Detroit welcomed Jake Walman back to practice on Monday after he missed three games due to a lower-body injury. Walman has 12 goals and 21 points in 61 games this season, but his 150 blocked shots have been a huge boon for fantasy managers.

There is a little bit more on Walman and defence partner Moritz Seider later in the article.

Just as a small aside: I noticed Walman is up to 200 career NHL games now. In that time, he has 25 goals and 26 assists. Hopefully we get a Cy Young season from him sometime soon because he is one of the more unique players that we have in the league.

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St. Louis was back to their normal power play units on Monday night, which means Pavel Buchnevich, Jordan Kyrou, Robert Thomas, and Jake Neighbours on the top unit. Neighbours has been a legitimate difference-maker for them on the man advantage and is one of the more fun stories in the fantasy realm this season.

St. Louis lost that game against Vegas 2-1 in overtime. Jonathan Marchessault managed the OT winner, totaling two shots, two PIMs, and a hit. Pavel Dorofeyev also scored and added a blocked shot on top of that. Dorofeyev now has 18 goals in 54 games across the last two seasons while averaging under 13:30 in that time. Several Vegas forwards are UFA after this season and Dorofeyev is putting a very good foot forward to getting a much bigger role in 2024-25.

Logan Thompson stopped 31 of 32 shots for the win, and had this unreal save:

WHAT A SAVE BY LOGAN THOMPSON 🤯 pic.twitter.com/56d3I9ge5T

— B/R Open Ice (@BR_OpenIce) March 26, 2024

Brandon Saad scored the St. Louis goal in the loss, which was his 23^rd of the season. Just one of the most consistent scorers of the last decade.

Oskar Sundqvist took a hard, awkward hit into the boards midway through the second period, left the game, and did not return.

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A note on the New York Rangers blue line:

No Erik Gustafsson or Jacob Trouba. #NYR say Gustafsson is day-to-day with an upper-body injury.

— Vince Z. Mercogliano (@vzmercogliano) March 25, 2024

Ryan Lindgren skated after practice, but there are several injury issues on the Rangers blue line right now. Suppose it's better now than in a month's time.

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Vince Dunn was once again in a non-contact jersey at Seattle's practice on Monday, and Ryker Evans was not on the ice after leaving the team's loss on Sunday night during the first period. More updates as we get them but Seattle's next two games are against Anaheim and that is a great matchup for their depth defencemen to get some points.

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Second-period goals from Blake Lizotte and Anze Kopitar helped pushed Los Angeles to a 3-2 win over Vancouver. Kopitar assisted on that Lizotte goal and had three total shots while Kevin Fiala scored in the first period. After scoring just 10 goals in the first 41 games of the season, Fiala has 14 goals in his last 30 games. That is much more what fantasy managers were hoping for.

Cam Talbot stopped 21 of 23 shots for the win. After a lull in the middle of the season, Talbot has gone 9-3-1 with a .934 save percentage in 13 starts since the All-Star break. He has not allowed more than three goals against in a game in over two months.

Sam Lafferty and Brock Boeser replied for Vancouver. Boeser had just the one shot but had two PIMs and a hit. He needs three more goals for his first career 40-goal season.

It is worth noting Vancouver reunited the Lotto Line for the final 10 minutes of the game. They were chasing for a tie, so maybe there's nothing more to it, but they did do this a couple of months ago before Elias Lindholm showed up and with Lindholm out of the lineup, maybe they try it again.

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Anyone who reads these Ramblings regularly knows that I often discuss defencemen. The position has changed so much over the last 15 years – and especially the last 5-6 seasons – that it's fascinating to watch evolve in real time.

Let's look at some defencemen who've changed their possession exit rates in a big way from 2022-23. Being able to get the puck up the ice, and on the stick of you or your teammates rather than fumbling around the neutral zone, can help create offence, and that's important for fantasy managers. The tracking data is from AllThreeZones and supplementary data is from either Natural Stat Trick or Frozen Tools. This is all at 5-on-5 and because we're tracking across two seasons, there are no rookies from 2023-24, and players with significant injuries (Dougie Hamilton) are also excluded.

The Big Improvements

It should be noted that large improvements rarely come from the top producers; the top producers are who they are because they're already great in most offensive areas. It is notable that the four defencemen who's relative change in zone exit percentage with possession reached double digits were all with the same team last year:

Interestingly, two of the four players (Jonas Brodin and Nick Seeler) saw their respective team's goal rates rise from last season while the others two fell (Ryan McDonagh and Jonas Siegenthaler).

