Do We Care About NHL Preseason?

NHL Training Camps began this week. If you aren’t plugged into the news and want to be, be sure to follow these accounts on Twitter/X:

Daily Faceoff - Fantasy (@DFOFantasy) / X (twitter.com)

https://twitter.com/GameDayLines

And some people still don’t know this that follow me and hang out in the Morning Skate Pod Discord, but I maintain rather meticulously (though I haven’t yet done a sweep through each list for the upcoming year) a list for each of the 32 teams, as well as a league-wide one. You can find all of them by following me - I’ve linked the NHL-wide one below, and each team is a 2 or 3-letter acronym. Elon ruined the appearance, but I think you can still hack the system by going to https://twitter.com/FakeMoods/lists/ABC. That’s what I do, at least.

My team acronyms are the correct ones, and they also mean that Elliotte Friedman can’t use my lists, which is an added bonus: @FakeMoods/NHL / X (twitter.com)

With the Xwitter promotion finished, let’s talk about the NHL preseason. If you’re reading this, you’re probably the sort that has been mainlining the lines that have come across your timeline all week. You don’t need me to tell you where to find the latest news from training camp.

Not because, like, you have to care about it, but maybe you’ve missed hockey, or you hate football (until Sunday morning when hope springs eternal…), or you just really don’t want to talk about Roblox with your kids or to your boss about the work you’re not doing while you draft 150 Best Puck Classic teams.

Let’s do a quick segment called “Should I Care About This?”, covering the many things you can expect to see from the moment camp opens until the horn sounds on the final preseason game.

This will, of course, have a fantasy slant to it. For your home team rooting interests, you only need to know two things:

1) every prospect who has so much as one good shift, particularly in a home game where the stars are littering the top six, will have seven articles deeming them The Next Big Thing and the player that the Front Office has been waiting six long years for to emerge of the late rounds of their first two draft classes to give this team much-needed depth. Needless to say, this player will be in the AHL to start the year and you’ll never think of him again. The entire Front Office will be gone by summer.

2) the oft-maligned defender on your team will say he came into camp looking to be an offensive threat, and the coach is encouraging him to be involved in the play. He won’t be, and by January you’ll be scouring the college free-agent class of rearguards, hoping one of them can make a damn breakout pass. But that one hit he threw in November was pretty cool, and he only had to serve a six-game suspension for it, doubling as a chance to see the 7th D who is Definitely Better Than Him play for a bit before Mr. Suspension returned to the lineup.

Let’s get into it.

Today’s Primary Point: Should I Care About This? (Preseason Edition)

Training Camp Lines - NO

Hold on, what? What else are we here for? Let me be clear..

Training Camp Forward Combinations - YES

This is the most important one, and quite honestly the main reason I’m writing this. You see, understanding the preseason is more of an art than a science. A lot of teams will throw a lot of shit at the wall in hopes that it sticks, and a lot of it doesn’t matter.

Let’s take a step back. The early days of training camp usually involve two to three groups of practicing players. Each group will have a nominal “NHL-line” consisting of Players Who Are Probably NHL Regulars, a possible fourth line of names you may recognize, and then two lines of absolute nobodies or young prospects. These groups are created so that there is enough practice/ice time to go around, but depending on schedule may also indicate which set of players will/will not play in an upcoming Preseason game.

So, teams tend to be very intentional with who they put together from the NHL buckets. However, nearly every team experiments throughout camp, using prospects or new faces in known roles throughout the lineup, often as a benchmark of sorts (i.e., how close does Zach Benson look to Alex Tuch [not at all in stature!] playing alongside Jeff Skinner and Tage?).

