Each of our editors has favourite players, favourite teams, players they end up commenting on more often, and players that end up being a little forgotten or overlooked. It feels like when writing the Ramblings we try our best to cover as much as we can as evenly as possible, but there is certainly a lean towards those topics and players that we know and like best. Today I wanted to flip that, and talk about some players whose outlooks I am not high on going into next season. These are the players who may still be fantasy relevant, or even very good, but I don't feel their hype or name value is nearly keeping up with their actual value.

As some quick examples, Mark Stone comes to mind first. While he's a great fantasy producer when healthy, but I'm not taking the risk. Same goes for Gabe Landeskog (who I really do hope gets better and makes a full return) and Sean Couturier. Neither one is young enough to tempt me with their upside, and the floor is that they're injured the entire season. There will always be someone who reaches for the name before my watch list of other interesting players runs out.

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Trevor Zegras – Lots of people love Zegras and think that he has a higher level to reach offensively. From what I have seen and what the numbers tell me, I think he's more so a 55- to 60-point player rather than anything in the 70+ range. Anaheim has enough high-end forwards coming up that he could be well insulated, or just pushed down the depth chart, and based on the fact that it feels like they have been trying to trade him for the last year or so, it feels like there is certainly a real risk of the latter.

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Cam Fowler – Sticking with Anaheim, Fowler has been a decent fantasy asset the last few years, putting up decent power play point, shot, and block totals the last few years. However, last year Fowler's point totals dropped, and with full-time minutes for both Owen Zellweger and Pavel Mintyukov, I do wonder whether Fowler's power play production might just completely dry up. Fowler also has to deal with being relied on more against higher-quality competition than his teammates, and his minus-36 rating last season shows that it's not exactly a forte of his. Take away some points and the whole picture looks exponentially worse.

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Mikael Backlund – He's not bad, it just feels like he never gets talked about so I wanted to mention him here. At 35 he has played three straight seasons of 82 games, though two of them have come in below 40 points. His 56-point campaign might be fresh enough for someone to grab him as a lineup filler, but he's not going to see that much power play production again. That makes him a pretty safe ceiling/floor guy in the 35- to 45-point range, but unless I'm streaming him in for three games over a four day stretch or something, then it's not something that has much use on anything but the deepest of fantasy rosters.

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Josh Norris – I still like Norris' situation and his upside, but that shoulder really concerns me. It does kind of remind me of Vladimir Tarasenko, who missed large portions of multiple seasons with a similar shoulder surgery, and then once he was finally back to full health, generally dropped off with his overall performance. Even with multiple surgeries for him, the shoulder was eventually healthy enough to string several healthy seasons together, but it did take a while. I'll let someone else wait that one out.

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Brandon Montour is being viewed as a 70-point defenceman in some leagues, with many people thinking he is going to take over top power play unit duties in Seattle, bringing him back to a high level of fantasy production. Unfortunately, there's a lot of signs against that. Initially, just looking at his own stats from Florida, and he saw a whopping 72% of the available power play time the last two seasons. Despite that, he has a relatively low PP IPP, and his drop in scoring this season was punctuated by a secondary assist rate of 76%, which is very high, even for a defenceman.

Overall, it looks and feels like Montour is more of a 40-point defenceman that had one excellent and lucky season rather than a player whose higher potential was unlocked in Florida and having that used as a benchmark moving forward. He's someone I would really be trying to sell high on this offseason, and if I was Seattle he really wouldn't have been one of my targets at all – especially not at $7 million per year.

In contrast, Vince Dunn has been excellent in Seattle over the last couple of years, with a higher PP IPP, a very consistent 63-point pace the last two years despite a few fluctuating underlying numbers, and the familiarity with the existing group. Both Dunn and Montour have had similar deployment, so they could be partnered together at times at even strength, but more likely is that they will be split across the top two pairs to give both sets a puck-mover. The power play is where the most important production will stem from though, and Dunn's underlying numbers give him an advantage there as well.

Dan Bylsma coming in as the new coach also confounds things, as he hasn't coached in the NHL since 2016-17, so we don't have a lot to go on. His history with managing defencemen on the power play his last three years of coaching is succinctly explained as "put Rasmus Ristolainen out as much as possible in Buffalo and run out Matt Niskanen as much as possible while Kris Letang is injured". It does feel like Bylsma picks one defenceman and sticks with him on the top unit, it will be interesting in Seattle's case though with at least 10 different skaters that have a solid claim to power play time, whether they just end up with two fairly equivalent units.

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Ah, Alex Ovechkin. In my mind, the greatest scorer the game has yet seen, but his pursuit of the all-time scoring title has slowed lately. If it wasn't for that second-half surge last year then we would likely all be saying that his chase is a token attempt at this point and he's unlikely to make it. As it is, Ovechkin scored 23 goals in 40 second-half games, showing that there are still some elite scoring streaks left in him. The scoring streak lines up with when he was moved onto a line with Connor McMichael and T.J. Oshie, so if it was mainly the McMichael magic that got him going, it could be very transferrable to this year (and could put McMichael in line for a solid full campaign).

However, he enters the season as a 39-year-old, on a team that is likely not a playoff team come springtime, and with Oshie's injury status uncertain, there's a need to find another complimentary player to go along with Ovie – and I don't think that new addition Pierre-Luc Dubois is that player. To top it all off, last year was the lowest shot rate of Ovechkin's career, Ovie is a very risky play this year at 3.4 per game. In 18 prior seasons he had never been below 3.8, and only twice came in below 4.0. The signs are all there that the decline is in full swing, so I'm going to let someone else take the chance on him this year.

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To list a few other names who I am fading, but don't have time to dive into right now:

Sergei Bobrovsky – 35 years old and coming off a cup run where he was just average, but the perception is that he shone.

Dylan Larkin – In my head he's still 25, which makes it disappointing to discover he's actually 28, and has maxed out at a point-per-game. He gets valued the same as similar or younger centres that can and will put up 85-90 points.

Aaron Ekblad – He has really fallen off the last two years, and the underlying numbers bear that out. Despite Brandon Montour leaving, I think Ekblad will maintain his general overall usage, while Gus Forsling and others will mop up the offensive zone starts and sheltered minutes.

Tristan Jarry – Has been someone I have targeted over the last few years for his volume and win totals while not being viewed as a top-10 goalie in most fantasy circles. With this iteration of the Penguins, and Alex Nedeljkovic taking a bigger slice of the pie, I'm staying away.

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See you next Wednesday, and if you want to keep up with it you can find me on Twitter/X here, or BlueSky here if you have any fantasy hockey questions or comments.