We are just a few days away from the release of the 2025-26 Dobber Hockey Fantasy Guide, which is available for pre-order in the Dobber Shop right now! It will have projections and a draft list from Dobber himself, as well as a bevy of articles from the team of editors and writers covering category-specific options, which players are on the rise or on the decline, some undervalued gems, and a whole lot more. For those looking for more information and analysis on prospects, the Dobber Keeper Pack includes both the Guide and the Prospects Report. The Prospects Report is already available and gives fantasy hockey fans the need-to-know not only on this year's draft crop, but each team's prospect pipeline. Help support what we do by pre-ordering the Guide or buying the Keeper Pack today!

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I wanted to quickly highlight an article yesterday from our own Stas Pupkov. He went back to 2007 and visualized things like expected goals, goal-scoring, and point production through the years. You can look by team, by player, whatever you want. It is just a neat little trip down memory lane that also helps to highlight how quickly (or not) things can change for teams and players.

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As we do every offseason here at Dobber, Bubble Keeper Week is coming up in a couple weeks. It is a chance for the writers and readers to assemble some interesting either/or questions about which players at the end of a fantasy roster should or should not be kept. It isn't designed for questions like "Do I keep Sam Reinhart or Pavel Dorofeyev" but something like "Do I keep Cole Perfetti or Matt Coronato".

Bubble Keeper Week starts August 10^th, so we'll start assembling questions now. Either leave a comment at the bottom of this Ramblings or reach out to me on Twitter here or BlueSky here.

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Drew Helleson signed a two-year extension with Anaheim a few days ago and it got me thinking about Ducks' blue line. They have Radko Gudas and Jacob Trouba for another year while Jackson LaCombe had his breakout and now looks like their top defenceman. That means there are four defencemen – Helleson, Pavel Mintyukov, Olen Zellweger, and Tristan Luneau – for three roster spots.

It made me wonder if we don't see the Ducks run a lot of 11F/7D lineups this season. PuckPedia has them with 11 forwards signed which doesn't include Mason McTavish and Sam Colangelo. Assuming they're both signed, they have 13 forwards and one of them is Ross Johnston, who probably doesn't see a lot of games. That gives them 12 forwards in regular use, but it seems like Colangelo or Jansen Harkins finds themselves in the press box in favour of the team keeping all their young defencemen in the lineup. The team probably sees it as more imperative to get games in for Mintyukov or Luneau than they do Harkins or Colangelo. It is just a guess, but it makes me a little less nervous on drafting Zellweger this season.

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Last week, these Rambling started an offseason series about projecting players for the following season. Here is what we've looked at to this point:

• Which stats to consider and how important they are.
• Differences between forwards and defencemen.
• Changes in ice time at the league level.
• Digging into ice time down at the player level.
• Why ice time for players who change teams needs extra consideration.

Today, we're going to break down the three forward positions to give us an idea of what stats are provided in each role. This is just differentiating what level of fantasy stats were available at left wing, right wing, and centre and how much that should inform our draft approach. We will be using data from Evolving Hockey and player positions are based on those provided from Fantrax.

As anyone who has played fantasy hockey for a while knows, the centre position is different from the wings. We generally expect more assists, fewer shots, and more points than we would on the wings. That is mostly true, or at least it was in the 2024-25 season. Again, using Fantrax positions, here is the breakdown at each of the three forward positions by goals, assists, shots, power-play points, hits, and blocks per game, as well as the per-game total of all these stats, and point production per game:

As expected, centres are last in goals and first in assists, but left wing isn't that far ahead in goals and right wing isn't that far behind in assists. If we go back a few more decimal places, the difference in goals per 82 games between centres and left wingers is about 0.34. That means left wings outscored centres by one-third of a goal per full season in 2024-25. That gap between right wings and left wings was about twice as large.

As for the assist column, centres averaged just under 1.0 more assists every 82 games than they did over right wings, which isn't a massive chasm. The bigger difference is centre over left wings, which works out to roughly 2.8 more assists every 82 games. Looking at all forwards last year, that means centres produced over 300 more assists than left wings.

Put that all together and look at the points/game column way on the far right and we see there really wasn't much of a difference between the production of centres and the production of right wingers last year, while left wingers lagged far behind. In fact, the total points at left wing (7158) were slightly behind centres (7168) despite 1262 more games. As far as goals, assists, and points go, centre and right wing were basically interchangeable while left wing was in a clear tier below.  

As for the shot column, there isn't much of a surprise there. Centres were last, which makes sense, and right wings were first, which makes sense when we see how well they produced.

The first real surprise comes in the power-play point column. That left wing was last, given what we've seen so far, is par for the course. But the fact that right wings outproduced centres by PPP per game is a bit of a surprise. Centres are the first players to touch the puck from an offensive zone faceoff and teams often run multiple centres on a power-play unit for face-off purposes. The gap between PPP/game at right wing was nearly one full point extra per 82 games (around 0.92). Of course, the gap over the left side is even larger, so this was a very productive year for the right flank.

Left wing had its moment to shine in the hits column as they far exceed the other two. Looking through the data, there were 15 forwards with left-wing designation to cross the 200-hit barrier, while just 11 such forwards were listed on the right side. It is actually a big enough gap to give them the edge in all six stats combined on a per-game basis. This isn't a fair way to do it because one hit is not equal to one goal, but it should at least help highlight how having a huge advantage in even just one category can really help balance overall fantasy value as long as the other areas are at least passable.

Finally, the centres had a huge edge in blocks per game, and that makes sense when thinking about the penalty kill. Assuming a team has two forwards and two defencemen on the ice, there is going to be at least one centre, which means less ice time for wings when compared to even strength. It gives centres a huge advantage in that one category, and when looking at hits and blocks in total, it brings them pretty much in line with right wings.

What We Can Learn

Without having done any sorts of projections yet, it feels like a good bet that the top four by ADP will be Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Nathan MacKinnon, and Auston Matthews, in some order. There is probably an argument for any of those four besides MacKinnon to move to the 5-spot but I'm not going to make that right now. Though, I will note that Draisaitl also has left-wing eligibility on Fantrax, and that is something to keep in mind because it separates him from the other super-elite centres.

The question is what to do after those four. We see that left wing is a distant third in points per game in 2024-25, so do we try to get a comparative advantage by drafting Kirill Kaprizov fifth? Do we try to catch the Brady Tkachuk super breakout season? Bank on Kyle Connor repeating his year? Or do we just land on Nikita Kucherov or David Pastrnak and call it a day?

There is no definitive answer to this question, but when doing projections, relative value does have to be factored in. Having a big positional advantage because of a lack of options for league mates not only helps build a lead at that position but allows the fantasy manager to deal from a position of strength if they need to make a blockbuster trade later in the season. What happened last year is no guarantee to happen again this year, but it's worth keeping in mind where each position stood against each other in 2024-25.