Really, what we are looking for is a common pairing. It could be two wingers (think Zuccarello and Kaprizov) cycling through centers (MIN is still looking… Marco Rossi come on down!) or a C-W combination (like the aforementioned Tage-Skinner) that are sticking together. Keep an eye on Edmonton, for example, where they started off camp with Evander Kane and Connor Brown flanking McDavid. Perhaps that’s what the lineup looks like in three weeks, but my guess is that this is more of a situation where there’s a few players competing for couple spots (where exactly depends on how Hyman/Drai/RNH are scattered throughout the lineup). The day-to-day lineup decisions won’t mean much, but if either Evander or Brown seems to “stick” to McDavid over these three weeks, that’s a telling signal we may be able to weaponize in our Fantasy drafts since we should expect that player to have the best chance to play with McDavid, even if the full three-man lines fluctuate over the next ~20 days.

Also consider that many teams have a very good idea of what they want to do/continue from last year, while others do not. Beat writers are typically a great source for this. It has come out of the LA Kings organization, all summer long seemingly, that Fiala would be playing alongside Dubois, with Arvidsson sticking to Danault and the top line of Kempe-Kopitar-Byfield remaining intact. Add in that last year’s top nine staples Iafallo and Vilardi were part of the Dubois trade return for Winnipeg, there’s an open job alongside Fiala-Dubois that feels awfully ripe for the taking. When Arthur Kaliyev shows up there, wielding one of the best shots in the league, the intent behind that decision and the known context disseminated from the top of the organization is the reason to celebrate a full line combination.

Every tweeted lineup is a snowflake, and it’s important (well, as important as anything in the preseason is..) to understand the context around each lineup before you go overreacting.

Player Speak - NO

Here’s a tip. What the players say on media day doesn’t matter. Especially if you ask Boone Jenner what’s in his phone’s photo album. Anything important coming from a player will be turned into a feature from a well-connected beat writer. Keep in mind that anything a player says is largely nonsense (think “best shape of my life” or “I put on ten pounds”) because hockey is largely a talent-driven game.

Yes, endurance is important, and strength is too, but there’s a reason you can walk down the street and not recognize most hockey players (beyond the fact that the NHL markets its players with less vigor than I display while washing the dishes). Unlike the skyscrapers of the NBA or the behemoths that make up a majority of an NFL locker room, there’s very few skills in hockey that rely upon physical largesse the way those other sports do. Keep an eye on the player who is working on adding a few layers of deception to their wristshot or went to a new skills coach’s camp; just know that a meaningful change will almost always get picked up and elaborated with more depth by a beat writer, and the player’s interview won’t be the only way to access this info. Speaking of eyes, also pay attention if your goalie needs corrective eye surgery.

That’s usually a bad sign.

Coach Speak - NO

When I said what the players say doesn’t matter, I meant it. But the coach? Well, I really want it to matter. There’s a fantasy gold-mine just waiting for the coach that enters the new year dreaming up a new way to apply pressure in all three zones, tells all five skaters on the ice to utilize their offensive gifts accordingly, and doesn’t punish players for trying to bite off more than they can chew in the attacking end. But we have to be realistic in that there is only one Don Granato, who actually practices what he preaches.

Exhibit A: Lane Lambert, who took an Islanders team that finished 21st and 23rd in goalscoring, famously sacrificing offense for defense, in the final two seasons of Barry Trotz and teased enough scoring out of the squad to finish a nice and tidy 22nd in the league last season.

How about Rick Bowness, who was tasked with replacing Paul Maurice in Winnipeg and had this written about him, roughly a year ago today?

In case you were wondering, after finishing 17th in goals in Maurice’s final year at the helm the Jets wound up 21st league-wide last year. Imagine what that would have looked like without Josh Morrissey’s season!

In these instances, there’s very little to be gained by being early to an underlying shift in philosophy. It’s a long season and talk is cheap.

We’ll all be glad we heeded this advice when the new coach that was totally going to change things comes in and scratches that prospect forward in game 4 after tallying three goals in as many games because he didn’t dump the puck properly before changing.