In the case of Siegenthaler, it's fair to wonder how much the injury to Dougie Hamilton hurt. Siegenthaler has played a lot with Šimon Nemec and as good as Nemec is, he's still a rookie teenage defenceman (technically, he turned 20 years old last month). Siegenthaler is starting his shifts in the offensive zone a lot less often, too. Judging by his career, his 2022-23 season seems more the outlier than the lower-scoring 2023-24 is.

As for McDonagh, his on-ice shot and expected goal rates are the highest they've been since his rookie 2010-11 season. He also has a career-low on-ice shooting percentage, so maybe a bit of bad luck going on here (combined with a Nashville team that didn't have much secondary scoring until recently).

Once the season is over and we get more post-deadline games in the sample, it'll be interesting to see where Seeler stands. He played a lot with Sean Walker until Walker was traded, so what his numbers look like post-trade deadline will help clarify what, exactly, is going on here.

In the offseason, it'll be fun to look at Minnesota's splits this season because I genuinely wonder how much Brodin helped Brock Faber and vice versa. Brodin was not known as a player who really helped get the offence going, but that's changed in a big way this year. Is it a veteran player adding a new dimension to his game or a blip due to a change in line mates? Coaching? All the above?

The Consistent Performers

Of the 132 defencemen in our sample, just seven have a zone exit possession rate of at least 80% in both seasons, which would be around the 95^th percentile or higher. Funny enough, most of the names we'd expect to see – Cale Makar, Quinn Hughes, Victor Hedman – are not on the consistency list (though they aren't that far behind). There are a couple names we'd expect, but most of these names are probably a surprise:

Erik Karlsson and Josh Morrissey don't need much explanation at this point.

Hampus Lindholm has seen a lot of the offence disappear from his first full season in Boston, but the team's goal rate also declined over 12% from 2022-23. That, combined with a lack of top power play role, has crushed his production. Zero goals at even strength doesn't help, either.

Tough luck for Cam Fowler. Anaheim has had a lot of injuries among their forwards all season and the team is shooting 5.8% with him on the ice; he had been at 7.5% or higher in five straight seasons. Some bad luck and a slew of injuries is making things look a lot worse than they really are for Fowler.

The drop in on-ice goals for Nick Leddy from 2022-23 is 14.9%. The drop in on-ice goals from the entire St. Louis Blues team from 2022-23 is 15%. There is something to be said for consistency.

Seeing Owen Power's name is very interesting. As has often been stated, Buffalo overhauled their offence from 2022-23 to be a better defensive team in 2023-24. However, their goals per 60 minutes are still over 3.0 with Power on the ice and he's the only member of the Sabres blue line that can boast that. Buffalo's goal rates are much higher when Tage Thompson or Dylan Cozens have Power behind them than anyone else. There is a lot for fantasy managers to be excited about, though having Rasmus Dahlin and Bowen Byram provides roadblocks to meaningful power play time.

Moritz Seider

Without going deep into the players with significant declines in zone exits with possession, the vast majority of the names are depth defencemen, and most of them changed teams in the 2023 offseason – guys like Ian Cole, Ryan Graves, Erik Gustafsson, and Dmitry Orlov are among the largest relative drops. One name did stick out as a top fantasy option though, and it's Moritz Seider:

A lot of digital ink has been spilled about Seider in his young career. He went higher in the 2019 Draft than expected, he was the Calder Trophy winner in 2021-22, he's on his way to his third straight 40-point season, and he also gets the toughest usage of any defenceman in the league (and toughest on Detroit's blue line for his third straight season). What his true value is depends on who you ask, but this stood out: Seider's results in 2023-24 are much worse with Jake Walman than without him. Considering Seider has skated over 70% of his 5-on-5 time with Walman, maybe there's something to his numbers appearing worse than they really are.

Seider will be a great multi-cat fantasy option for years to come; he gets top-pair minutes, he gets meaningful power play time, and he puts up fantastic peripherals. The question is whether he can take that next step to being a regular 50- to 60-point (or higher) multi-cat option like Rasmus Dahlin, or whether he'll just be a reliable 40-point multi-cat option like MacKenzie Weegar. Both are very good fantasy options, but it's the difference between very good and elite, and that matters to us. The team that builds up around Seider may tell more of the story than he will.