Once the details of what happened to Washington defenceman John Carlson a few months ago, just seeing him back on the ice with the Capitals in practice was great to see. On Thursday night, he made his return to the lineup, playing on a pairing with Martin Fehervary. It is just nice to see a full recovery and he can get back to the game.

It was a very successful return to the ice for Carlson, as he managed a goal and an assist in Washington's 6-1 beatdown of Chicago. He had three shots, a couple of PIMs, a hit, and both his points were on the man advantage. That is an instant impact that the team has been missing since Christmas.

Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom each had a goal and an assist as well, with Ovechkin having three shots and four PIMs in the game. It was Backstrom's first multi-point game of the season as his return from hip surgery hasn't been as smooth for the team as hoped.

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Sam Bennett was not in the lineup for Florida on Thursday as whatever is nagging him continues. Eetu Luostarainen was on the second line again with Matthew Tkachuk and Carter Verhaeghe. Just keep tabs on Bennett as Luostarainen went into last night's game against Toronto with 17 points in 19 games and the team's schedule next week is very soft: four games on the road but it's Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, and Columbus.

The Bennett-less Panthers didn't have a good outing at home against the Leafs, dropping a 6-2 game to Toronto. Auston Matthews scored twice while both Mitch Marner and William Nylander each had a goal and an assist. That is eight goals and 16 points the last 12 games for Matthews, who might be rounding into form at just the right time.

Morgan Rielly was scratched to give him some rest and Mark Giordano ended up with a couple of assists despite the team dressing seven defencemen.

Matthew Tkachuk scored in the loss, giving him goals in six straight games, a stretch that has seen him put up 13 points.

Matt Murray stopped 34 of 36 in a very good effort from him.

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William Eklund is day-to-day in the AHL as he was injured after being sent down following his stint with the big club. At this point, we may not see him back with the San Jose Sharks this season, and that makes projecting him for next year very interesting. What the team does this summer – and who they draft – will tell us a lot.  

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New York avenged a loss to Carolina a couple days earlier with a 2-1 win in Carolina. Igor Shesterkin stopped 29 of 30 shots faced as goals from Artemi Panarin and Adam Fox lifted them to victory. Shesterkin now has a .931 save percentage in his last 10 starts, winning eight of them. Speaking of rounding into form, this is an entirely different team with a .930 Shesterkin as opposed to .910 (as is every team, I guess).

Panarin assisted on Fox's goal to give Panarin a multi-point night, his third such game in his last four outings.

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A third-period onslaught from Ottawa overwhelmed their opponents, as four third-period goals (including an early empty-netter) turned a 3-2 game into a 7-2 game and eventual win for the Senators. Brady Tkachuk had two of those four goals, landing seven shots total, and adding a hit for good measure. Alex DeBrincat had a goal and two assists, snapping an eight-game goalless stretch that saw him post one helper. Claude Giroux had a pair of assists, one of them on the power play, bringing him to an even 70 points on the season. He has been as advertised for the Sens.

Erik Brannstrom had a goal and an assist as well, and he now needs two more points to set a career-high.

Brayden Point and Mikhail Sergachev both scored in the loss. Point's goal gives him 45 on the year and a real shot at 50 tallies for the first time.

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Simon Edvinsson scored his first career NHL goal for Detroit but the Red Wings ultimately lost their game 4-3 to St. Louis. Jake Neighbours made good on his move up the lineup, scoring once on his only shot in nearly 16:30 in ice time. Neighbours also got some secondary power-play time. With four hits in this game, he now has 40 on the year in 32 contests. The Blues have two games this weekend and one of them is in Anaheim, for all you multi-cat people.

Brayden Schenn also scored for St. Louis, his 19^th of the year. One more would give him his seventh career 20-goal season. All in all, not a bad fantasy season again from Schenn, even if the production is down from a year ago.

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David Pastrnak scored his 49^th goal of the season early in the second period of Boston's 4-2 win over Montreal, setting a career-high and making it nearly all but assured he gets to 50. He always eludes the defence:

David Pastrnak nets goal No. 49 on the season, a career high for 🍝

🎥 @NHL | @NHLBruins pic.twitter.com/ggjo1FK7F7

— The Athletic NHL (@TheAthleticNHL) March 24, 2023

He added an assist, had five total shots, and put up a couple of hits for good measure. Five more points are needed for his first 100-point season.

Tyler Bertuzzi scored his first in a Boston uniform and added an assist for his first multi-point game as well. Nick Suzuki had a goal and an assist in the loss, but the goal did give him a career-high of 22.

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My fantasy hockey seasons are varied. There is a keeper league that is my last traditional fantasy hockey league, there are a handful of best ball formats that I draft before the season, and there is Daily Fantasy Hockey that I play almost every day. For today, it is the best ball formats I want to discuss, and more specifically what went wrong with my regular season.

I drafted six best ball teams for 2022-23 and there is a chance I get one cash out of the six (and it wouldn't be near enough to recoup my very minor expenses). It is my worst season-long fantasy season, in this respect, in the last three campaigns. I thought it'd be worth going through the players drafted, my thought process, what went wrong, and what can be learned for next season.

