Dobber’s 18th annual Fantasy Guide PDF and Draft List spreadsheet is now available! Sleepers, rookies, stock drops, goalies, schedule breakdown, team-by-team projections and analysis, and more! Buy it as a standalone product, or get it as a discount as part of a package.

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Some more summer hockey reading for you: We will be starting the Offseason Fantasy Grades team articles very soon. The first article is scheduled to appear on Tuesday August 8, and they will continue into September. You will be able to find the links to all of them here. For now, you can scroll down and read last season's articles and reflect on how things are with each team a year later.

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Back to the Fantasy Guide. One of the topics that I wrote about for the guide was on players with high hit totals for each team. This section might be useful not only for fantasy drafts, but also for daily or short-term streaming options. Since leagues that use hits often include other categories as well, it's beneficial to put them together to determine players worth targeting for peripherals. This is where a Frozen Tools category, aptly named Multi-Category, can come in handy.

Click the Multi-Category button on Frozen Tools, and you'll see two columns of combined categories: hits and blocks (HIT+BKS), and shots, hits, and blocks (SOG+HIT+BKS).

First, the Hits+Blocks column.

The top 7 options and top 8 of 10 are defensemen. In fact, the top forward in the blocked shots category (Auston Matthews, if you can believe it) is not even in the top 100 overall. So if you're strictly looking for blocked shots, you'll need a defenseman. If blocked shots is a category in your league, you could even consider drafting a defenseman strictly for this purpose. If they provide a strong hits total as well, even better.

A good example of this is Brayden McNabb, who provided over 200 hits in addition to his 198 blocked shots (second in the NHL). He also finished just outside of the top 10 in the combined Hits+Blocks category in 2021-22. He's only reached the 20-point mark once in his career, and that was back in 2014-15.

Because of the ratio of hits to blocks, the heavier hitters are generally the ones who dominate this category. For every blocked shot in the NHL in 2022-23, there were about 1.5 hits. McNabb's teammate Alec Martinez led the league with 242 blocked shots, with McNabb finishing second with 198 blocked shots. Yet because Martinez is not a big hitter (less than 100 each of the past five seasons), he does not even register anywhere near the top 10 for Hits+Blocks. If you add Martinez for his blocked shots total, you'll need to find another option for hits (and just about every other roto category, for that matter).

Along with McNabb, Andrew Peeke made the top 10 because of both hits and blocked shots. The light-scoring Blue Jackets defenseman was third in the league with 197 blocked shots. Although his hits total is lower than the other options in the top 10, he still fits into the top 50 in hits anyway. For that reason, he may be a better player to roster than Martinez. Just be wary that his career high in two full seasons is 15 points, and he was a minus-41 in 2022-23. In other words, don't expect much in anything beyond hits and blocked shots.

If you were hoping to grab Tanner Jeannot and could not, Jack McBain could be a worthwhile alternative. Although McBain outscored Jeannot last season, Jeannot would be regarded as the better scorer because he has a 20-goal, 40-point season already under his belt. Yet the two forwards (the only two in the top 10) had very similar hits and blocked shots totals. If for some reason McBain is able to move up in the Coyotes' lineup, he might really be a player to target in bangers leagues. Keep in mind that McBain also had 14 points in his last 20 games of the season.

Next, the Shots+Hits+Blocks column. 

Should you draft a high hits/blocked shots option early and possibly sacrifice a bit of scoring, or draft a hits/blocked shots specialist later? There's not a single path to building a successful team, as long as you fill all categories. I personally don't believe in "punting" a category, unless a major injury occurs and it's difficult to fill that category otherwise.

The classic player who is drafted higher than his scoring for that reason is Brady Tkachuk, but for good reason. Among similarly-ranked players in the Top 100 Roto Rankings, Tkachuk had a lower points-per-game average (83 points in 82 games), and it was a career season for him on top of that. However, he makes up for that with an outstanding hits total for a scorer (242, best among top-100 ranked players) along with a high shot total (347, fourth among top-100 ranked players). If you draft Tkachuk, you'll need to make scoring a priority, so you may want to avoid drafting similar players like Alex Ovechkin, Timo Meier, or Evander Kane as well.

Speaking of which, it's difficult to quibble on where this group of players would be relatively weak from a multicategory perspective. Yet if there's one category, it would be assists. For example, Kane has played a combined 84 games over the past two seasons. He has a combined 29 assists over that span, which is normal for his production. In fact, he has never reached 30 assists in a season. For forwards in the top 100, that's a very low number. Same with Meier, but he has at least recorded at least 35 assists twice in his career, which might be a reason to take him over Kane. The shoot-first Ovechkin recorded 33 assists last season, but he has often had season assist totals in the 20s. I know this turns away from shots, hits, and blocked shots, but it's important to consider the entire body of work on a player. 

On the defense, Jacob Trouba has been the leader in this category for two consecutive years. He doesn't provide nearly the level of hits as Radko Gudas, but he offers better overall fantasy value because he blocks more shots and he also takes more shots (and not surprisingly, he generates more offense). Trouba wasn't even a top-60 scorer among defensemen, but he is in the Top 100 Roto Rankings because of his shots and hits totals (blocked shots aren't a category in the rankings, but maybe they will be soon). Trouba was in the top-10 (or close to the top-10) among defensemen in all three of those categories in 2022-23.

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