A bit of good news/bad news on the injury front for the Buffalo Sabres. While there is still no official diagnosis or timeline for defenceman Michael Kesselring, reporter Paul Hamilton tweeted that both Jason Zucker and Josh Norris are considered day-to-day now. Norris played the season opener and then suffered an upper-body injury while Zucker has been out with a viral infection. Buffalo's next game is Wednesday night at home to Calgary.

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Dougie Hamilton was back at New Jersey Devils practice on Monday, according to Amanda Stein. While fantasy managers may be happy with this development, it's a wonder where Hamilton's stands in relation to his PP role because both Luke Hughes and Simon Nemec have been getting some run there.

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Viktor Arvidsson was not in the lineup for Boston on Monday night and has been deemed week-to-week. In his place, Matej Blumel was skating next to Pavel Zacha at 5-on-5 and was also on the top PP unit. With the injuries to that line, it will likely be a rotation of wingers and not Blumel staying there until Arvidsson returns, but he's getting the first crack for now.

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Zach Dooley reported that Los Angeles defenceman Drew Doughty is week-to-week with a lower-body injury, but it's not related to the ankle injury from last year. About as good as that news can be.

The Kings lost their game on Monday night in Washington by a 2-1 margin as Charlie Lindgren had his best game in net since his first of the season, holding the Kings to one goal on 31 shots. Lindgren had given up 18 goals in his previous four starts, so it's safe to say he needed this kind of performance.

Matt Roy scored his first goal of the season while Alex Ovechkin scored the game-winning goal early in the second period. Tom Wilson had an assist on the Roy goal and totaled five shots, a pair of blocks, and a hit.

Jakob Chychrun assisted on the Ovechkin goal and added three shots and a hit. He is now on a four-game point streak (1 goal, 3 assists) and is up to 14 points in 19 appearances.

Anze Kopitar (PP) scored the lone goal for the Kings as goalie Darcy Kuemper took the loss, allowing two goals on 25 shots.

Of note here is that Brandt Clarke led the Kings in ice time with 22:53 without Doughty in the lineup, his highest TOI total of the season and third straight game with at least 20 minutes.

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The Buffalo Sabres have won two games in a row for the first time since October 22^nd – October 24^th thanks to a 5-1 win at home against Edmonton. The depth did a lot of the damage as Noah Ostlund had a pair of tallies (one PP), Beck Malenstyn scored his first goal of the year, Bowen Byram added some insurance, and Tage Thompson got a late empty-net tally.

Rasmus Dahlin managed a pair of assists (one PP), four shots, and a block. That makes back-to-back two-assist games for Dahlin since his absence from the team.

Colten Ellis was in net for the Sabres and held the fort by stopping 31 of the 32 shots the Oilers directed his way.

Jack Roslovic scored Edmonton's lone goal. He is up to 7 goals, 15 points, and 45 shots in 19 games with the Oilers. In net, goaltender Stuart Skinner allowed four goals on 28 shots for the loss.

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The Carolina Hurricanes went into Boston and skated out with a 3-1 win. Taylor Hall had a revenge game (of sorts) with a goal and an assist, three shots, and a hit. Their other goals were scored by Mark Jankowski and Jordan Staal, with Staal scoring on a one-hander while tied up in front of the net.

Riley Tufte broke Pyotr Kochetkov's shutout bid by scoring a power-play goal with nine seconds left in the game. Kochetkov, meanwhile, stopped 27 of 28 shots for the win.

Sean Walker had a solid multi-cat night on Carolina's blue line with an assist, three shots, two blocks, and two hits.

Jeremy Swayman earned the loss in net for Boston by giving up three goals on 32 shots.

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The circus game of the night took place in Florida as the Panthers managed an 8-5 win over the Vancouver Canucks. Vancouver managed just 14 shots on goal but scored five times on Sergei Bobrovsky, yet Goalie Bob hung on for the win.

Seth Jones had the big game for the Panthers with a pair of power-play goals, five shots, three blocks, and a hit. Sam Reinhart managed a trio of helpers, two of them coming on the Jones power-play goals, with three shots, four blocks, and a hit. AJ Greer, Luke Kunin, and Evan Rodrigues also scored.

Both Sam Bennett and Brad Marchand posted a goal and an assist with Bennett managing four total shots, six PIMs, and three hits in a big multi-cat night.

Gustav Forsling had an assist, two shots, and five blocks in a solid multi-cat effort of his own.

Elias Pettersson scored twice for the Canucks while Jake Debrusk, Drew O'Connor, and Filip Hronek all scored as well.

Quinn Hughes had three assists of his own (one PP), a shot, three blocks, and two PIMs.

