Fantasy hockey rankings – How the schedule benefits Hurricanes, Flyers

My apologies to Mr. McDavid.

You may have briefly noticed a rest-of-season rankings on Monday that triumphantly stated Nathan MacKinnon finally wrestled the No. 1 spot away from Connor McDavid for the first time in these fantasy rankings. My bad. That’s what I get for putting a blemish on another perfect feat in this season for the ages from the Oilers superstar, who last night became the first player to score 140 points in a season since Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr both did it in 1995-96, and the first time an Oiler has crossed that threshold since Wayne Gretzky in 1987-88.

My logic was sound, don’t get me wrong. On Monday, based on the rest of the season (the entire premise for these rankings, I remind you), MacKinnon had more remaining value than McDavid. More games made up for the gap in their per-game projected value.

But I forgot one of the fantasy lessons we learned from the cascade of COVID-19 cancellations of the past couple seasons: You can’t tack on cancelled and rescheduled games to the fantasy championship. This season, a water-main burst in Nashville and a devastating snow storm in Buffalo that trapped the Sabres left us with two such games on April 14 that take place after your fantasy hockey league will be decided. The Avalanche are in that game in Nashville and I included those post-schedule contests in the calculations that pushed MacKinnon past McDavid.

I should have known nothing can stop Connor this season. When removing even just the one game from the Avs, McDavid projects to the top again. So he never should have fallen from his lofty post to begin with.

So, in the interest of getting this right, I’ve redone the final rest-of-season rankings, this time as of Tuesday, March 28, which meant also removing the six Monday, March 28 games from the projections. That means quite a few changes up and down the rankings.

I will also offer a re-do of the remaining schedule chart that accounts for only the games from Tuesday, March 28, to Wednesday, April 14, which will encompass the remainder of the fantasy hockey championship here at ESPN.com.

This is a look at the goals against per 60 of the opponents of each team for the rest of the schedule again. I’ve posted this chart a few times over the past couple of weeks, but it changes and updates as the goals against per 60 of teams change (or as I, ahem, correct the schedule).