Ramblings: Zetterlund and Duchene Sign; Mailbag Questions on Zero Goalie Drafting, Lane Hutson, Rankings, and More – June 20

Michael Clifford

2025-06-20

The 2025 Dobber Hockey Prospects Report is now available in the Dobber Shop! It has everything fantasy hockey fanatics need to know about this year's crop of draftees, as well as a dive into each NHL team's current prospect pool, and a whole lot more. Dobber and the prospect team worked all year to get to this point so help support what they do by grabbing a copy today.

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One RFA is off the board as Ottawa extended winger Fabian Zetterlund:

Zetterlund didn't do much for Ottawa following the trade with two goals and five points in 20 regular season games and then being held pointless in the postseason. A full year with the coaches and team may give us something different.

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Another key UFA centre is re-signing as Matt Duchene is staying in Dallas:

This is a reasonable deal for a centre entering his age-35 season, but it also pushes Dallas near the cap and they have six roster spots to fill. Even shipping out a couple guys like Mason Marchment or Matt Dumba would mean around half of Dallas' 23-man roster making around $1M AAV (give or take a couple hundred thousand). Lots of tightrope walking to do this summer for Jim Nill.

Staying with Dallas, the Stars traded winger Mason Marchment to the Seattle Kraken. I have a full breakdown of that trade here.

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On social media this week, I asked for some fantasy hockey mailbag questions for today's Ramblings so that's what we'll do. We will touch on rankings, goalies, and more, so let's get right to it.  

Question #1

Every year, I talk about my rankings a week or two before the regular season. Here is a general breakdown of what goes into the rankings.

After completing projections for each player, it's a matter of putting the projections into league-wide context. That context has two main components: the position of each player, and how far above/below average is the projections from a replacement-level player. Let's break those down individually.

Positions matter in fantasy; getting a 20-goal point-per-game forward is nice but getting that production from a defenceman is rare and very valuable. When devising rankings, if you're in a league where players are separated by position (even if it's just forward/defence), accounting for positional scarcity should be one of the steps taken, so when I determine the overall value of each player, I separate them into positions, and that usually means LW/C/RW/D.

The second part is an extension of the first and it's figuring out the value of each player in each category above (or below) a replacement-level player. This has a few steps:

  • A replacement-level player is effectively someone that is at the bottom of the value ranking of rostered players in a given fantasy league, or one of the top options on the waiver wire. For example, if there are 12 teams in a fantasy league, and each team starts five defencemen, and each team has one spare on the bench, that is 72 defencemen on rosters. In that sense, a replacement-level defenceman is probably around the 65th – 80th ranked blue liner.
  • When we're ranking skaters in a fantasy league, we look back to the previous season to figure out the replacement value in that league. So, if we're looking at the replacement value for assists from defencemen, we look at the defencemen who finished ranked somewhere between 65th – 80th overall, and what the average assist output for those players is. That means if the 65th – 80th overall defencemen in my fantasy league averaged 20 assists in the 2024-25 season, then that would be the replacement level for assists.
  • That process is repeated for each fantasy category in the league and then compared to the projection of replacement-level production. If I have Noah Dobson for 15 goals and 38 assists, and the replacement level for a defenceman in my fantasy league is 6 goals and 20 assists, then it's a matter of calculating the value above that. That calculation isn't complex but not necessary to explain right now.

I could go a lot longer, but that's the general idea. It is figuring out what players are expected to produce in each fantasy category relative to others at their position, how much value they bring in each category, and then comparing across positions.

Question #2

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Fantasy hockey goalies and people trying not to pull their hair out because of them: name a more iconic duo.

Luckily, there was a good write-up on the Zero Goalie fantasy hockey strategy by our own Ryan Brudner. He covered the 2023-24 season last June and I recommend reading that. It is a very thorough breakdown of that strategy.

As for the 2024-25 regular season, I went and dug into this myself. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the fantasy MVPs among goalies from this season and determined that using ADPs. The average ADP between Yahoo, ESPN, and CBS was taken for a group of 45 goalies. In general, here is the graph of final fantasy points and that average ADP:

There is a clear downward trend, which means later ADPs bring lower value, and a reasonable correlation (r-squared), at least as far as hockey is concerned. Here is a quick table to show this in a bit more detail. It shows four groups of goalies by their final fantasy ranking based off my MVP data, their average ADP, their median ADP, their average value, and their median value:

A few takeaways from this:

