The 2025-26 Dobber Hockey Fantasy Guide has been released and is ready for purchase in the Dobber Shop! It is now August, which means it's time to start fantasy hockey research in earnest, and this is a great place to do that. The Guide has projections, a draft list, columns that include a schedule breakdown, players set to regress, category-specific skaters, and a whole lot more. The Guide will also be updated throughout the offseason and training camp to reflect injuries, trades, or anything else that pops up.

For fantasy hockey managers in keeper or dynasty leagues, how about the Keeper League Fantasy Pack? It has both the Fantasy Guide as well as the 2025 Prospects Report in one bundle for over 30% off their individual prices. Help support what we do by grabbing a copy of the Guide or the Keeper Pack today!

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Over the last couple of weeks, I have been talking about creating player projections. On Tuesday, we discussed goaltenders and team effects. The links to prior Ramblings on the league environment, ice time, differences between forwards and defencemen, and more, are included in those recent Ramblings. We are going to pick that back up next week because I have something else I'm working on right now.

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The Calgary Flames extended forward Martin Pospisil for three years at an average annual value of $2.5M. Pospisil has one year left on his current deal with a $1M cap hit, per PuckPedia, and has 12 goals, 37 assists, 231 shots, 193 PIMs, 48 blocks, and 549 hits in 144 career NHL games. Over the last two seasons, he is top-10 among regular forwards (at least 1250 total minutes) by penalty minutes and hits per hour of ice time. Overall, he is sixth in total PIMs and fourth in total hits.

The first question for Pospisil is where he'll play because he played both wing and centre last year: in his first 20 games of the season, he had 113 faceoffs taken, or about 5.7 per game, but took just 61 faceoffs over the next 61 games. If the team decides to try him at centre again, it's not good news because they have Nazem Kadri and Mikael Backlund locked into roles ahead of Pospisil, and probably Morgan Frost, too. It would leave Pospisil as the fourth-line centre, and Calgary's fourth line generally earned under 10 minutes a game last season.

If Pospisil plays the wing, then it's a different story. Names like Jonathan Huberdeau, Blake Coleman, and Matt Coronato will be ahead of him but once we get to wingers like Yegor Sharangovich and Joel Farabee, it is more wide open. There would be a decent chance that Pospisil would earn middle-6 minutes as a winger, and that would mean 2-3 more minutes a game than as a fourth-line centre.

Given the plethora of wingers that Calgary has, my guess is they try Pospisil as the fourth-line centre to start the season. With the triumvirate of Kadri-Backlund-Frost on the roster, that wouldn't be good news for Pospisil's fantasy value.

The next question is whether there is more production that could come if his minutes aren't reduced. Obviously, what sticks out is him shooting 5.2% overall across the last two seasons, and 5.1% at 5-on-5, per Evolving Hockey. To see if he could improve, I looked at the forwards who shot under 7% at 5-on-5 across the 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons, and how they performed across the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons. It was a sample of 24 forwards, and it gave us some pretty good news:

Of those 24 forwards, only two saw a decline in shooting percentage in the most recent two seasons (Teddy Blueger and Mathieu Joseph), the average jump was by over 50% from 6.1% to 9.3%, and goals per 60 minutes increased by nearly 32% from 0.48 to 0.63. They went from averaging 7.9 goals per 82 games at 5-on-5 to 10.3 goals per 82 games. Some forwards with high hit counts like Trevor Lewis and Joel Kiviranta saw their goals/60 rise substantially.

Of course, this is where ice time matters. If Pospisil goes from shooting 5.2% to shooting 9%, that's great. But if he goes from skating 13:48 per game to skating 10 minutes a game as the fourth line did last year, the efficiency improvement won't matter. The only way it would matter is if he maintains somewhere close to his ice-time level of the last couple years and improves his shooting percentage.

There are a lot of things Pospisil does well: he's a solid playmaker, he's fine defensively, and he obviously can get under the skin of the opposition. As long as he's posting seasons of 25 points, 80+ PIMs, and 250+ hits, he'll have banger league value. It is whether he can be more than he's been, and he probably can, but he needs a meaningful role to do that, and it's not certain what that role looks like in 2025-26.

For posterity, the 2025-26 Dobber Hockey Fantasy Guide has Pospisil with 8 goals, 29 points and 88 PIMs, all improvements over last year, with Justin Kirkland assuming fourth-line centre duties. If Kirkland can hold onto that role, it would be great news for Pospisil's fantasy value.

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Buffalo signed goalie Devon Levi to a two-year deal with an AAV a little over $800K. It is nice to get him under contract, but with Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen signed for four more years and Alex Lyon signed a month ago to a two-year deal to be his backup, Levi might be headed back to the AHL for the bulk of the upcoming season, so the fantasy value remains marginal here. The Fantasy Guide has him appearing in just 10 games for the 2025-26 campaign.

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Speaking of the Fantasy Guide, I want to close out today's Ramblings by going through some things that stuck out to me in the Guide. This is to give everyone a little preview of what they will get if they purchase a copy of the Guide out of the Dobber Shop.

Pavel Dorofeyev (Vegas Golden Knights)

One of my columns in the 2025-26 Fantasy Guide was players with stock drops for the upcoming season. They can be guys with red flags for regression, or maybe their team context has changed, or a host of other issues. One of the names is Dorofeyev and it's because of the addition of Mitch Marner. Here is part of what I wrote:

"With Jack Eichel, Mark Stone and Shea Theodore already in place, that leaves just one spot for Dorofeyev or Tomáš Hertl. Hertl plays centre…"

That Hertl is a left-handed centre to complement Eichel's right-handedness is what makes me think Hertl has the inside track for top PP minutes. Last year, Dorofeyev had 13 goals and 58 shots on the power play, earning nearly 60% of the team's PPTOI. If he's dropped to the second unit, those numbers could easily cut in half. The Guide has Dorofeyev finishing with 31 goals, and fantasy managers should be happy if he can get to 30 goals again.

Matthew Knies (Toronto Maple Leafs)

In the 2025-25 Fantsay Guide, Rick Roos wrote about outliers from last year. One name that was brought up is Matthew Knies, being one of nine players to score at least 25 goals (he had 29) on fewer than 2.0 shots per game (he was at 1.95). The 2025-26 Fantasy Guide has his projection for 28 goals and 60 points in 79 games, very close to what he did in 2024-25.

I will be honest: I am not overly concerned about Knies seeing a production drop with Marner going to Vegas, and that is what the goal and point projections say, too. For a bit of evidence, let's turn to data from Natural Stat Trick. Over the last three seasons, here is how the Leafs fared offensively with Matthews/Marner on the ice without William Nylander, and Matthews on the ice without both Marner and Nylander, at 5-on-5:

From shot attempts (CF/60), shots, expected goals, and goals for per 60 minutes, the increase is across-the-board without both Marner and Nylander next to Matthews. It is easy to forget that as good as Marner is, Matthews is a top-5 player in the world and coming off a down year where he clearly fought injuries. Losing Marner will hurt both defensively and on the power play, but as far as even strength offence goes, I think Knies and Matthews will be just fine. Considering just five of Knies's 29 goals last year came on the power play, losing Marner may not be as big a deal for his fantasy value as it is for other top Toronto forwards.

Troy Terry (Anaheim Ducks)

In his sleeper picks column for the Western Conference, Grant Campbell mentions Terry with the Ducks. As someone who has been beating the Anaheim Ducks drum all summer (for fantasy hockey purposes), this warms the heart. While Anaheim picked up guys like Mikael Granlund and Chris Kreider to make the lineup deeper, Terry is one of the few right-handed shots on the team and that means his role as the team's top right winger is secure.

The Fantasy Guide doesn't have Terry doing a whole lot different than what he's done in recent seasons, projecting him for 21 goals and 54 points. And that makes sense given what Terry has done overall, but I do want to make a fun comparison point.

Over the last three years at even strength, here is the winger who compares closest to Terry by ice time per game, and goals and assists per 60 minutes:

If we look at the seasons Martin Necas has been a productive fantasy option, they were the seasons where he was part of a good top power-play unit. While Terry has usually received top PP time, the Ducks have the second-lowest PP goal total over the last three years (104, only Philadelphia is worse with 98). If the team takes the next step in their rebuild, and the power play does get better, Terry can absolutely be a 25-goal, 70-point guy.