Work on the upcoming 2025-26 Dobber Hockey Fantasy Guide is proceeds daily as Dobber is hammering away at the projections while the writers are creating specific articles. Whether risers or fallers from last year, category-specific options, under- and over-valued players, and a whole lot more, there are segments of this fantasy guide for fantasy hockey owners of all stripes. The Fantasy Guide will be ready by the end of the month and can be purchased as part of the Keeper League Fantasy Pack! In addition to the fantasy guide, the Keeper Pack includes the 2025 Dobber Prospects Report, which has everything fantasy managers need to know not only about this year’s crop of draftees, but each team’s prospect pool. Start getting prepared for the upcoming season by picking up the Keeper Pack!

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The NHL released the 2025-26 schedule and, as always, our Frozen Tools has the Schedule Planner on the site to help fantasy managers with their lineup decisions. A few highlights:

• Boston only has 20 games on light days. The heavier teams (Anaheim with 38 and Utah with 37) have nearly twice as many.
• Five teams have 16 back-to-backs, for anyone looking to handcuff their goalie. The kicker: none of them are teams like Colorado, Dallas, Vegas, or Florida. They are all bubble playoff teams, with Los Angeles likely being the best option.
• Winnipeg has only nine back-to-back games, tied for the lowest in the league. It seems a fair bet that Connor Hellebuyck gets a heavy workload again.

Go check out the Schedule Planner for more tidbits like this.

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Late on Monday night (or early Tuesday morning, depending on where you are), Bowen Byram re-upped with the Buffalo Sabres for two years at $6.5M per season. Ian wrote a bit on it in his Ramblings yesterday, as well as a month ago.

Byram has been one of my favourite players to write about over the last five years just because of how interesting his career arc has been:

• Byram starts his NHL career in the 2021 Bubble season before suffering a concussion 15 games in. He returns a few weeks later and suffers another concussion one week after that, which ends his season.
• He starts the 2021-22 season in Colorado's lineup and has eight points in 10 games to start the campaign. In Game 11, he receives another concussion.
• Aside from a couple of brief returns in November/December/January of 2021, Byram largely remains out of the lineup for 4.5 months, returning in early April. He plays just 30 games in the 2021-22 regular season, totaling 17 points. He did that skating secondary PP minutes and 18:48 per game. Overall, his 1.54 points per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 was fifth among all defencemen with 500 minutes played. 
• When the 2022 Playoffs roll around, Byram is the fifth defenceman by ice time behind Cale Makar, Devon Toews, Samuel Girard, and Josh Manson.
• Girard gets injured in Colorado's third game of the second round in 2022. At this point, Byram is sixth among their defencemen in postseason ice time per game.
• Once the West Final starts, and with Girard still missing from the lineup, Byram steps up in a huge way. After not reaching 20 minutes in any single game in the first two rounds, Byram cracks 20 minutes in eight of the next 10 games, and averages 22:13. That moves him from the #6 defenceman to the #3 and he's over five minutes higher than the #4 defenceman. He is the go-to guy when Makar/Toews are off the ice.
• In the 10 games where Byram is skating as the clear #3 defenceman, Colorado outscores the opponent 12-5 with him on the ice at 5-on-5. For comparison, the Avalanche are outscored with Makar/Toews on the ice by an 11-9 margin.

Colorado wins the Cup, and a lot of credit goes to just how good Byram was. In fact, since 2007, there are 392 defencemen with at least 15 games played and 200 minutes at 5-on-5 in any single postseason. Of those 392 defencemen, just four managed an on-ice goal share of at least 70% with an on-ice expected goal share of at least 60%. This is the list (from Evolving Hockey):

Byram looked to be on the ascent but then was sidelined by a lower-body injury early in the 2022-23 season and things really haven't been on track since. This is a guy who has long shown tremendous puck skills as tracking data from AllThreeZones has John Carlson and Shea Theodore as Byram's two comparable defencemen by measures like scoring chance assists (SCA, or helpers on teammate scoring chances), scoring chance contributions (SCC, or those assists plus individual chances), high-danger passes, percentage of zone entries carried in, and percentage of zone exits with possession over the last four years:

