Taking doctor's orders under advisement, Andrew Shaw has decided to retire from hockey. Shaw leaves hockey at the age of 29, having won two Stanley Cups with the Blackhawks and posting 116 goals and 131 assists.

The concussions have caught up and he is thinking about his future and not his present. When he was at his best in his Chicago heydays, he was a solid multi-cat performer in the fantasy realm, but it really seems all those hits have taken their toll. The best to Shaw and his family on their next chapter.

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An update on Nikolaj Ehlers:

#NHLJets HC Paul Maurice says F Nikolaj Ehlers is out for the remainder of the regular season but the team is confident that he will be ready for the playoffs. Ehlers likely dealing with an upper-body issue after the collision on Saturday with @MapleLeafs D Jake Muzzin

— Ken Wiebe (@WiebesWorld) April 26, 2021

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An an update on Noah Hanifin

Flames D Hanifin done for season.

MORE: https://t.co/bRQmnZ8NzD pic.twitter.com/LhsCt3GzpN

— TSN (@TSN_Sports) April 26, 2021

I suspect this means some power-play minutes for Juuso Valimaki, though just watch his minutes. He was up to 20 in his most recent game but was playing much less than that before the injury.

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At this point, I have no idea what's going on with the St. Louis Blues. They have had basically a full lineup for three weeks now and the entire top-6 is getting throttled: not a single regular forward in the top-6 has an expected goal share over 49 percent and the majority of them are well below 45 percent. Thanks to absolutely absurd shooting percentages, some of them are scoring – the ROR line, mostly – and because Arizona is a bad team, it's probably going to be enough to get to playoffs. But make no mistake: this isn't the team that had a brutal start in 2018-19, turned it around, and won the Cup. That team had legitimately started playing great hockey. This Blues team has not.

Now, in this stretch in April, most of their games have been against Colorado (about half, in fact), with most of the rest against Vegas and Minnesota. That is a tough stretch of games. It also places them in the pecking order: no higher than third in the division, maybe even fourth. If that's where they sit, how good are they, really?

This isn't to say the franchise is cooked moving forward. There really isn't anyone for aging stars besides maybe David Perron, they still have young guys like Thomas and Kyrou improving every year, and still have a bevy of good-to-great forwards. This is still a team in its Cup window.

All that said, there seems to be something missing this year. (All the injuries plus any lingering COVID issues are plausible here.) Maybe they surprise in playoffs, but it seems getting rested over the summer and coming back healthy and in force in October is the more likely avenue here. They might need some help on the blue line, too.

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I wrote that bit on the Blues on Monday morning, then Monday afternoon we get this:

Parayko and Dunn are out tonight, and "I dont know how long they're out for," Berube said. #stlblues

— Jeremy Rutherford (@jprutherford) April 26, 2021

I do genuinely wonder how healthy the team has really been over the last month. Are players back because they're 100 percent, or are they back because they're close enough and the team wants a playoff push?

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How about the season Devon Toews is having? On the year, he's averaging career-highs in goals per game, assists per game, shots per game, and TOI per game. In a full year, he'd be on pace for about 11 goals and 45 points, doing so with sparse top PP time, only taking the role when Cale Makar was out of the lineup.

To crystallize how good Toews has been this year, from Evolving Hockey, here are his impacts offensively and defensively, compared to teammate Makar:

The question is how much weight you, the reader, put into impacts. There are margins of error, but going from league-average to two standard deviations above league average is, well, that's a pretty big gap.

To show just how good Toews has been defensively, it helps to highlight where the opposition is shooting from when he's on the ice. While it takes a team to defend, shot rates and locations vary with each player on the ice. It can help us decipher who has been really good defensively. This is where teams are shooting from with Toews on the ice, from Hockey Viz. The darker the blue, the fewer shots compared to league average:

That is just a giant pile of nothing for the attacking team in the slot. The Avs have been great defensively this year, Toews being no exception.

For reference here, with Makar on the ice, the team is -20 percent xGA/60. That means the impact defensively has been roughly 70 percent greater for Toews than Makar's, comparatively. Yes, Makar has piled up the points, but defencemen need to play at both ends, and Makar has nine fewer games played.

