Welcome to the final Ramblings of 2025. After a quick holiday break, we've had a busy few days of games, which has left us with a lower than usual number of Tuesday night games. That makes for a rebound to a bigger slate on New Year’s Eve today, so keep a closer eye on your Wednesday [...]
Happy Christmas eve to those who celebrate, and to those who don’t, we wish you a happy “three days off from NHL nonsense as the World Juniors begin” season. * Jamie Benn’s peripherals have dropped off a bit as the mid-season doldrums have kicked in now – he was really stuffing the stats initially upon [...]
Morgan Geekie continues to chug along and ranks second in the league in goals after scoring his 23rd and 24th goals of the season last night. He’s also ranked 39th in the league in shots, which then had me look into whether he was the top player in the league for save percentage. If you [...]
Scott Wedgewood and Thomas Harley made their returns to the lineup last night. Harley was sitting behind Miro Heiskanen as far as the offence in Dallas was concerned early on, so it will be interesting to see whether he can make any in-roads there, and how that affects what has been a fantastic run from [...]
In a Ramblings full of underperformers, the poster-boy for it on my teams this year has been Steven Stamkos. Somehow though, with another goal last night Stamkos has quietly put up five points in the last four games, including his first two assists in 20 games. Stammer still has some positive regression coming based on [...]
The drop offs in the rankings usually take a bit more of a sample size to show, but sometimes the jumps can come almost out of nowhere. That’s what we’ve seen early on from Jakub Dobes and Colten Ellis, two of the biggest risers for the November update. Ellis’ stock might still have some rise [...]
In a strange twist for a Tuesday night, we only had one game on the schedule. Well, the scheduling quirks for the week don’t end there, as there is a full slate of 15 games both tonight and Friday night, while the Thanksgiving Football matches on Thursday are avoided completely with no NHL games. There’s [...]
The rookies have been added, with some of them making more of an impact than expected this early. Matthew Schaefer and Alexander Nikishin will be much higher in the next update if they keep these scoring levels up. In the meantime, just enjoy watching them play. Standard pre-rankings note: This isn’t meant to be a [...]
Joseph Woll could be a bit of a difference maker for the Leafs. Even if on paper he isn’t much better than Anthony Stolarz, sometimes teams get in their own head and play better in front of one goalie than another, and I wonder if we see a bit of that moving forward, as the [...]
After ceding my last two Ramblings days to Cliffy and Dobber, I’m back and I have a whole lot of thoughts on some early-season starts from plenty of players in addition to some nuggets from games last night. We’ll start with those. * The Leafs lost not only the game, but also Auston Matthews and [...]
