The first night of the postseason is behind us but for anyone that may have missed it over the weekend, the Dobber Panel put together its predictions. Editors and writers, as well as Dobber himself, put out their picks for each series, the Cup finalists, the Cup winner, and the Conn Smythe winner. Go check that out to see where our collective heads are at.

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Sometimes, games go as we think they will, and the Islanders and Hurricanes played a low-scoring Game 1 with Carolina taking a 1-0 series lead thanks to a 2-1 win. A pair of power-play goals, one from Sebastian Aho and one from Stefan Noesen, was the difference. Brent Burns and Martin Necas assisted on both of them. Ryan Pulock scored the lone goal for the Islanders, finishing with two shots, two blocks, two penalty minutes, and nine hits.

Ilya Sorokin stopped 35 of 37 shots in the loss while Antti Raanta stopped 24 of 25 in the win.

Mathew Barzal looked fine to me on the top line with Bo Horvat, finishing with over 21 minutes in ice time. The Islanders didn't play particularly poorly, really, but couldn't capitalize on their power plays and Carolina's suffocating defence did its job. That could be a theme of this series.

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Even with Patrice Bergeron absent from Game 1, Boston executed its gameplan perfectly, taking a 3-1 victory at home to Florida. They were able to create many good chances from turnovers and odd-man rushes, converting enough to earn a 1-0 series lead. Alex Lyon played well in net for the Panthers, stopping 26 of 29 though that is a bit misleading. One goal he would want back – a soft one off his glove – but he made several great saves to keep the score withing striking distance.

David Pastrnak, Jake DeBrusk, and Brad Marchand all scored for the Bruins, with Tyler Bertuzzi assist on two of them and being a general pest all game long. Dmitry Orlov and Charlie McAvoy also had assists, with the former landing five shots on goal.

Matthew Tkachuk scored the lone goal for the Panthers, and it was thanks to an awful giveaway by Orlov. They did have their chances, and looked like at least a comparable team in the first two periods, but Linus Ullmark stopped all but one of 32 shots in a very solid outing.

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Minnesota tied their opening playoff game against Dallas 2-2 midway through the second period, and that's the way it stayed all the way until the second overtime. As these things tend to go, a crazy bounce down around the Dallas net popped right to Ryan Hartman, and the Wild forward deposited the puck into the net for the 3-2 double overtime win:

HARTMAN IN OT! Ryan Hartman grabs the loose puck and buries in tight to win Game 1 for Minnesota!#mnwild pic.twitter.com/cpuQ3zFpDG

— Hockey Daily 365 l NHL Highlights (@HockeyDaily365) April 18, 2023

That goal gave his team a 1-0 series lead, and there's still the spectre of a possible return from Joel Eriksson Ek sooner rather than later. A real good start to the series for the Wild.

The guy who was in the lineup because of that Eriksson Ek injury, Sam Steel, had a goal and an assist, including the lone helper on Hartman's OT winner. Playoff hockey is filled with unlikely heroes, and Steel was the first of the 2023 postseason.

Filip Gustavsson saved 51 of 53 in the win, putting up an incredible effort.

Joe Pavelski left the game in the second period after taking a hard hit by Matt Dumba and looking wobbly going off the ice. It didn’t look good for Pavelski.

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I am going to be honest here: I picked the Kings to win the West in our Dobber Panel picks, but did so before we found out Kevin Fiala and Gabriel Vilardi were going to be out for Game 1. Had I known that 24 hours earlier, I probably would have taken them to lose to the Oilers in the first round.  

I say that because it certainly looked as if the Oilers were on their way to pummeling the Kings on Monday night. They were up 2-0 after two periods, largely carrying the play for 40 minutes, outside of a few good flurries from Los Angeles.

That all changed in the third period as an early goal from Adrian Kempe put the pressure on immediately. Leon Draisaitl replied, but two goals in the final 10 minutes from Kempe and Anze Kopitar, the latter with under 15 seconds remaining in the game, pushed us to overtime.

That overtime would end before the 10-minute mark as Alex Iafallo fired home the final pass of a tic-tac-toe setup on the power play to give Los Angeles a 1-0 series lead. Hopefully, this can buy them some time to get healthy, but that was a huge road win for a team that looked toast through 40 minutes (to the point that I went to bed and was very surprised when I woke up).

Los Angeles's top line did all the damage as Kempe had two goals, Kopitar had a goal and three assists, while Quinton Byfield chipped in a helper on one of the Kempe goals. Joonas Korpisalo saved 37 of 40 shots in the win.

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In non-playoff news, the Ottawa Senators announced that Cam Talbot is not returning:

Dorion says Cam Talbot will not be back. #Sens

— Bruce Garrioch (@SunGarrioch) April 17, 2023

Talbot fought injury and made just 32 starts for Ottawa, posting an .898 save percentage. He turns 36 years old this summer.

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Calgary announced it was relieving GM Brad Treliving of his duties. He was the guy in charge of their wild 2022 offseason, and this will still largely be his team for a while, considering the hefty contracts that they have. It is a wonder if this happens if Calgary's goaltenders don't put up the second-worst save percentage at 5-on-5 this season (seriously, worse than Columbus or Buffalo). There are things that need improvement or change, but the simple fact is that average 5-on-5 goaltending has this team easily into the postseason, and likely not even in a Wild Card slot.

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Big news from Vegas:

Mark Stone will be in the lineup tomorrow.

— Danny Webster (@DannyWebster21) April 17, 2023

He has been out for months with his second back surgery of the last year. Now, how healthy he is, and how rusty he is, are very fair questions. All the same, this is one of the top wingers in the league returning for the playoffs and if he can play as he did through the first half of the season, Vegas just added a true superstar to their roster. That is a huge deal, though how he plays ultimately determines how valuable his return ends up being.

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I noticed an interesting conundrum of two situations that mirrored each other: Luke Hughes and Kevin Bahl in New Jersey, and Thomas Harley and Nils Lundkvist in Dallas. We have already seen Harley take over Lundkvist's playoff roster spot as he was in the lineup on Monday night. Hughes is set to watch from the press box for Game 1 of the New Jersey/New York series, but how long does that last? Young players can provide an unexpected spark in the postseason, and it'll be interesting to see if Hughes/Bahl follows the Harley/Lundkvist playbook.

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The playoffs have just begun but the work on the 2023-24 fantasy season has started as well. While I do like to personally take time away during the summer – Ramblings aside – to just get away from the NHL, we need to look back before we look ahead, and that's what we're starting today. 

Over the next couple months, leading to the draft/free agency, I am going to review each of the non-playoff teams. All of it is through a fantasy hockey lens, of course, but we're going to highlight the successes and failures, improvements and declines, and the work to be done in the offseason.

For today, we'll start with a team that was boatloads of fun to watch in 2022-23: the Buffalo Sabres. We are going to be using our Frozen Tools as well as Natural Stat Trick for data, and other sources will be referenced as we use them.

Successes

Well, there are a lot of them. Over on Yahoo! Fantasy, Tage Thompson finished as the 13^th overall skater and would have easily been top-10 with a better plus/minus, Rasmus Dahlin finished as the number-3 defenceman behind Dougie Hamilton and Erik Karlsson, and both Jeff Skinner and Alex Tuch finished between the 50^th and 60^th skater overall. Add in Dylan Cozens sneaking just inside the top-100, and Buffalo's entire top PP unit finished as top-100 fantasy options.

The reasons are two-fold. Of course, the emergence of Tage Thompson as a high-end, dual-threat forward is a big part of it. Does this happen without his development over the last few years? More than that, though, is the coaching. Back in the Bubble 2020 season, the team was 10^th in shots off the rush, per Corey Sznajder's tracking data. This season, they were 2^nd, trailing only New Jersey. That is the impact of Don Granato, beyond just individual player development. Buffalo's offence is a lot more explosive and it's not just because of the personnel.

We will discuss all these players this summer, but it's Dahlin I want to highlight now. Teams need good puck-moving defencemen in the modern NHL, and he's turned into one of the best. Per the same tracking data, Dahlin was good at Scoring Chance Contributions, which is his individual scoring chances plus assists on teammate scoring chances, back in Bubble 2021, rating a standard deviation above the league average. He has taken huge steps in the last two seasons, though, and he's gone from good to high-end in this regard. He can generate at an elite level, and it helps everyone else.

Failures

Perhaps not making the postseason is a failure, but that doesn't matter a whole lot for fantasy, and that wasn't the team's expectation anyway. The biggest failure through the year looked to be in net, but then Devon Levi signed at the end of the season and posted 3.7 goals saved above expected (per Evolving Hockey) in seven games. If he can really be the number-1 goalie of the future, there really isn't much to get down about here. Rookies like Owen Power, Jack Quinn, and JJ Peterka all looked varying levels of good, Dylan Cozens took a big step forward to establish himself as a top-6 centre, and the depth guys were largely fine. Perhaps not developing the team defensively is a failure and that could matter moving forward, but the team is still so young that it's hard to really call it a failure.

Improvements

The big improvement is in depth scoring. The line of Skinner-Thompson-Tuch was elite in the second half of the 2021-22 season, but with them off the ice at 5-on-5, the team scored 1.6 goals/60 minutes. Overall, in Buffalo's final 50 games of last season, BUF had 40% of the team's 5-on-5 goals scored with the top line on the ice.

This season was a different story. The top line was great again, but the depth improved significantly, as the goals/60 jumped from 1.6 to 2.4 with them off the ice. The goals against got worse, but a full season from Levi should help in this regard. As much as the fantasy hockey story about Buffalo is the top PP skaters, the depth got a lot better and that is important to keep in mind for 2023-24.

Buffalo getting so much better offensively overall is, really, the story here. In 2021-22, even with the Thompson breakout, the team finished 23^rd in goals/60 and 30^th in expected goals for/60. This season, those numbers climbed all the way to 3^rd in goals/60 and 12^th in expected goals for/60. The top line doing so well is a huge part, obviously, but the scoring depth is, too, and that speaks to the futures guys like Peterka, Quinn, and Cozens have.

Declines

A team improving across the board doesn't have many declines to speak of, but we should again mention the team defence. Last season, the team was 25^th in goals against/60 and 22^nd in expected goals against/60. This season, they were 27^th by goals against/60 and 24^th by expected goals against. A team that got a good rookie year from Owen Power and a Norris-calibre season from Rasmus Dahlin got worse defensively. I know, right?

Some of the goals is goaltending, for sure, and hopefully Levi is the improvement there. But this team needs to improve defensively, and they can't lay it all at the feet of Mattias Samuelsson. In fact, it is imperative: of the bottom-10 teams by expected goals against/60 this season, only Florida made the playoffs, and they were the best of the 10, ranking 23^rd and just ahead of Buffalo. In other words, to get to the postseason, they don't need more offence. They have as much as they need. Hopefully, more growth from the young blue line (and young forwards) helps in this regard because, assuming Levi is actually good, it's the final piece to this team being a true contender in a couple years.

Work To Be Done

Most of the team should return. The only UFAs are Kyle Okposo, Zemgus Girgensons, Vinnie Hinostroza, and Craig Anderson, and he already said he's retiring. Okposo and Girgensons may return on varying lengths of deals, but Hinostroza and Anderson are gone.

Other than that, barring a trade, most everyone should be back. They don't really have a ton of cap space, though, sitting at $19.5M. Maybe they want to make a couple of short-term bets, but they are a year from a monster deal for Dahlin, a raise for Casey Mittelstadt and Peyton Krebs, and a slew of defencemen needing RFA extensions, including Power. They should look to improve the depth of the roster, but this is what the top of the team looks like already:

Skinner-Thompson-Tuch

Quinn-Cozens-Peterka

Dahlin-Jokiharju

Samuelsson-Power

Levi

Buffalo effectively has the top of the roster cemented, and maybe they want to add some middle-6 scoring help, or depth on the blue line, but there isn't a need to make a splashy signing like Vladimir Tarasenko or Dmitry Orlov. A healthy Joonas Donskoi or Radko Gudas should suffice.

In all, I'm not sure how much work needs to be done this summer other than bolstering the depth. If they do decide to make a splash, it's almost certainly via trade, and unless it's a game-breaker like Alex DeBrincat or Timo Meier, I'm not sure why they would.

Look Ahead

There isn't much more to say, really. Outside the top guys, and the more proven younger players like Power and Cozens, this team will go as far as players like Peterka, Quinn, Krebs, Samuelsson, Jokiharju, and Levi will take them. If 2-3 of those guys develop into top-line players, and the others useful middle-of-the-roster options, this team is a budding juggernaut. Work needs to be done on the defensive side of the puck, but that should come with development and experience. If things keep falling into place as they have the last two years, this is the end of a very dark period for the Sabres and the emergence of perhaps the most complete roster this franchise has ever seen. There could be a lot more fantasy goodness next season than just the top PP guys (think of Tampa Bay from 2018-2022).