GM Speak - YES

Finally, someone we can listen to. After a long offseason of being really close to acquiring any number of superstar players, ultimately settling on giving $3.5mil to a 3rd line forward and trading that one AHL dude for the other AHL dude, the GM’s work is largely done once the players hit the ice. All that’s left for them is to arrange for talented youngsters to return to their CHL teams and maybe bring in a few older guys on PTOs to fill preseason rosters.

And to tell us what the hell is going on with these injured dudes. Yes, for some reason the league that hides all sorts of injury information from its fans in the guise of protecting a competitive edge will gather around a microphone and tell us every single procedure that a player had, projecting timelines around nearly every player who misses the start of camp.

Last year it was Marchand and McAvoy, this year it’s Montour and Ekblad… but almost universally, if you pay attention, you’ll gather lots of breadcrumbs to even determine timelines within the provided timelines. Instead of playing it close to vest, we have updates all across the league on players that are intended to be transparent and to set the stage for the upcoming season.

What a treat, almost like the league cares about its viewers. If only we knew it wasn’t the GM totally sending a signal to ownership that says “We might suck for the first ten games, but it’ll be okay I promise. Please don’t fire me until at least March”.

It goes without saying that these are among the most important updates that we get as far as moving ADP in season-long contests like Underdog Fantasy, especially ones that have no IR slots. Expecting Andrei Svechnikov to miss a couple months, a couple weeks, or to be ready for Opening Night coming off a torn ACL changes the calculus in a way that does impact the results. Additionally, this is one of the only things that the field really isn’t reacting to, because this news is relatively obscure to the average “casual”, which only heightens the advantage that can be gained from it.

Preseason Games - NO

This one hurts to write, particularly with NHL DFS starting us off with a couple weeks of preseason slates that are a ton of fun for anyone who loves to play their favorite prospects in these contests. But what happens on the ice will almost never move the needle from a fantasy standpoint. Unless you’re in a format that rewards 3rd line-level offensive output (or an otherwise very deep format), the fantasy-relevant players are almost never “on the bubble” of the roster, and the line combinations in November have very little to do with success rates in preseason. Just ask Dylan Holloway, who scored 6 points in 5 games (a better clip than McDavid’s 3 in 3!) and promptly averaged 9:35 TOI a night come the regular season.

Once you know who is playing with who (and as covered above, what pairings are remaining constant throughout the preseason), the rest is largely filler or helps determine the 4th line/AHL cut-off.

Connor Bedard Shooting Into An Empty Net - ABSOLUTELY YES

Kid can shoot. Trust me, I know things. 2024’s 1.03 on Underdog, teammates be damned. Connor McDavid has to lug around Leon Draisaitl and you don’t hear anyone complaining!

Secondary Assists: Links You Should Click

Please make sure you're subscribed to the Morning Skate Podcast on your podcast app of choice. You should see our Underdog series in your pod catcher, otherwise you are still subbed to the old feed. New feed linked in this thread. We will be back to pod-only come the start of the season, breaking down multiple DraftKings slates per week (mostly T/Th)!

DJ Mitchell and I went live on Tuesday discussing our top exposures as we both approach the century mark on Underdog Fantasy. Tune in every Tuesday at 9PM EST for more discussion as we close in on the start of the regular season!

Use this link and the code “MSP” to sign up on Underdog Fantasy to draft along with us and receive a matched deposit bonus of up to $100 if you deposit $100!

Sign up for PuckLuck.com and use the code MSP for 10% off a subscription. PuckLuck features data-based Sportsbetting, DFS, and Underdog picks, pick’ems, and projections, useful for any hockey fan who wants to gain an edge!

If you are an incredibly sick person, before training camps there were rookie camps. I enjoyed this breakdown of takeaways from these camps, courtesy of the prospect-watchers over at the Athletic: NHL rookie camp standouts 2023: Who impressed in Buffalo, Penticton, Traverse City and Vegas? - The Athletic

Check out my earlier newsletters if you haven’t yet for some in-depth discussion of my approach to the Underdog Fantasy Best Puck Classic tournament with $25k to first place!