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. Brad Marchand is adding to his legend during the playoffs. He now has the most goals in the Stanley Cup Final (10) among active players, the most Cup Final goals among left wingers in history, and the third-most playoff overtime goals in NHL history. Like him or not, he is definitely in the discussion among clutch players in NHL history. In hindsight, a conditional second-round pick seems like a small price for the Panthers to pay the Bruins, even if Marchand is a rental in the true sense of the word.

Marchand made his breakaway opportunities count during the Panthers' Game 2 win to even up the Final on Friday. He scored both of his goals on breakaways, with his second goal of the game the game-winner in the second overtime period. Marchand had an impressive game with two goals, a plus-3, seven shots, and two hits. He has also scored goals in back-to-back games and is up to 17 points in 19 games. That’s not bad for a 37-year-old who is playing on Florida’s third line. (jun7)

2. While we’re on the subject of over-35 greats producing when it matters the most, this is a great time to bring up Corey Perry. Playing on the top line with Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, the 40-year-old Perry scored his eighth goal of the playoffs with just 18 seconds in regulation to tie the game for the Oilers.

Perry is right behind Marchand with nine Stanley Cup Final goals among active players. A UFA after the season who hasn’t scored at over a 40-point pace since the 2017-18 season, Perry somehow looks like he needs to be on some contending team’s roster again next season to score more big-game goals. It’s worth mentioning that Perry was fifth on the Oilers in goals during the regular season with 19 goals, something he accomplished while averaging fewer than 12 minutes per game. (jun7)

3. Sam Bennett leads the playoffs with 13 goals in just 19 games after finishing the regular season with 25 goals in 76 games. Expect a team to throw an absurd amount of money at him this offseason, as no free agent has added to his value more than Bennett during the playoffs. Bennett’s career highs are 28 goals and 51 points, but teams understand that his value extends well beyond the scoresheet.  

Meanwhile, Connor McDavid leads all players with 31 playoff points, followed by Draisaitl with 29.

The teams will have two days off before Game 3 on Monday. The flight from Edmonton to Miami is a long one with a distance of 4114 km / 2558 miles! If this final goes the distance, it will finish on Friday June 20. Very little time before free agency on July 1. (jun7)

4. Some major coaching news went down on Friday, as Pete DeBoer was relieved of his head coaching duties with the Dallas Stars. Under DeBoer, the Stars had the best overall record of any team over the past three seasons and had gone to the Western Conference Final for three consecutive seasons. Coaching multiple teams, DeBoer has made the conference final in six of the past seven seasons.

It seems insane that a coach that just took his team to the conference final is being let go, but the questionable decision to pull Jake Oettinger in Game 5 was right there for everyone to see, while his comments afterward about not having faith in Oettinger might have sealed his fate. Keeping the franchise goalie over the replaceable coach seems like a no-brainer if the two can’t coexist anymore.

DeBoer seems to get results wherever he coaches, but he also seems to wear out his welcome, having been dismissed from three different teams over the past six years. That might give teams pause in hiring DeBoer for a vacant head coaching job, despite his success. DeBoer has had an NHL head coaching job somewhere since 2008-09, so he’ll probably be back behind an NHL bench at some point. That will especially be the case for a team not meeting expectations needing to turn things around quickly. (jun7)

5. As for Jake Oettinger, he should be fine. Expect the new coach to make it a priority to smooth Oettinger’s feathers after his Western Conference Final experience. We won’t know how the coaching change will fully affect Dallas players fantasy-wise until they decide on the new coach.

In other Stars news, Tyler Seguin was dealing with a shoulder injury during the playoffs. Seguin is expected to rehab the injury over the summer. (jun7)

6. Elsewhere, the Boston Bruins hired former team forward Marco Sturm to be their next head coach and Michael Clifford wrote about that here, while the Pittsburgh Penguins also named a new coach this past week in Dan Muse, as Alexander MacLean shared some thoughts here.

7. We have spent the last six weeks reviewing the NHL season, be it assessing projections, looking at changes to shot, hit, and block counts, the role of young players, or fantasy MVPs.

We are going to continue that looking-back trend but with an eye to the future. We are going to take the next several Ramblings to review the weaknesses of each team that led to subpar fantasy performances and how those weaknesses can improve in the offseason either via trade or free agency.

