the changes to the power play, I think there is reason to either draft a top centre earlier, or keep filling out other categories and waiting to grab someone like Aleksander Barkov, Joel Eriksson Ek, or Sebastian Aho. There just is not a three- or four-round gap in fantasy value between Point and that next tier.

Wyatt Johnston (ADP: 91.9, C19)

Let me preface this with saying: I am a Wyatt Johnston Guy. He caught my attention with his rookie 2022-23 season and just kept improving in 2023-24. The problem is this: he is likely to split top-6 centre duties with Roope Hintz, even if Johnston does get moved to the wing at times. Also, the way Dallas shares the ice time is something that might keep their group fresh and rested, which is good for them in real life, but it's not great for us in fantasy. It is notable he led their forwards in ice time per game in the playoffs, but I read that as more 'we rested these guys in the regular season so we could get the most out of them in the playoffs' rather than 'Johnston is now a 20-minute forward'.

The issue with him being an 18-minute player rather than a 20-plus-minute player is there are guys who will play more than him available later. Nazem Kadri is now the top centre in Calgary, brings way more peripherals, and is cheaper at the draft table. Does Johnston really have much more upside than Bo Horvat if Horvat skates 20 minutes a game and Johnston skates 18? Racking up shots, hits, and blocks is something Horvat can do with all that time. It is not something Johnston can do.

If we knew Johnston was going to skate 20 minutes a night, I would be taking him in the top-75. But we don't, and I don't think he will, either, so I'm not.  

Sam Reinhart (ADP: 20.8, W13)

Before the 2023-24 season, Reinhart had never shot 18% in any 82-game season of his career. In the 2023-24 season, he shot 24.5%. Even if we take his best three year stretch from 2019-22 – when he shot 17.4% – with the same shot volume as last season, he's a 40-goal scorer, and not a 57-goal scorer. The interesting thing is that in this format, he was the 17^th overall skater in the league. If we add a couple goalies to the top-20, Reinhart is basically being drafted at his absolute upside. To put it another way is that there is no regression discount. Even if he scores 50 goals, and everything else is the same, he's a top-25 player rather than top-20. If he scores 40 goals, well, we get the idea here.

What is likely to happen to Reinhart is what just happened to Leon Draisaitl. In 2022-23, Draisaitl shot 21.1% and that led to a 52-goal season. His shot volume dropped a bit in 2023-24, as did his shooting percentage, and it cut 11 goals from his total. I like Reinhart, and I think he's a bona fide first-line, star winger. He is also not worth a second-round pick in this format. 

Mathew Barzal (ADP: 48.9, W25)

This is one I really don't get. Barzal is a tremendous player, do not get me wrong. We also saw a lot of line shuffling late in the season after Patrick Roy took over, and that meant moving Horvat away from Barzal. With Roy at the helm, Barzal was under a point per game, under three shots per game, and he doesn't bring much in the way of hits. This is a guy who has six 82-game seasons under his belt and has peaked at 23 goals and three shots per game. The question goes like this: why draft Barzal at the start of the fifth round when Jordan Kyrou is available at the end of the sixth round?

Quinn Hughes (ADP: 43.4, D5)

It seems like Hughes is on this list every year and here we are again. In 2023-24, Hughes more than doubled (17) his career high in goals (8), exceeded his prior career high in shots per game by nearly a half-shot, surpassed 90 points, and, in this format, he was the 10^th defenceman overall. This is where the lack of peripherals really hurt: Evan Bouchard put up over 50 more fantasy points than Hughes did in this type of fantasy league and it basically boiled down to the extra shots, hits, and blocks. If Hughes puts up the same peripherals, but scores 20 goals and has 80 assists, it works out to the number-7 defenceman in this format. Being able to be a more well-rounded player across the board is incredibly valuable when we're separating the absolute elite at any position.

This is one of those disconnects between real-life value and fantasy value. Using this points system, MacKenzie Weegar, Noah Dobson, Morgan Rielly, and Zach Werenski all had better seasons, on a fantasy-point-per-game basis, than Hughes. Each has their landmines, but Hughes is far too one-dimensional in his fantasy game to worth risking a fourth-round pick.  

Dougie Hamilton (ADP: 79.2, D10)

The concern here is Luke Hughes. If Hughes is running the top PP unit – and I think he is – then Hamilton is relegated to PP2 duties. In Hamilton's New Jersey tenure, over one-third of his points have been with the man advantage, and it's about 40% of his production in the last two seasons alone. Unless he boosts his scoring otherwise, he's closer to a top-20 defenceman than a top-10 defenceman. It just feels very risky when names like Mike Matheson and Zach Werenski are available 20-30 picks later.

There absolutely is upside here. If the New Jersey power play falters for the first month and Hamilton takes over, he does have top-5 fantasy defenceman-type upside to his game. In this kind of format, it may be a risk worth taking because you're looking to beat out thousands of other entries. In that sense, I get it. In most one-year leagues, though, I'm not sure Hamilton is worth taking as a top-10 defenceman off the board.

Andrei Vasilevskiy (ADP: 35.8, G6)

It worries me to rely on Vasilevskiy in a league that weights wins so heavily. The upside is that if he's healthy, he should get lots of starts because they don't have anything close to resembling a reliable backup goalie in the franchise. The downside is this: how good is Tampa Bay, really?

Last season, there were 30 goalies to make at least 40 starts. Of those 30 goalies, Vasilevskiy finished 22^nd by fantasy points per game. A 20% improvement in his fantasy point total would still have him around the 5^th goalie on the board. There is a big jump that needs to happen and expecting him to do it feels like reaching for reputation rather than production. I don't have a problem with taking Vasilevskiy as a top-12 goalie, but taking him ahead of Ilya Sorokin or Jacob Markstrom feels like losing value for no reason.