For those unfamiliar, best ball formats are fantasy drafts where the rosters aren't touched through the season. Drafts are completed and there are no waivers, trades, or free agency; your team is your team. The best score from one centre, one defenceman, one goalie, one flex, and two wingers are counted each week from the players on the roster and then the weekly scores are tallied at the end of the season to determine the winner. There are also playoff formats where the top X number of scores through the first week of March go to fantasy playoffs as well. The site I play on is called Underdog (not affiliated with us at Dobber in any way, it's just a site I like to use) and it is a points format with goals (6), assists (4), power-play points (0.5), shots (1), blocks (1), and hits (0.5) counting for skaters, and wins (6), saves (0.6), and goals against (-3) counting for goalies. Clear as mud? Great.

To start, my general idea was to stack players from the same team, hopefully the same line, and definitely the same power play together at least once per roster. Where you draft would indicate a lot about which teams to target, but that was my general approach. With that in mind, here are the teams from which I stacked, the players that were drafted, and how many times I drafted them in parentheses:

• Tampa Bay Lightning: Victor Hedman (2), Nikita Kucherov (2), Steven Stamkos (3), and Andrei Vasilevskiy (2).
• New York Rangers: Artemi Panarin (2), Chris Kreider (2), Adam Fox (2), Igor Shesterkin (4)
• Carolina Hurricanes: Andrei Svechnikov (4), Seth Jarvis (2), Sebastian Aho (2), Max Pacioretty (1)
• Colorado Avalanche: Valeri Nichushkin (3), Mikko Rantanen (2), Cale Makar (2)
• Washington Capitals: Alex Ovechkin (2), John Carlson (2)

Those were the five teams where I ended up with at least a two-man PP stack from the same team on more than one roster. There are four teams with a three-man stack, and two teams with four (including a goalie). What readers will notice is no Edmonton and no Toronto. Out of these six drafts, I picked in the top-3 twice. Once was second overall, and Connor McDavid fell to me somehow, and one was third overall where Auston Matthews fell past Nathan MacKinnon. The McDavid draft proved unable to stack as the only Edmonton skater I could get in that draft was Evander Kane and his injury ended those hopes. The Matthews draft saw he and Mitch Marner find their way to my roster, but Matthews' huge production drop also ended any hope I had.  

It is pretty obvious the teams I chose to stack weren't ideal. A number of my drafts started something like Kucherov-Vasilevskiy, Kucherov-Stamkos, or Shesterkin-Svechnikov-Aho. Even if all those players have been some levels of good-to-great, none of them are elite. For reference, Stamkos is about 180 points behind his mark from last season in this scoring format, and at his current pace, could finish 80-100 points behind what he did a year ago. Kucherov's per-game mark in this format is down from a year ago, and Vasilevskiy/Hedman are just not having good seasons to their standards.

New York has had a similar problem. It isn't as if the players are bad, they just aren't elite. Shesterkin's drop-off is obvious, so we don't need to dive into that. Panarin has been good but his per-game Underdog fantasy production is down about 7% from a season ago. Adam Fox is seeing a per-game fantasy point drop of about 5%, and that includes his blistering start of six goals and 23 points in 20 games. If he's seen a 5% drop on the season as a whole with a start that had him as a high-end fantasy option, well, we can only imagine what the drop has been like since Thanksgiving.

The Carolina stacks missing don't really bother me because none were high-end picks. Those stacks are in drafts where I may have started with, say, Makar-Shesterkin or something along those lines. Once the real high-end offensive options are gone in the first two rounds of a 12-team draft, stacking options get limited.

The Colorado stacks don't really bother me, either. It was never my intention to stack them, mainly because I could never get Nathan MacKinnon in a draft, and where I did stack them, it was almost by accident – I was drafting Nichushkin late when I could. Health has sunk a lot of Colorado stacks this season.

As far as Washington goes, well, we should just be glad John Carlson is alive after suffering a fractured skull and severed temporal artery.

It is the New York and Tampa Bay stacks that sunk me and while there are many factors as to why, one really sticks out to me: age. Eschewing the goalies because VOODOO, Stamkos and Hedman are both 32 years old while Panarin is 31. Even in an era where players are taking good care of themselves year-round, that is still getting up there in age, and the Lightning players have played a lot of hockey in the last 30-plus months.

Back in the 2010s, I played a lot of fantasy baseball. Two guys I listened to often were Rick Wolf and Glenn Colton. One of their drafting mantras was to forego the older player for a younger one if they profiled similarly for fantasy. The reasons include age-related decline and potential injury concerns. When looking at the top offensive teams this season, that tracks. There are six teams that have scored at least 3.4 goals/60 minutes this season, and only one (Boston) started the season as one of the 10 oldest teams in the league. Tampa Bay and Toronto aren't too far behind, but it's a young man's game, and it's showing in the scoring. (I would also say that distribution matters a lot. Seattle is just behind Buffalo in goals per 60 minutes but Seattle effectively has four lines that can score while Buffalo concentrates on their top PP guys, making them a better fantasy environment for high-end performers.)

That was my mistake in the preseason. It was focusing too much on established high-end talents and not looking for the next high-end talents. There are teams where I have a Jack Hughes or a Tage Thompson, but not multiples of them, and no stacks. It was a pretty huge oversight and it cost me basically my entire season-long campaign. Foregoing Panarin/Kreider to draft Hughes/Bratt later was the right play, as was Tkachuk/Stützle over Ovechkin/Carlson.

It is my hope this helped give a bit of insight into my preseason process and how to avoid the mistake I made. Drafting established stars is fine, if not necessary, for fantasy success, but knowing when to avoid them for a younger option can often be the difference between winning and losing. This is readily apparent when looking at my 2022-23 best ball teams.