The Wild West

  This will be my first The Wild West column after doing the Frozen Tools Forensic column for almost a year and I’m pretty excited to get going. Inspired by the original Wild West writer Ryan Ma, I’d like to focus on weekly happenings in and around the Western Conference of the NHL and look [...]

  This week we are hitting the second in our two-part series on multi-cat contributors. As a reminder the focus is on players who are contributing in hits and blocks, but also are putting up some level of shot production. We will not include PIM in this article.   In order to generate this list [...]

  This week we are starting a two part dive into players in the West who are helping owners out in a wider variety of categories. The focus is on players (forwards this week - defense next) who are maintaining useful levels of shots and points, but are also contributing in hits and blocks. We [...]

  In honor of the holidays we are going to take a look at skaters on our ranking lists. We are are looking at values at the start of season versus current values. These are based on Yahoo ranks (so take with a grain of salt). The categories taken into consideration are goals, assists, power-play [...]

  Last week we took a look at forwards in the Western Conference that were seeing a change in their ice time. The idea being that deployment; linemates, power-play time, even-strength time on ice - all of these things matter when figuring out which players we want to hang on to, particularly when we get [...]

  Opportunity is the name of the game in fantasy. Well so is skill, but you get the idea. A decent player with a great opportunity might be a better own than a good player with poor deployment. Linemates, power-play time, even-strength time on ice - all of these things matter when figuring out which [...]

  Last week we took a tour of the Central Division, looking at the status of each team’s goalie performances and tandems. We return this week for our second installment, and this time we move on to the Pacific Division.   One quick note to follow up: In the Nashville section I claimed there was [...]

    Goalies are fickle at the best of times. They rarely perform as expected either in the short or long term. Because of this, it is usually a good plan to check in on who is doing what every so often. To that end, we are going to take a bit of a dive [...]

  In part one of this mini-series we took a look at players who were scoring above their expected goal rates. These, for the most part, were guys that we expect to be at their highest value right now. They have high shooting percentages and we can assume that their goal-scoring pace will slow down [...]

  This week we are kicking off a two-week look at who is scoring in the west. More than that though we are going to be looking at who might be scoring a bit more than we can expect them to, and who might be scoring less.   This week we are going to look [...]