  • It isn't necessary to take a goalie early to get a top-5 netminder (Darcy Kuemper, Filip Gustavsson).
  • Among goalies 25-45, or outside the top-24 goalies, by overall fantasy value, only two (Alexandar Georgiev and Jeremy Swayman) were taken with a top-100 pick. You can find great goalies late, and early goalies may underperform (Juuse Saros, Stuart Skinner), but they don't frequently outright bust.
  • One thing to keep in mind when drafting a goalie late is that it is often a goalie from a bad team. If that team doesn't have a competent backup goalie, and things go south, there is going to be a lot of negative value because of games played. Samuel Ersson in Philadelphia and Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen in Buffalo are good examples of this.
  • A goalie can have an excellent season, like Lukas Dostal did for Anaheim, and still be a below-average fantasy option. By some measures, Dostál himself was probably a top-12 goalie in real life, but he didn't rack up wins, and faced so many shots he had a below-average goals against average. He was great but his team was bad, so it didn't really matter.
  • Building off all that, total games played matter a lot. One reason why Connor Hellebuyck was so valuable wasn't just because of great stats, but because he finished second in the league with 62 starts. By my rankings, Hellebuyck was three times more valuable than the fifth overall goalie. The great stats are the main reason why that happened, but it doesn't happen if he gets 40 starts.

I agree with Brudner's conclusion that Zero Goalie is probably a better strategy for points leagues than something like a roto league. In a points league, a bad week from a goalie can be salvaged by a great week from the skaters, and goalies that face a lot of shots (Dostál) can still have solid value even without racking up wins. That doesn't happen in a roto league. Zero Goalie is a viable strategy, no doubt, but like anything else, you have to get a bit lucky. Someone that went Zero Goalie last September by drafting Gustavsson and Dustin Wolf probably enjoyed their fantasy season. Someone that went Zero Goalie by drafting Luukkonen and Pyotr Kochetkov was probably looking forward to the baseball season by Christmas.

Question #3

It is a two-parter, so let's start with the goalie question, and my immediate thought was Jet Greaves in Columbus. His last two AHL seasons were pretty good (fourth by save percentage among goalies with > 30 starts in 2024-25 alone) and he basically took the net from Elvis Merzlikins at the end of this NHL season. Greaves has had limited time in the NHL (20 starts over the last three seasons) but has been very good in that limited time with a .924 save percentage. Columbus is looking to make a playoff push, so they won't entertain months of underperformance from Merzlikins again. Maybe Greaves doesn't have the job to start October, but I think he's a guy to circle for the 2025-26 season, at least right now. We will come back to this in three months.

As for the second part, I almost never cross any team, player, or goalie off my draft list. They all have their value; it's just a matter of when they are being drafted. In fact, as for players I cross off, it's almost always in the other direction and towards players from good teams I think are overvalued in drafts. Last year, that included guys like Steven Stamkov, Filip Forsberg, Elias Pettersson, and Quinn Hughes. It mostly worked out.

Question #4

It's kind of odd because I am a person that has been very high on Lane Hutson since his draft year but was not high on him for fantasy purposes last season. That didn't work out so well.

The question of a downturn is very real because 98% of defenceman building off a 66-point regular season campaign is always a question. And the fact Hutson figured in on 56.9% of goals scored with him on the ice is a bit of a worry because that would mean he's already in the Adam Fox/Rasmus Dahlin tier of defencemen.

With that said, if he does figure in on fewer goals, there are three reasons not to necessarily believe in a points decline:

  • He skated 23:28 per game from March 1st onward, an increase of just over a minute per game up to that point. As the Habs were pushing for a playoff spot, he got a bigger role, and he could push 24 minutes a game next season. An extra 100-150 total minutes helps soften the potential regression.  
  • He didn't start the season on the top power-play unit, and while it didn't take long for him to get there, playing 82 games as the PP1 defenceman is always a plus.
  • With Ivan Demidov there for a full year, a healthy Patrik Laine, and hopefully some scoring depth added in the offseason, the Canadiens should have more depth scoring from which Hutson can rack up points, and he won't have to rely on his minutes with the Nick Suzuki line.

There could always be a sophomore slump, and I would not expect any sort of Cale Makar-like season, but as long as Hutson (and Montreal's key forwards) stays healthy, I think reaching 70 points is very reasonable. I wouldn't expect some huge drop off to 43 points or something like that.

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SAM RINZEL CHI
STEFAN NOESEN N.J
NOAH DOBSON MTL
KIRILL MARCHENKO CBJ
MORGAN GEEKIE BOS

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ARTURS SILOVS PIT
JOHN GIBSON DET
DARCY KUEMPER L.A
LUKAS DOSTAL ANA
MACKENZIE BLACKWOOD COL

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25.9 BRYAN RUST VILLE KOIVUNEN SIDNEY CROSBY
21.7 RICKARD RAKELL EVGENI MALKIN DANTON HEINEN
21.0 PHILIP TOMASINO JOONA KOPPANEN CONNOR DEWAR

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