Hockey Rambling

If you’re reading this then odds are that you’re in at least one fantasy hockey league, and you’re now really ramping up for the NHL season. What that means differs from person to person. Maybe it means you’re re-ranking your top-500 draft options for the 4,762nd time, or maybe it means you’re printing off last [...]

Last week, my Ramblings discussed my projections that I have started cobbling together. My first run of projections covered overall value in a multi-cat league that includes goals, assists, power-play points, shots, blocks, and hits. There was a method used to value each player’s contributions (or lack thereof) in each category to try and assess [...]

While 50 goals are the number most fantasy general managers drool over, scoring 40 goals in today's NHL is a great accomplishment. Only 37 players have scored 40 goals a season in the past 10 years. While there are plenty of the usual names, there are a few surprises (Matt Duchene, Brayden Point, William Karlsson [...]

As training camps get underway, it’s important to keep an eye on what line combinations are developing throughout the league. The success Michael Bunting enjoyed playing with Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner last year made him very valuable as an add off the waiver wire, so watch for other players that might be able to [...]

Since Andrew Copp is expected to miss at least the first week of the regular season due to abdominal surgery, Michael Rasmussen has been centering the scoring line of Jakub Vrana and David Perron. This may not be a long-term placement for Rasmussen, but it is an opportunity nonetheless as he enters his fourth NHL [...]

I try not to get too excited about line combinations at the opening of training camp. Oh no, not me. I’m not that guy. However… I’ll break down a few recent training camp developments and what they mean. https://twitter.com/keepingkarlsson/status/1573086710799470592 At Leafs camp on Friday, Adam Gaudette was skating on the second line with John Tavares [...]

With injuries mounting and the team not looking very strong to begin with, the Flyers are facing a huge uphill battle from the outset. New coach John Tortorella, who is very much known for not going easy on his players, didn’t take long to make his mark on this roster on the first day of [...]

Training camps have opened, though the first day of camp is a lot of off-ice work, including team physicals. To that end, there really wasn’t a lot of information to pass back to the reader, but there are always injury updates. First, we got one from Toronto, which includes the timeline for Timothy Liljegren’s injury: [...]

Within the span of an hour yesterday we had retirement announcements from three excellent defencemen over the last two decades, with Zdeno Chara, P.K. Subban, and Keith Yandle all hanging up their skates. Chara leaves as the all-time games played leader among defencemen, a cup winner in 2011, and a virtual lock for the Hall [...]

Training camp starts this week across the NHL and that means we finally start to get some actionable information. To this point, the only information we have besides projections – which are educated guesses themselves – are estimations of lineups and playing time. Things change throughout the preseason but even with split squads, we start [...]