The Wild West

Sporting a seven-game win streak as the NHL campaign passes the midway mark, the Calgary Flames are poised to separate from the tightly-clustered Pacific and grab one of the West’s three available non-wild card births.   While it’s too early to think all that deeply about playoff chances, southern Alberta might enjoy looking at the [...]

WJCs and the West   By Kevin Wickersham   Following the late-game, underdog heroics of two Western Conference prospects, Tyler Steenbergen (Arizona) and Conor Timmins (Colorado) to bring the WJC title back to Canada, another World Junior Championships is in the books. This one was accompanied by some unsightly organizational warts and blemishes in Buffalo [...]

Useful goaltenders are often a rare fantasy commodity. With the mercurial nature of the job, even the best sometimes just lose it and for whatever reason can no longer produce at a high level. With the recent, albeit maybe temporary, appearance of the Blackhawks’ Jeff Glass we are reminded how goaltenders can sometimes appear out [...]

Winnipeg’s had lots of ups and downs lately. The more recent ups have come against some tough Western Conference company.   After nearly stealing a win with Steve Mason in net against the Blues, dropping the game 2-0 for their fifth loss in six, they dominated in the second half of back-to-back, home-and-home tilts shutting [...]

Turris and the Red Hot Preds   By Kevin Wickersham     A quick look at the NHL standings shows last year’s Cup runners-up tied with the Blues atop the Western Conference, and for the NHL’s best record (46 points), despite having played three fewer games. The Predators remain the hottest team in hockey with [...]

As the top team in the West the Blues have much to brag about in both the worlds of fantasy and reality.   Currently on a four-game winning streak they did have a tough weekend injury-wise though, losing the formerly on-fire Jaden Schwartz who slowed a little lately with just a goal and two assists [...]

Fantasy titles are won often by those who make a good number of deft pickups throughout the year rather than relying too exclusively on the players they drafted. Particularly in deep, multi-category leagues it’s crucial to monitor those who rack up peripheral stats than can round out your lineup in the less glamorous and/or gritty [...]

We’re a little over a month into the campaign so let’s take a look at how the West’s goalies have performed thus far. Much is prone to change, but from a fantasy perspective (obviously dependent on your league’s settings) consider this a loose ranking of early returns that could flip wildly in the upcoming week [...]

As NHL teams hit about the 15-game mark in the campaign, we start to see what we might have hoped to be some players’ short lulls turn into more serious patterns of below-expectation play, or initial hot streaks look a bit more enduring. We’ve now gained enough of a sample size to start evaluating a [...]

Here’s our latest installment of tortoises and hares, featuring those having the hottest and coldest starts among Western Conference defensemen as October turns into November.   Tortoises   Oscar Klefbom – Edmonton (0 goals, 2 assists in 10 games) The Oilers top defenseman is having rough early going. A key member as quarterback of their [...]