This is going to be division by division, so let’s start out with the Pacific Division: 

8. Anaheim Ducks

The problem remains the power play. They had the worst conversion rate in the league (11.8%) and tied for the fewest total PP goals (26). The 30 teams who scored at least 30 power-play goals averaged 50 PP goals each. That means if Anaheim wants to get to roughly an average mark, their PP scoring needs to double. That is… a lot.

Using tracking from All Three Zones, Anaheim (59.4%) was basically at the league average for carrying the puck into the offensive zone on the power play (59.7%). The rate at which they set up the power play on an entry was 41.2%, just under the league average of 42.5%. The problem was that 11.2% of their passes led to shots from the blue line, the highest rate in the league. It led to a severe lack of shots from the middle of the ice.

The best power plays can generate from a variety of areas, but Anaheim was very one- or two-dimensional in what they did once they got into the zone.

This is where I’ll recommend something that might get laughed at, but here goes: Trade for Chris Kreider. He is coming off a down year, no doubt, but it’s also well-known he was fighting a back injury for over half the season. He is an older player, and back problems are a concern at any age, but he only has two years left on his current deal and with the cap rising, a $6.5M cap hit isn’t a big deal, especially for a team that won’t be contending in the next two years. His net-front ability on the power play is still excellent and if he can bounce back health-wise, it is a low-cost acquisition that can turn around a glaring offensive problem. (jun6)

9. Calgary Flames

Over the last two years, on average, teams have needed 22.8 shot attempts at 5-on-5 to create one expected goal, and 23.8 attempts to create one actual goal. The Flames have been worse than both marks in each of the last two seasons, and the 2024-25 Flames were the worst team by those two measures from either of the last two campaigns:

The Flames are solid defensively, and they do generate shots well, but a lot of them are from distance and that resulted in them finishing 30^th by 5-on-5 goal scoring this past season. Just being below average by 5-on-5 scoring, rather than awful, would have been enough to get them into the playoffs.

Tracking data had Calgary as the worst team in the league at using high-danger passes (across the slot or from behind the net). There is a free agent who is exceptional at creating high-danger shots for his teammates at 5-on-5, and his name is Mikael Granlund. 

Of course, a lot depends on what he wants to sign for and where he wants to go. He does have his issues, particularly defensively, but he can genuinely help his teammates score, and that would be great news for guys like Nazem Kadri and Matt Coronato (and us greedy fantasy owners). (jun6)

10. Edmonton Oilers

Assuming a long-term extension for Evan Bouchard in the $10 to $11-million AAV range (give or take a million), the Oilers won’t have a lot of cap space. It puts a big free agent signing out of the question.

Believe it or not, the 2024-25 Oilers finished 14^th by goal scoring at 5-on-5, two goals ahead of Philadelphia and tied with Seattle. What they need is a middle-6 winger who can score. Their depth is a big part of the postseason run, but the Oilers have five UFA wingers, so they need to replenish that depth. If there is one thing Mantha can do, it’s produce at 5-on-5. 

Mantha is heading into his age-31 season and had season-ending ACL surgery in November. It isn’t ideal, but that was seven months ago, so the hope is he’s healthy enough for his offseason work. The question is whether he wants to go to Edmonton and what he signs for given Edmonton’s limited cap space. If he’s healthy and wants to go to Edmonton, he can be a boost to their depth scoring. (jun6)

11. Los Angeles Kings

The Los Angeles power play was a huge issue for most of the season but then turned itself around after acquiring Andrei Kuzmenko. Assuming he returns, maybe that’s one problem solved.

The other problem is Los Angeles’ blue line. To be clear: this was an excellent defensive team. However, their defencemen provided very little help creating offence in the zone as they had precisely one blue liner who was above average by assists on teammate scoring chances from a defenceman, and you can probably guess who it was.

If Brandt Clarke takes a big step forward next season (I think he does), that’s great. It still leaves them with a blue line largely incapable of helping create offence and that’s a big problem in the modern NHL. There is a defenceman who has shown well in the postseason after returning from injury, and that’s John Klingberg. He is even a right-handed shot.  

Vladislav Gavrikov is the crux here because if he re-signs with the Kings, they likely just run back largely the same defence group. If Gavrikov leaves, there is a spot on their third pair, and Klingberg could help them create some more dangerous chances from the back end. (jun6)

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12. San Jose Sharks

Here we have a team that just has to add everywhere. They finished last in the league for the second year in a row and they’ve averaged 53 points over the last three seasons. Over those three seasons, they are 31^st by goals for per 60 minutes (only Chicago is lower) and last by goals against.

