Short Shifts -- The Home Stretch
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What Olympic injury fallout should fantasy managers know about?
Thank you.
What's up, champs? Welcome to another episode of the Short Shifts Fantasy Hockey Podcast, brought to you by Keeping Carlson. I'm your host, Jeremy Versillo, and I'm back after the Olympic break, ready to roll with a solo show as the NHL kicks off again. There's only about two and a half weeks left before the fantasy regular season wraps up, so I'll be here to help keep you in the loop on all the big news for your fantasy squad as playoffs approach. Let's get right to it. First off, we have some unfortunate injury fallout from the Olympics. Sidney Crosby will be out for probably close to four weeks. Originally, it was a minimum of four weeks. Now it's, well, four weeks from the injury, but he tried to get ready to play in the gold medal game, so he might have sent himself back a little bit.
Either way, you won't have Crosby for the rest of your regular season and probably not the first rounds of the fantasy playoffs either. This has shifted the lines in Pittsburgh a little bit. Now, Ricard Raquel is centering that top unit or second unit, depending on how you look at it. And AHL call-up Avery Hayes is on that left wing slot. This is kind of an interesting pickup opportunity, I think. Hayes was a bit of an unknown coming into season, but he got a ton of praise in training camp. He actually was an undrafted free agent, got a ton of praise, and is killing it in the AHL this year to the tune of 30 points in 36 games. He's got shots. He's got hits. He's got a strong power play resume. I hope he sticks on that top unit for the next couple weeks and potentially gets some power play two-time.
I have not seen any power play lines yet from the Penguins as their game just started as I'm recording this, but he's an interesting pickup in a deeper league or any sort of speculative pickup. Because Crosby's out. He could be there for a while if he sticks. And the Penguins have a pretty good schedule coming up. You know, they play today, Thursday. They play Saturday, Sunday. They play four games next week. And they have a decent playoff schedule, which does include a five-game finals week. But that's less of an issue when Crosby will likely be back by then. The other injury clarification we got coming out of the Olympics is Mikko Rantanen. He's out at least two weeks, and Rupe Hintz was ill for the last game, but it sounds like he's working his way back.
This opened up some opportunity for Matt Duchesne and Jamie Benn to jump onto the top power play, and at least Duchesne did something with it last night. He was hot going into the break with six goals and three assists in his last six games, and he wasn't even on power play one then. Now he added another goal and a power play assist in his first game back. He's gotten more time to catch up on his conditioning after missing a month plus with an injury. So I'm kind of interested in picking him up for potentially a big last four or five weeks of the season. He was a point per game player last year, was drafted with that expectation and just never really got off the ground to start this season. This could be the time to sneakily add Matt Duchesne if he's sitting on your waiver wire in any leagues.
Jamie Benn similarly got elevated to the top power play. He was hot before the break with two goals and six assists in his final four games, but he had no points yesterday. I think Benn likely will be the one kicked off the power play unit when Hintz comes back, but we'll have to wait and see on that. Not as interested in him as I am in Matt Duchesne, although it is useful that Jamie Benn, as an older guy with a bit of a physical game, got a couple weeks to rest. I'm going to go more into that after the break, though, with some other guys. I know you're probably thinking right now, wait, Jeremy, there's so many other guys who missed games coming back from the Olympics. Are you going to talk about all of them?
And no. I am going to just mention that a number of guys were game time decisions, got the first game back off, maybe got limited minutes in their first game.
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