There was a good point raised by Corey Sznajder, who does that game tracking. Byram is not often the one to retrieve the puck in the defensive zone and it got worse in 2024-25. Here is that same tracking data showing how often Byram retrieved the puck in the defensive zone in each season, the league average in each season, and his team's average in each season:

This is a guy who clearly has tremendous abilities and yet the first touch is more often going to his defence partner or a forward compared to most defencemen. It takes the puck out of his hands, so to speak, which could help explain the disassociation between the great tracking data elsewhere and his actual impact on the ice.

Jack Han, a hockey analyst and former AHL coach, also had a good point about this:

Considering all the concussions Byram has suffered, particularly early in his career, it would be understandable if he's not super keen on getting hammered 10 times a game retrieving the puck. At the same time, it could be holding him back from regaining those highs he saw earlier in his career. It's a brutal double-edged sword and if this is the case – and it's just speculation – we can't be hard on him for it. He is fortunate just to still have his NHL career, given those concussions, and his quality of life in 10, 20, or 30 years is more important.

It isn't hard to love Byram as a player, but there are probably things not in his direct control that keep him from being the player he was and can be again. He just turned 24 years old last month and maybe things change with his new deal. It would be awesome to see, because if he can be the guy he was in 2021-22, it is a game-changer for the Sabres.

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In Tuesday's Ramblings, I started a bit of an offseason project by talking about creating projections. A big part of the discussion was about forwards but it's also worth highlighting defencemen, because the position is continually changing. Back in May, we went over how scoring among blue liners has exploded in the last 5-7 years and how young defencemen are being (or not being) used. The position is constantly changing, so where we talked about what stats are important for forwards, we will do the same for defencemen.

For a refresher, these are the correlations we found among forwards for production stats (goals, assists, points) and shot stats (shot attempts, shots on goal, individual expected goals) from the two years between 2022-2024, and then this past 2024-25 campaign:

Assists didn't help as much predicting shot stats, shot stats correlated well with each other, and goals and assists don't necessarily follow each other to the same degree as some other pairings.

As for defencemen, not a whole lot is different. The shot stats correlate very well with each other, for example. There was one drastic difference, though, and that's looking at production stats from 2022-24 and shot stats from 2024-25. Among forwards, production in general, and assists specifically, did not correlate as well with the shot metrics:

That is distinctly different from what we see among defencemen:

This makes sense when we look at what players actually did in 2024-25:

• Of the 99 defencemen to produce at least 1.03 points per 60 minutes – the league average for blue liners – there were 72 who were also above average by shot rate.
• Of the 183 forwards to produce at least 2.01 points per 60 minutes – the league average for attackers – there were 115 who were also above average by shot rate.

That is 72.7% of defencemen who were above-average producers to be above-average shooters but just 62.8% of forwards to do the same.

Intuitively, that makes sense, right? Defencemen who produce well are going to be involved heavily in the offence, and that includes shooting. Forwards, though, have goal-scoring and play-making specialists that lean in one direction or the other. This isn't something that applies universally to each forward and defenceman, and it's why we do individual projections, but it is notable.

While this section discusses what's important to look for in the past to help project defencemen in the future, which is an extension of Tuesday's Ramblings, this brings two important lessons to keep in mind when making projections.

The first lesson is to always check the league environment. How are shot, hit, and block rates changing? Are defencemen and forwards racking up more or fewer points than recent seasons? What has been important for production at each position, what is important now, and how can that help us predict where the league may be going?

The second lesson is that the differences between forwards and defencemen matter a lot. Teammate quality at each position matters, but when evaluating the fantasy value of skaters, splitting at least among forwards/defencemen, if not further dividing by LW/RW/C/LD/RD, is important. Relative value at each position cannot be ignored in fantasy hockey.