Here are the Top 300 skaters to own in your points-only keeper leagues – April edition!

I noted this Thursday in the full Top 300 list: As with every year for the last 17 years, my April, May and June adjustments are casual. The July and August editions are my "audit" rankings because, thanks to the Fantasy Guide, every detail of every player within every team is analyzed top to bottom. April? Not so much. I go over every player on my spreadsheet and wipe the slate clean for the season just completed, and I make my best guess – no formulas – at how they will do next year. I tweak the 3YP, I adjust the team offense value (i.e. for Columbus I tweaked it downward because I expect them to lose a lot of offense this summer).

What's left is that the young players improve, the older players slip (Brent Burns). The injured players get a clean slate and move up (Erik Karlsson), the over-achievers of 2018-19 move down. The late-season surges of some promising young players get a bit of a bump. Doing the April rankings are always a lot of fun. My goal is to do my best to get these as close to what I come up with in August after extensive analysis as I can. The players I'm 'way' off on I take it hard. I want to be a savant with this – I want spew out an accurate player value without doing the work (and then prove myself right after doing the work in the summer).

As always, players between +/- 5.0 in the ratings should be considered equal. Click on any player name to be taken to his incredible stats page (with charts, game logs, graphs, fancy stats – everything you need, even customizable date windows you can look at). These rankings, which focus on defensemen, are simply pulled from the overall skater rankings.

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