A 32-save shutout from Sergei Bobrovsky held Carolina off the scoreboard and helped Florida to a 1-0 win in Game 3 of the Eastern Final. It gives the Panthers a 3-0 series lead with four cracks at a trip to the Stanley Cup Final for the first time since the late 1990s.

Sam Reinhart scored Florida’s lone goal, a tally from the slot on the power play. His team only generated seven shots over the final 40 minutes of the game, but they only needed his goal to secure a pivotal third game. It was his seventh marker of the postseason, representing his 10^th point.

It wasn’t a bad game from Carolina even if they didn’t have a bunch of Grade-A chances. They just could not solve Goalie Bob on the chances they did get, and they now have their backs against the wall.

Aleksander Barkov was injured in the first period and did not return for the final 40 minutes. The team called it a lower-body injury and we’ll find out more when they give us more (so, not until their playoff run is over).

Game 4 goes Wednesday night again in Florida.

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I am hesitant to link to stories in languages I don’t understand, but it was tweeted by a prominent Vancouver reporter, so an update on forward Vitali Kravtsov:

Should he go to the KHL, he would finish his NHL tenure with just 12 points in 64 games played. We will await further confirmation but it would mean one less wing roster spot to worry about fantasy-wise.

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The offseason fantasy reviews of each non-playoff team continue in these Ramblings, and with the trip back to the Eastern Conference, we’re getting to the Montreal Canadiens. It was a full rebuild year for the Canadiens, but they still managed to out-perform expectations, even if they finished 28^th in the final standings.

We are going to discuss the fantasy successes/failures and improvements/declines of both individual players and the team, as well as where they go from here. There is no shortage of talking points for this team, even if some fantasy performances left something to be desired.

As usual, the data will be from our Frozen Tools or Natural Stat Trick.

Successes

It sure seemed as if Cole Caufield was well on his way to a successful fantasy season until his surgery: 26 goals and 36 points in 46 games, managing 3.4 shots per contest and 10 power-play points. It wouldn’t have been elite or anything, but solid enough in multi-cat formats, even ones including blocks/hits. At the time of his injury on January 19^th, Caufield was inside the 95^th percentile of NHL forwards in goals and shot attempts per 60 minutes. He is just starting to scratch his fantasy upside. At a minimum, he is going to be a great goal scorer for many, many years.

Caufield was injured, though, so calling his season a true fantasy success would not be accurate. In fact, it’s hard to say there were many fantasy successes on a team that had one player (Nick Suzuki, 66) reach the 60-point mark. In fact, Suzuki was the only player to reach the 40-point mark as Kirby Dach finished second on the team in points with 38 in 58 contests. Suzuki could qualify as a success with 26 goals and 66 points, posting 17 PPPs and 162 shots. He ended up inside the top-125 skaters on Yahoo! Fantasy, out-performing his ADP/ranking by a few rounds. A minor success, but a success.

Josh Anderson may have been a fantasy success, depending on your fantasy format. He missed 13 games but still posted 21 goals. He also managed 2.4 shots, one PIM, and two hits per game. He didn’t have great overall production thanks to a very low assist total (not unusual for him), but he did bring a lot of peripherals to go with a 20-goal season. He had a fascinating season, actually, as Anderson easily led regular Habs forwards in expected goals-for impact (per Evolving Hockey), finishing second in actual goals-for impact. The trade-off was poor defence, but it has never been his strength, and helping the team create goals is a good sign for him under Martin St. Louis.

There were genuine changes from Anderson, too. His playmaking stats have rarely been good, and 2022-23 was no exception as Corey Sznajder’s tracking data had him well below average in scoring chance assist rate (helpers on teammate scoring chances). He was also well below average in a variety of individual passing measures:

However, the change was more scoring chances. He was well above average here (Chances/60) after a very poor 2021-22 campaign. In a full year, 25 goals, 180 shots, and 150 hits are all within reach. A well-rounded fantasy effort is unlikely from Anderson, but Martin St. Louis did really seem to help his offensive game. He did not see a huge improvement on his raw totals, but a better offensive process will hopefully make that upside more likely.

Like Caufield, it could have been a very successful fantasy season for Mike Matheson had it not been for injury. He played just 48 games, but posted 8 goals, 26 assists, 126 shots, nine PPPs, 80 blocks, and 53 hits. On an 82-game basis, that works out to roughly 14 goals, 44 assists, 215 shots, 15 PPPs, 137 blocks, and 91 hits. All of those marks, except the hits/blocks, would have easily been a career best. A short season, but Matheson was great in the fantasy playoffs in March/early April.

