The Journey

Pittsburgh Penguins General Manager Ray Shero chose to use much of his available cap space this summer on defencemen.

Looking at the Penguins roster, they have three spaces to fill and, according to CapGeek.com, have only $724,785 to spend on each opening. That’s not much higher than the NHL’s minimum salary.

The Chicago Blackhawks salary cap struggles could help Kyle Beach earn a spot in the NHL as early as this year.

It’s not very often that you’ll look at a 19-year-old’s decision to leave Harvard and say it’s a good one – but in the case of Louis Leblanc, it definitely is.

Sometimes, all you need to do to make it in the NHL is get your foot in the door. It’s the same with just about any job, but NHL lore is full of stories of guys who took advantage of opportunities and never looked back.

Trading an established player for prospects is always a gamble that rarely draws anything less than scorn or ridicule from fans and media.

Teams don’t do it because they think they can get ahead by doing so, they do it because they’re forced to and they’re trying to cut their losses.

A draft is supposed to be a league’s way of leveling out the playing field.

Call it egalitarian, socialist, counter-evolutionary – even naïve – but as long as leagues award the top pick to the worst team, we have to operate on the assumption that by using such a system, leagues are trying to offer a hand-up to the cellar-dwellers. If that’s the case, why do the Canadian major junior leagues allow prospects and the fat-wallet teams to game the system?

Note: Geoffrion has not been featured in three consecutive Dobber Prospect Reports and this profile is a response to a request in the prospects forum.

On bloodlines alone, Blake Geoffrion seems destined for greatness, but a name only catches people’s eyes and a  might give a player a longer look. No NHL team is going to hand Blake Geoffrion a roster spot just because of his ancestors.

Even when you’re the great grandson of Howie (The Stratford Streak) Morenz, the grandson of Bernie (Boom Boom) Geoffrion, and the son of a former NHLer, Daniel Geoffrion, you still need to put in the work.

Ian Cole is on the cusp of becoming a good fantasy prospect. There’s no doubt that the first-round pick from 2007 is a good hockey prospect and will help the St. Louis Blues, but when combing through the prospect ranks for the upcoming Dobber Prospects Guide, I had the option of picking one of their players for the Prospect Guide. I considered Cole, but didn’t include him, because in the end, I don’t think he will be a good fantasy player.

The Nashville Predators must have a secret lab somewhere where they breed young defence prospects. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on the names of all of them, another one takes a big development leap.

This year, that defenceman is Roman Josi, a Swiss-bred rearguard that the Predators took in the second round (38^th overall) in 2008.