Jiri Patera was in net for Vancouver and allowed seven goals on 40 shots.

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Zach Werenski and Dmitri Voronkov each had a goal and an assist (with a power-play point apiece), Adam Fantilli also scored, and Jet Greaves stopped 29 of 32 shots, plus two of three in the shootout, as the Columbus Blue Jackets took a 4-3 win over Montreal in that shootout.  

After posting just four points in his first eight games, Werenski has four goals and 11 points in his last 11 games, totaling 41 shots and 17 blocks in the meantime. It was a bit of a slow start for him but he's really started to find his footing. Fantilli, meanwhile, has goals in four of his last five games and he's skated between 19:20 and 23:00 in each of his last four appearances.

Lane Hutson had a goal and an assist for Montreal, posting five shots, a block, and a pair of hits in 25:42 of ice time. The other goals were scored by Josh Anderson and Oliver Kapanen, and that goals now gives Kapanen seven on the year (though he is shooting over 29%).

Jakub Dobes allowed three goals on 23 shots for the shootout loss.

Montreal didn't draw a power play in the game (probably a good thing at this point) but Zachary Bolduc is expected to take over on the top unit for Ivan Demidov.

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Olen Zellweger finished off a 3-on-1 passing play in overtime to lift the Anaheim Ducks to a 3-2 home win over Utah. Zellweger finished with four shots, a block, and a hit in over 23 minutes of ice time.

Anaheim's other goals came from Jackson LaCombe and Troy Terry with LaCombe managing five shots and a block. Over his nine games in November, LaCombe has a goal, four assists, 23 shots, 13 blocks, and 8 hits. That is a lot more like what fantasy managers want to see from him.

Anaheim goalie Lukas Dostal allowed two goals on 18 shots but held on for the win, putting him in a tie for second in the league with nine wins.

Dylan Guenther and Logan Cooley tallied the Mammoth goals. Guenther skated just 15:40 in this game and has averaged just 16:33 per game in the month of November, compared to 18:20 in October. In an unrelated note, the Mammoth have lost six of eight games this month.

Mikhail Sergachev assisted the Cooley goal and now has 15 points in 19 games to start the season. That is a 65-point pace.

Goalie Karel Vejmelka took the loss by giving up three goals on 26 shots.

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Because I play DFS nearly every day, I am constantly going through a lot of data both at the team and player level. Sometimes, there are things that just start gnawing at the back of your brain that something isn't quite right, and I had that feeling on Monday morning. To me, it seemed as if goal scoring and expected goal rates weren't quite aligning as closely as they had in the past, so I went and looked at it.

As of Monday morning, we were 600 individual team games into the regular season. Here are the adjusted 5-on-5 rate of goals-for per 60 minutes and expected goals-for per 60 minutes from each of the prior three seasons, this season, and the difference between the two (data from Evolving Hockey), at similar points of those campaigns:

The expected goals model at Evolving Hockey usually overshoots the actual goal production early in the year, but this is way above anything in recent history. I really don't know why this is the case, but it's something to keep an eye on in the coming months. These models are extremely useful for fantasy managers, and this isn't done with any intent to denigrate them, it's just to monitor how well they're aligning with actual on-ice performance, especially compared to recent seasons.

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When going through the Frozen Tools Schedule Planner, I noticed that from here until the three-day Christmas break, the Utah Mammoth has the most games on the docket with 20. More importantly, of those 20 games, a whopping 11 of them are on light days, also the most in the league with no other franchise even having 10. That gives the Mammoth a great fantasy schedule over the next five weeks. Here are a few things to know about that stretch.

First, they have a road trip from November 28^th – December 6^th that consists of six games in nine days including two sets of back-to-backs. Those games are in Dallas, St. Louis, San Jose, Anaheim, Vancouver, and Calgary. It is not a brutal schedule, so anyone looking for a streaming goalie, grab Vitek Vanecek at some point in the next week.

Next, the second line has seen their ice time throttled back recently: In October, Dylan Guenther averaged 18:20 per game and his lowest total was 16:54, but November has seen him average 16:41 and he's been under 17 minutes more often than not. The fourth line has been getting a bit more ice time, but needy fantasy managers in multi-cat leagues might want to look at Lawson Crouse or Jack McBain. The team is basically running a top line with two somewhat-even second lines.

Finally, Nate Schmidt has added over 1:15 per game over his last four games compared to his first 14 games. He kind of seems like the number-2 defenceman now, or at least the 2A to John Marino's 2B. He is also due for a lot of positive regression as he's participating on just 18.2% of goals scored with him on the ice (per Natural Stat Trick), close to half his three-year rate of 35.6%. Do not be surprised to see his point production double in the near-term. That would make him a passable option in multi-cat leagues.