If we are to drill down on one aspect, though, it’s defence. The Sharks finished with 2.49 goals-for per 60 minutes in 2024-25, which was last in the league, but 16% higher than in 2023-24. While their goals against rate also improved, it was by just 5%. This was arguably the worst defensive team in the league (Anaheim provides competition), and they traded Jake Walman at the Trade Deadline, by far their best defenceman. (jun6)

[Follow the link for the rest of the Sharks' analysis and the rest of the Pacific: Seattle, Vancouver and Vegas…]

13. The Memorial Cup finished up last Sunday night. Having gone to school in London Ontario, I was happy to see the Knights come away with the win after they were achingly close last year. The core group of Easton Cowan, Denver Barkey, Sam Dickinson, Oliver Bonk, and others were all there to make sure they didn’t let the opportunity slip through their fingers again. 

Cowan tied Mitch Marner‘s Memorial Cup record for the most points scored by a London Knight, and that seems somehow fitting as he may be part of replacing Marner in the Leafs lineup next season too. It’s tough to imagine him not making the team this fall, even if it is only a third-line role to start. Cowan has really grown his game over the last year, and is so much more than a one-dimensional scorer. He’s owned in dynasty leagues already, and he likely won’t add enough value as a rookie this year to be worth your last flier pick in redrafts, but he’s worth having on the radar anyways. (jun4)

14. Perhaps the player who impressed me the most though was Sam Dickinson. At the end of last season, I wasn’t 100% sold on him being worth a top-12 pick (I had him ranked later in the teens), and I thought that just as a bigger defenceman in a very visible market, he was getting pushed up draft boards higher than he should have. Well, fast-forward a year and he has certainly proved me wrong, continuing to push his equivalency numbers higher, while playing in all situations for a dominant London team, who was leaning on him for nearly every second shift by the end of the year. He’s another one that I expect to be in the NHL when camp breaks in October. It might be tough to fit him for longer than the nine-game trial due to Mario Ferraro, Henry Thrun, Shakir Mukhamadullin, and Marc-Edouard Vlasic all also being left shots and having one-way contracts. (jun4)

15. Jackson Lacombe was one of the big breakout players for the Ducks this past year, and while my initial thoughts on him this offseason were as simple as “sell-high”, taking a look under the hood shows that it’s not so straightforward. 

His 47-point pace was a fantastic find for fantasy managers, and for those of you (us) that were expecting it to drop next year, allow me some time to change your mind. Lacombe started the year out playing bottom-four minutes in Q1, where he put up only four points in 15 games (one on the power play). The final three-quarters of the season then saw him record 39 points in his final 60 games (a 53-point pace), with nearly two shots a game and eight power play points. Interestingly, his final eight games he was also held pointless, meaning his pace during the middle of the season was 62 points. 

The consistency does need some work though, as he was a very feast or famine player. Part of that however does come from the Ducks themselves being a poor team, and the scoring not being consistent from the roster as a whole. The team will likely take another step forward this season (big or small remains to be seen), and with Lacombe likely coming in with the top power play gig his to lose as the incumbent, he’s in a very good spot to keep the points coming. 

The underlying numbers are all very reasonable as well, with only his PPIPP coming in high, though that would account for an extra point or two, so it’s not something to worry about. At 24 years old and coming up to his 200-game threshold this year, Lacombe is someone I would be leery of selling if I did own him anywhere. (jun4)

16. Rick Roos is looking for a few more mailbag questions to be answered in next week's article. To get your questions to him, private message “rizzeedizzee” via the DobberHockey Forums or email admin@dobbersports.com with “Roos Mailbag” as the subject line. No one does a deeper dive on your questions than Rick, and now is the time to get those keeper and draft questions in before it's too late.

17. The Colorado Avalanche signed one of the bigger free agent names on the board before he could even hit free agency: Brock Nelson, three years, through 2027-28, at $7.5 million.

