Work has begun on the 2025-26 Dobber Hockey Fantasy Guide, which will be available later this month. For fantasy managers looking to really bolster their preparation for the upcoming hockey season, the Dobber Keeper Pack is available in the Dobber Shop! It will include the guide and projections themselves, as well as the Prospects Report. The guide will be available for download upon release, but the Prospects Report is available now, so get a jump-start on the fantasy season and go grab the Keeper Pack!

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Just a quick thought: I've had two separate people ask me about Matthew Schaefer's fantasy relevance for the 2025-26 season only. If he sticks with the New York Islanders, they have six defencemen signed to NHL contracts already. Maybe he supplants one of Scott Mayfield or Adam Boqvist, but that would keep him on the third pair. He isn't going to play ahead of Alex Romanov or Ryan Pulock at even strength, and Tony DeAngelo has the inside track for top PP minutes.

One thing working in Schaefer's favour if he does make the team is how New York ran their blue line last year. They basically ran a five-defenceman rotation with five guys between 21:00 – 23:30 in ice time over the course of the season and 20-23 minutes down the stretch, with the sixth guy being used sparingly. With Noah Dobson gone, maybe Schaefer slides into the fifth role. But they can always change usage, and the Islanders won't be a top scoring team, either. He has an incredibly bright future, but there are a lot of obstacles to fantasy relevance in most leagues even if he immediately sticks in the NHL.

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Matt Dumba was traded from Dallas to Pittsburgh, along with a second-round pick in exchange for Vladislav Kolyachonok. This is a salary dump by Dallas that sheds one of the worst defencemen in the league while giving them enough cap space to sign another cheap forward to round out their roster. In return, Pittsburgh gets a second-round pick and a defenceman that will make their team worse and improve their odds at getting Gavin McKenna in next year's draft. A pretty smart sneak-tank move from the 'Pens.

Besides the cap space, this pretty much guarantees Nils Lundkvist and Alex Petrovic are on the roster in October with either being the spare seventh defenceman. It also improves the fortunes for any Stars skater that had to skate with Dumba on the ice last season, so a definite addition-by-subtraction situation here.

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Colorado signed defenceman Josh Manson to a two-year extension worth $3.95M per season. That carries Manson through the 2027-28 season and keeps Colorado's depth on the right side after Cale Makar for the foreseeable future.

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In yesterday's Ramblings, we looked at forwards who've grossly underperformed their individual expected goal (ixG) rate over the last couple of seasons. Today, we're sticking with that ixG rate but moving to defencemen. The data is taken from Evolving Hockey and is at all strengths.

Before digging into individual players, remember that in the article yesterday, we showed how forwards tend to under-perform in terms of actual goal scoring compared to their ixG rate. It wasn't a considerable deviation and it obviously wasn't applicable to everyone, but the general trend was for forwards to have more expected goals than actual goals.

That isn't true of defencemen. In fact, in each of the last three pairs of seasons (2021-2023, 2022-2024, 2023-2025), NHL blue liners have had goal-scoring rates around 4-4.5% higher than their expected goal rates:

The effect is consistent and tells us that we should look at defencemen a bit differently from forwards.

With that out of the way, here are some defencemen who under-performed their individual expected goals rates in the 2024-25 season and could be in line for a goal-scoring rebound. The ice-time limit is set at 800 minutes, giving us 177 defencemen.

Jacob Trouba (Anaheim Ducks)

The player that sticks out immediately is Trouba. He was traded midseason from New York to Anaheim, but things did not get better. He scored his only goal with Anaheim, but his point and shot rates declined, and between both teams, he had one of the largest gaps between his goal-scoring rate and his expected goal rate:

There are two things likely true here about Trouba:

• He won't repeat the season he just had where he shot 0.9%, the lowest conversion rate of any defenceman with at least 70 games played (Adam Pelech shot 0% in 60 games).
• Trouba has not been a high-percentage defenceman in any recent season, having shot below 6% in every season over the last decade.

Anaheim is on an upswing, and that will help Trouba's innate rebound. But he isn't getting used on the power play as he was a couple years ago and he's now on the wrong side of 30 years old. If his shot rate doesn't rebound in a big way, maybe he gets back to 4-5 goals, but that's about as much as we can reasonably expect.

