I must say, it’s a lot less fun writing the Ramblings and checking your fantasy teams when there are no games on.

Looking at the fantasy schedule that we have to deal with from the Four Nations break, games restart on the Saturday Feb 22^nd, which means most leagues will have that weekend attached to the following week for a nine-day head-to-head matchup. Over those nine days, the Predators, Penguins, and Blues each play six times, so if you can, find a few of them on the wire to stream in. However, just be careful going overboard on getting those guys now, as the Penguins and Blues have very light schedules in the last few weeks of the season (the important ones).

The Senators are the only team with a league-low three games in that nine-day stretch, so avoid them for the short term.

The Kings are a nice streaming option that could fit into any lineup, with games on Mon/Wed/Fri, in addition to both Saturdays during the stretch.

*

We're a month out from the trade deadline, and after having looked into who was on the block for each team as part of the Midseason Guide and then after that reading Puneet's Top-10 article on Monday covering 10 names who could see a fantasy boost with a trade, it feels like now is about the right time to look at some situational changes that we might see at the trade deadline. This won't be focused on individual names so much as those two links above were, but on what teams are likely to make certain moves, and the impending impact those could have.

As an example, we'll take the New York Islanders, who seem like they're very likely to be sellers. They're in a position to move out a few different forwards, including but not limited to UFAs Brock Nelson, Kyle Palmieri and Matt Martin up front, while the recent bunch of cheap defencemen added means that as the team gets healthy they will have some flexibility on who they want to shop on the back end too. At the deadline, you can always get inflated returns for decent defencemen.

All that to say, the goalies might have a tough time in the stretch run for the Isles, while some of the third/fourth line forwards like Pierre Engvall and Simon Holmstrom could be in line for a bump.

That same idea goes for other teams like Seattle (who also has the most difficult strength of schedule remaining this season), Utah, and St. Louis.

Seattle in particular might be interesting, as they have a lot of options to sell off forwards, and that could provide some incentive to shovel extra ice time onto the remaining players, boosting their scoring just by heaping on volume.

San Jose still has a bunch of players primed to exit as well, and while they don't seem to be the same level of tire fire this year as last year where a ten-goal-game-against seemed to pop up every second week, it's hard to trust the goalies. But the exodus at the deadline, like a wildfire, does provide some new breathing room for the greener pieces to grow. Fabian Zetterlund for example was seeing two minutes per game on the power play and 18 minutes overall in Q1, and scored 17 points in those 25 games. In Q3 however, he's down to one minute of power play time, 15 minutes overall, and only has five points in 12 games to show for it. Will Smith has seen his production grow as his ice time has gone up since the start of the campaign, and that should continue. Macklin Celebrini and William Eklund were both seeing 20 minutes per game in Q1, and should be back to that in Q4.

At this point Jake Walman's numbers seem to have normalized as well. He shouldn't be a 60-point player like he was in Q1, and he's also not as bad as his most recent stretch of three points in 12 Q3 games.

*

Now that we have looked at the sellers, there are also quite a few teams looking to buy who I feel will be interesting to watch.

Minnesota has to be thinking that they have a unique window this year to take advantage of with Kirill Kaprizov at the level he is, Brock Faber and Marco Rossi still on their ELCs, a 35-year-old Jared Spurgeon, and 40-year-old Marc-Andre Fleury as one of three capable backstops.

They have some interesting options for adding talent, and with their wide-open cap situation next year thanks to the rising cap on top of the Parise/Suter buyouts reducing in value, they can make moves and ask questions (or for forgiveness) later. As part of bringing in players, I wonder if we see a reduction in the role of 37-year-old Mats Zuccarello (on a pointless streak of five games). He might be one to sell while there's still the illusion of gas in the tank.

The Florida Panthers have such a clear need at right-defence, that it will be shocking if they don't address it. Whoever gets to jump onto the Panthers, and possibly get a slice of the powerplay pie, is going to see a big spike in value. The question then becomes, who will they get? It's a bit of a fruitless guessing game, but I'll try anyways. The pipe-dream would be Noah Dobson, though where they probably settle is Connor Murphy and/or Luke Schenn.

I'm really curious to see how much of the future the Capitals sell off for this year's surprise run while Alex Ovechkin is still chugging along. As much as they have been a high-scoring team thus far, they really could use another offensive difference-maker, also without breaking the bank. I don't expect them to shake things up much though.

*

Here’s a few players that might be flying under the radar despite being on hot streaks entering the break: 

Bowen Byram had a couple great games amounting to five points in three games. He’s never going to be the top dog with Rasmus Dahlin around, but Buffalo should have enough fire power to keep their three top defencemen afloat. 

Vladislav Namestnikov had six points in four games before the break, playing on the second line with Nikolaj Ehlers and Cole Perfetti. His production dipped for a while while he was down the lineup, but it’s back up now, and he’s even finally adding a respectable shot volume. 

Josh Doan is finally looking more comfortable since his recall around the New Year, and ironically enough, is finally producing after his power play time was cut three games ago. He had four points in that stretch, and could see even more minutes through to the end of the year. 

Gage Goncalves is on a hot run since being recalled from his AHL stint. He has recently been playing in the top-six and has made the most of it with five points in six games. It may not last but it’s a solid streak to jump on in the meantime. 

*

I'm not going to spend much time on the actual Four Nations event, but here's my projected result:

Round Robin: 1) USA, 2) SWE, 3) CAN, 4) FIN, with USA defeating SWE in the finals and Jack Eichel taking home MVP honours (assuming they have some kind of MVP award).

The biggest fantasy stock increases that I think we see are a rebound from Mikko Rantanen, who always does very well for Finland, and I think could use the break to reset his head a bit. I'm also looking at Lucas Raymond to show on the best-on-best stage that he is a star, and it's not just the Detroit fans that should be seeing it.

The biggest stock drops that I feel we may see are from Patrik Laine, who it's going to be much harder to shelter into an offensive-specialist role in this tournament, and maybe it's just my sad-Leafs-fan bias, but I think Mitch Marner isn't going to be as visible as his linemates Sam Reinhart and some guy named Connor McDavid, which is going to disproportionally affect some of the public perception of him (not that Marner has ever been the apple of the public's eye).

*

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