Nelson had six goals and 13 points in 19 regular season games with the Avs but had no goals in their seven-game loss to Dallas in the first round. His line looked a lot better once Gabriel Landeskog was added to it, and with Nathan MacKinnon, Martin Necas (pending he doesn’t get traded), Artturi Lehkonen, and Valeri Nichushkin, Colorado has a very formidable top-6 group, provided they all remain with the team and stay healthy.

The signing of Nelson, on top of Yanni Gourde‘s extension in Tampa Bay, removes a couple of the key centre options in free agency. The pool is getting thin, and that’s only good news for Sam Bennett‘s agent. (jun5)

Still with the Avs: Logan O’Connor underwent hip surgery recently, which means he will need 5-6 months of recovery time. That will put O’Connor out of the lineup until November or December, so he likely won’t be ready for the start of the season. O’Connor finished the season with 21 points in 80 games while filling a fourth-line role for the Avs, so his absence shouldn’t affect a ton of fantasy teams. (jun7)

18. In the last two Ramblings, we went over the MVP candidates, first among forwards and then moving to defencemen. Today, we are round out MVP performances with goaltenders.

Those two articles are the capstone of Ramblings over the last month that looked at preseason projections for forwards and defencemen, the changing NHL environment, and what it all means for fantasy owners. Those Ramblings can be found here:

• Forwards who underperformed goal-scoring projections.
• Forwards who overperformed goal-scoring projections.
• Forwards whose goal-scoring landed close to their projection.
• Forwards who underperformed points projections.
• Forwards who overperformed points projections.
• Forwards whose point production landed close to their projection.
• Defencemen who underperformed points projections.
• Defencemen who overperformed points projections.
• Defencemen whose point production landed close to their projection.

After those comparisons were done, we moved to how the NHL changed in the 2024-25 season. This is what we looked at:

• Declining shot totals, changes in block/hit numbers, and improvement in bottom-6 scoring.
• Production changes from young players in the league.
• Players who saw some key improvements but did not produce well.

Finally, we finished with how those changes affected my projections:

• Goals from top-6 forwards, declining power-play production, and how the power plays affected the top players.
• Goals and assists from defencemen, and the rising middle- and lower-class of point-producing blue liners. (jun5)

19. For MVPs among goalies, we’re going to focus on value – the 20^th overall pick performing as the 12^th overall pick is great but having guys that are 10^th or 15^th-round picks perform as third- or sixth-round picks is what we have in mind. We are also going to limit it to goalies who had more than 25 appearances. That gives us 52 goalies to work with.

things will change based on individual league settings or ADPs, but this should get us pretty close to the most valuable goalies based on that draft position. Managers with Connor Hellebuyck or Andrei Vasilevskiy on their rosters probably aren’t complaining about those early picks, though.

Here are the three goalies who are at the top of the board for draft-based value – probably no real surprises here, but let’s go through them: (jun5)

20. Darcy Kuemper (Los Angeles Kings)

Given Kuemper’s struggles to finish his tenure in Washington, it isn’t a big surprise he fell outside the top-100 picks on a regular basis. This is a lesson in the quality of the team in front of a goalie, though: The 2023-24 season saw Cam Talbot post a .913 save percentage in 54 games with the Kings while David Rittich had a .921 (!) save percentage. The Kings were excellent defensively in 2023-24 and were even better in 2024-25. The result is the season Kuemper just had. (jun5)

21. Filip Gustavsson (Minnesota Wild)

Remember before the season when there was genuine concern that Minnesota would carry three goalies? Jesper Wallstedt made two starts, both coming in a one-week span in December. Maybe there will come a day when teams carry three goalies regularly, but even the Montreal Canadiens did that out of necessity a couple years ago, not because they really wanted to. Something to keep in mind.

Anyway, the Minnesota Wild have typically been one of the best defensive teams in the league basically this entire century, and certainly since the 2021 Bubble season. Few teams are better perennially at keeping dangerous shots to a minimum, allowing their goalies to rack up a lot of easy saves, and that was true again in 2024-25: as a share of all shots faced at even strength, Minnesota goalies faced the fifth-lowest percentage of high-danger shots but also faced the eighth-most even-strength shots per 60 minutes. It made the Wild 1 of 2 teams to be top-10 at limiting high-danger shots while also allowing a lot of perimeter shots:

This has often been great for Minnesota’s fantasy netminders, and the tradition continues. (Now, just imagine if Minnesota had a competent penalty kill.) (jun5)

[Follow the link for Mike's full analysis]

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