Three Veteran Defencemen

To go back to giving a brief overview for a second, it's important to note that defencemen like Trouba (30+ years old) tend to underperform their individual expected goals rate compared to the younger cohort (<30 years old):

This isn't groundbreaking – we've long known that shooting percentage declines with age regardless of position – but it's to reiterate that just because an older defenceman underperformed their ixG rate doesn't mean that it'll rebound. Maybe at the extremes it will, which is why certain players are highlighted in this article, but by-and-large, we can't expect the same from a 33-year-old that we can from a 26-year-old.

With that in mind, here is a trio of veteran defenceman all bunched around the same area:

John Carlson shot 3% last year, his first time shooting under 5% in over a decade. So, yes, betting on a rebound isn't a terrible idea. But there are mitigating factors with him and the team around him that might give us pause in just assuming he'll have a huge turnaround year. Carlson turns 36 years old in January, and maybe he turns back the clock to have one more great season where he posts something like 11 goals and 53 assists, but that runway is getting short.

The second name is Detroit's Erik Gustafsson. As for his goal scoring, from 2021-2024, he averaged 0.26 goals scored per 60 minutes, an identical number to his expected goals rate. Then in 2024-25, his goal-scoring rate crashed to 0.12 goals per 60 minutes, or nearly half his expected goal rate of 0.23. He will turn 34 years old late in the 2025-26 season and is coming off a year where he got third-pair usage. In a best-case scenario, he's Detroit's number-4 defenceman with secondary power-play time. If that happens, he can get to 5-6 goals and 30-ish points again. But in any other scenario, it's hard to see him having much fantasy value, even if his goal-scoring rate rebounds. There just isn't enough ice time to justify it.

Our last name from this triumvirate is Justin Faulk. This is a very interesting option because he is coming off a season where he shot 3.2%. There are three other seasons in his career where he shot between 3-4%, and the campaigns following those years saw him shoot 6.3%, 5.1%, and 6%. So, there is a track record of a rebound. The fly in the ointment here is that the shot 1.5% in 2023-24, which improved to 3.2% last season. So, was last season the rebound season, or was it a low-percentage season with a better year ahead? Considering he's 33 years old, we must be wary of any significant improvement actually happening. But he got consistent power-play time through the year and the only real change to the blue line this offseason was a trade for prospect Logan Mailloux. He is an eventual threat to take power-play time, it is just doubtful that it's in October. I can feel myself talking myself into drafting Faulk as a late-round defenceman again.

Sean Walker (Carolina Hurricanes)

Across the 2021-2024 seasons, Walker's goal-scoring rate (0.29) was nearly in line with his ixG rate (0.31). That was not the case in his first year with Carolina:  

Walker lost 2:24 per game in ice time compared to 2023-24. That led to across-the-board declines not only in goals, but also assists and peripheral production. Even though Brent Burns and Dmitry Orlov are gone from the organization, the team brought in K'Andre Miller and Mike Reilly, while Alexander Nikishin looks set to be with the squad, if not in the lineup, all season.

The crux here is what the coaching staff does with the defencemen because up until the Four Nations break in early February, Walker was earning just 26.8% of available ice time, per Frozen Tools (about 16:12 per game). After league action resumed, that shot up to 30.2% of available ice time, adding over two minutes per game. It can't just be chalked up to the coaches putting it on cruise control until playoffs, either, as he earned 29.7% of playoff ice time until his injury in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Final. If Walker is a 4/5 defenceman, rather than the number-6, the additional ice time plus the rebound in goal scoring could mean a sneaky-good fantasy season ahead. Maybe something like 7-8 goals, 20-25 assists, 160 shots, and triple-digit hits and blocks.

Zac Jones (Buffalo Sabres)

To cap things off, Zac Jones didn't qualify for the cut-off of 800 minutes (just under at 794), but his under-performance did stick out when looking through the data:

He is worth highlighting for a few reasons. The first is his goal rate from 2021-2024 of 0.2 goals per 60 minutes was the same as his expected goal rate. The fact that his goal-scoring was so much worse than his expected goal rate this past campaign doesn't jive with what he'd done in a limited NHL sample.

The second reason he's worth including is he turns 25 years old in October. That differentiates him from the rest of the players listed here today, who are all over 30 years old. Jones has over 100 NHL games under his belt, so he has some good experience, and he's also reaching his prime to start playing up to his potential.

The final reason is he's no longer with the New York Rangers. Last year, Buffalo defencemen landed 27.8% of the team's shots compared to 26.5% for New York. There is a slew of left-shot defencemen so Jones has his work cut out for him, but there is potential for a rebound here. He just needs to earn a regular role, which is very much up in the air.