I am well aware that Toews won't get nominated for the Norris. He falls into the Ryan Suter or Jaccob Slavin category for me (from prior seasons) where other defencemen on the roster will get the headlines, but the other defenceman (in this case Toews) has been as good if not better, he just doesn't get the power-play time to put up huge points. And they may not even be suited for that role to begin with. The point of highlighting Toews is that A) he has been truly among the elite defencemen this year and B) pointing out reasons why Colorado has been successful other than the elite scoring they have.  

Toews won't get the Norris nom but he definitely deserves it. Kudos to him on a great year.

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Cole Caufield made his debut for Montreal on Monday, and it was a success for the Habs as they took a 2-1 win over Calgary. Caufield didn't score, but Tyler Toffoli scored what would stand as the game-winner in the second. He is now up to 25 goals on the year, and has 32 goals in 60 games since leaving Los Angeles. It really is nice to see Toffoli do so well after all those lost years post-Cup runs.

Caufield had four shots, not really shy of where he took them. He may have to learn to be a bit more selective and there were a couple defensive cramps, but a very successful first game. He did not look out of place at all.

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Josh Norris scored his 14^th of the year and Brady Tkachuk had a pair of assists in Ottawa's own 2-1 win over Vancouver. Drake Batherson scored his 17^th of the year, putting him three away from 20 in this shortened season. It has been a real nice first full year for him.

Nils Höglander failed to register a shot for the second game in a row. He has six shots in five games since returning from the COVID pause, though he does have three points. A nice year for this rookie as well but maybe he's hitting a bit of a wall. It may not even be related strictly to what is occurring on the ice, either, which puts remedying it beyond his reach.

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Hey, quick question: who realizes that Sam Reinhart has as many goals (21) as Jake Guentzel, and more than Sebastian Aho (20), Mika Zibanejad (19) or Nathan MacKinnon (18)? He needs one more goal to equal his output of 22 goals last year in 69 games, and 82 games the year before. He needs four to equal a career-high 25 goals in 2017-18. Again, this is all on a terrible team in a shortened season.

It should be pointed out that he's shooting 19.4 pecent, a career-high. He has shot at least 13 percent in four of his five prior seasons, though, so it's not like it's crazy out-of-line.

What is nice to see here is his individual expected goals per 60 is still 0.81, an improvement on last year's 0.69, and in line with the 0.84 from the year before. Even with Jack Eichel out of the lineup and Taylor Hall gone basically for the last month, Reinhart is still producing. That is a very good thing for this team moving forward.

Reinhart is RFA after this year and turns 26 in November. Any multi-year contract is going to start buying UFA years so this is a tricky contract for the Sabres. He isn't the 35-goal scorer he's shown this year but he's clearly a valuable player. The team also has a lot of RFAs so sign this year. Could we see him get moved like we saw Mantha in Detroit? It would make sense to me, but then you need to find a team who can trade similar money back and wants to sign him. In a flat-cap era, it could be tough to pull off.

Either way, it's good to see Reinhart doing so well, even while playing centre. For more on him, Ian wrote up a bit about him last week.

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What do we make of Eeli Tolvanen? I was fishing around defensive impacts writing this stuff and Tolvanen's are very good (like, over a standard deviation better than league average). That is on top of his excellent point production, which ranks second on a per-60 basis among Nashville forwards, and has him tied with Mathew Barzal league-wide.

Some concerns here are Tolvanen not driving the play at a high level himself, and the fact he's shooting over 20 percent. Even as he's played nearly 16 minutes a night over his last 15 games, he's well under two shots per game. He is a rookie so that will get better, it's just a concern for now.

I have liked Tolvanen's game. It seems he knows how to operate in the offensive zone, meaning he knows how to get open and find open teammates. That is valuable. Whether that can persist for an entire NHL career is another matter.

All that said, this is a good first year. We are seeing his offensive upside combined with his defensive prowess. All good things. Does he turn into a bona fide top-line forward? I think he does, but it's still too early to tell.