A special shout out to Sam Montembeault. He put up 0.43 Goals Saved Above Expected per 60 minutes this season, again from Evolving Hockey. To put that into context, Andrei Vasilevskiy was at 0.44 GSAx/60 while Jake Oettinger was at 0.35/60. Montembeault’s team was too awful to give him consistent fantasy value, but he was a fine streamer at times, and it bodes well moving forward.

Failures

As with a lot of the teams at the very bottom, it’s hard to say many non-injured players were an outright failure. Outside of Suzuki, the only Montreal skaters to play more than 62 games, thus missing fewer than 20, were Michael Pezzetta, Christian Dvorak, Jordan Harris, Mike Hoffman, Jonathan Kovacevic, and Anderson. Maybe we’d hope for more from Hoffman or Anderson, but this was supposed to be a very bad team, they endured a lot of injury, and expectations were low anyway. We’ll say Hoffman didn’t live up to our hopes and move along.

Improvements

As a Habs fan going into this season, there were basically three goals for the team, in my mind:

1. Continue the offensive development of Suzuki/Caufield that started when St.-Louis was hired.
2. Not only regain the prior form of Kirby Dach but help him finally scratch his two-way upside.
3. Find out which, if any, of the young defencemen would be future roster players.

We could spend 10 000 words discussing why those were each a success, but I feel they were, and that’s a big improvement the team was looking for. Props to Kovacevic for a good real-life season. That doesn’t tell us where they improved for fantasy purposes, though.

Like many other teams, Montreal did grow its expected goals-for rate at even strength from 2021-22, but it also coupled it with a growth in goal scoring of 5.5%. In fact, on a per-minute basis, Montreal out-scored teams like Detroit, Nashville, and Minnesota at even strength. For a team destined for the lottery, that’s good, and a definite improvement over the previous season.

The power play also improved for Montreal, as their goals per minute rose in excess of 12%. What is kind of funny here is that the power play didn’t really improve until Rafael Harvey-Pinard showed up: 8.6 PP goals/60 for Montreal with RHP/Suzuki on the ice as compared to 6.1 with Caufield/Suzuki. When fantasy drafts roll around in September, remember that Montreal’s power play did not improve considerably with Caufield, it improved considerably with Harvey-Pinard (and, perhaps, Matheson as well).

Declines

As bad as the team was defensively at even strength, they were just as bad the year prior, if not slightly worse by expected goals against (though, again, they rose league-wide). Considering this was the first year in turning the roster over to the future, stagnation on defence isn’t a bad sign. Things could have been much worse.

The big decline came on the penalty kill. Teams did get better on the PP as compared to a season ago, but Montreal allowed 6.8% more PP goals against per minute than they did in 2021-22. That was largely due to a rise in expected goals against on the PK by nearly 23%. Teams got better on the PP this season but, even when factoring that, Montreal’s penalty kill got much worse. The bright side is that a much healthier team, a more experienced blue line, and maybe some offseason help could aid the PK in 2023-24. They have a long way to go, however, and that’s bad news for goalies Montembeault and Jake Allen.

Where They Go From Here

This is where we get to the bad news, of sorts.

There is a lot of good, young talent here. We’ve talked about a lot of them and didn’t even mention Juraj Slafkovsky, Denis Gurianov, or Arber Xhekaj, or really discuss Harvey-Pinard, Harris, or Kovacevic. Then there are the recent draft picks like Owen Beck, Lane Hutson, Filip Mesar, and on and on. Throw in the fifth overall pick in the 2023 Draft, and there is a lot of high-end potential coming down the pipe.

The bad news is figuring out when they actually get a chance to play. Hoffman has a year left on his contract, as does Joel Edmundson, while Dvorak, David Savard, and Joel Armia each have two. That is an entire even-strength line that could be removed from the roster without the team really losing anything, but they’re under contract so they’ll be on the roster, and taking a roster spot, for at least one more season. That is going to mean some guys staying in the AHL or Junior when they could be in the NHL.

Now that we know they’re not drafting first overall in 2023, it seems unlikely a whole lot is done to improve the roster from outside the organization for the upcoming season. They have under $10M in cap space – more with Carey Price on LTIR, obviously – and need a huge extension for Caufield. Even with Price’s cap space available, anything more than short-term margin-nibbling is not in the cards because of the contracts already signed.

We will have to see exactly what Montreal does this summer, but it seems like mostly the same lineup will return in 2023-24, just hopefully healthy. It could make the goaltenders precarious to own week after week in fantasy, and there won’t be a lot of value on the blue line past Matheson. Montreal’s rebuild is coming along nicely, but until the roster really turns over to the next generation in a couple years, it’ll be more pain like they had in 2022-23.

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