Eastern Edge

With tomorrow being All Hallows Eve, I thought it appropriate to do some fantasy hockey trick or treating. Remember when you were a kid, coming home with a pillowcase full of candy? Then your parents would go through it all, throwing out all the unwrapped and suspicious looking candy? Well that’s what I aim to do here; separate the fantasy eye candy from players that could potentially make your fantasy team sick.

Outside of Ilya Kovalchuk, is there any Atlanta Thrasher worth owning in a hockey pool? Some people are sold on Kari Lehtonen’s talent. Unfortunately, because the team is suspect both offensively and defensively, Lehtonen’s wins and goals-against-average numbers will suffer.

In this case, M*A*S*H stands for Miller’s Avoidance of Seriously Hurt players from the Eastern Conference. There seems to be a rash of serious injuries going around the NHL these days. Maybe it’s just being over-reported and us, being the fantasy hockey junkies we are, start to get worried when we are constantly being bombarded with injury information.

Last season, only one NHL team (Columbus) scored fewer goals than the New York Islanders. So why you ask, should you even consider selecting someone who plays in Long Island when some consider it to be a fantasy wasteland? Now I can hear some of you snickering, but there are some decent selections on the Isles if you happen to be in a deeper draft.

In honour of Canada’s newest favourite Olympic sport, let’s look at some silver medal picks to rebound for the coming season.

I started this column by doing research on how players headed into free agency did. The thought being that with the added motivation, they would be primed to do as well as they possibly could in order to have the numbers to support a big contract. What I found were a bunch of players who broke out in their third year. It’s typically been a player’s fourth NHL season that we see them breakout offensively. Is this a new trend developing or just a blip on the screen?

The following are some examples of Eastern Conference pending free agents that had a breakout in their third NHL season: