NHL Camps Open This Week and Five Jobs Are Still Genuinely Open

NHL rookie and prospect camps open across the league this week, with most clubs bringing veterans in between September 10 and 13. Preseason games begin September 19, and the regular season opens Tuesday, September 29. That leaves roughly three weeks between the first camp skate and opening night, compressed further by a preseason capped at four games per team.

For fantasy drafters, that compression is the problem. Camp is the last place to gather information before drafts, and this year there is less of it than usual. The efficient approach is to ignore the noise entirely and focus on the small number of jobs that are actually undecided.

Chicago's top center job

Connor Bedard underwent left shoulder surgery in July with a recovery timeline of roughly four months, which rules him out for all of camp and the first month of the season. He is on track to return around early to mid-November after producing 30 goals and 45 assists in 69 games last season.

That leaves the Blackhawks' top center role open for roughly a dozen games, and Frank Nazar is the player positioned to take it with more support around him than he had a year ago. A young center with first-line minutes and power-play time for a month is exactly the profile that wins the early weeks of a fantasy season, and he is being drafted as though the job does not exist.

Minnesota's crease

Filip Gustavsson will miss the start of the season while recovering from hip surgery, which hands Jesper Wallstedt the Wild's net to open the year. Wallstedt spent last season shedding the prospect label and is now getting a head start in what was already going to be a competitive tandem.

Goalie value in fantasy hockey is almost entirely a function of volume, and a young goaltender with a clear runway to start twenty-plus games before a competitor returns is worth more than a nominally better goalie in a true split. Public win projections have him in the low thirties, which would put him firmly in startable territory.

Toronto's roster spot for the first overall pick

The Maple Leafs selected Gavin McKenna first overall out of Penn State and he enters camp attempting to earn an immediate NHL role. Toronto also brought in Sergei Bobrovsky on a three-year contract to take over as its number one goaltender.

McKenna is the single most consequential camp battle in the league for dynasty leagues and one of the more overrated ones for redraft. First overall picks who make the roster rarely produce top-100 fantasy value as rookies unless they land on a scoring line with power-play time. Watch which unit he skates on in the preseason, not whether he makes the team.

Anaheim and Columbus have unsigned stars

Cutter Gauthier remains unsigned in Anaheim following a season in which he scored 41 goals and put up 69 points, and reporting suggests his eventual number will be very large. Adam Fantilli's negotiation with Columbus reportedly still has a gap on annual value, though the talks have not been characterized as troubled.

Both are legitimate top-100 fantasy assets whose availability for opening night is not guaranteed. Draft them at a discount if your league drafts before they sign, and be aware that a player who misses camp entirely typically starts slowly even after signing.

Winnipeg's goaltending situation

Connor Hellebuyck's trade request continues to hang over the league's transaction market, and reporting indicates Winnipeg's realistic list of trade partners may be narrowing rather than expanding. Until it resolves, he is the hardest player in fantasy hockey to price.

The practical advice has not changed: an elite goaltender is worth drafting even with destination uncertainty, because the floor for a starter of his quality is high on almost any roster. The risk is not that he is bad. It is that he starts the season in a holding pattern.

The Verdexed model take

Verdexed's model treats the shortened preseason as a reason to weight last season's deployment more heavily than camp reporting, and that has one clear consequence for drafters. Camp battle stories will be overrepresented in fantasy content this month relative to how much they actually predict, because there are fewer games to generate real signal.

The model's highest-conviction positions coming out of this week are on the two situations where a job opened because of an injury rather than because of a competition. Nazar in Chicago and Wallstedt in Minnesota both have defined runways with a known end date, and defined runways are the most projectable thing in fantasy hockey.

The model is more cautious on the rookie and the unsigned stars. McKenna's fantasy value depends entirely on line placement that will not be settled until late September, and Gauthier and Fantilli carry timeline risk that draft prices are not fully reflecting.

What the four-game preseason changes

The league capped the preseason at four games per team, and the downstream effect on fantasy preparation is larger than it sounds.

In a six or seven game preseason, coaches could give a legitimate audition to a player on the roster bubble across two full games with regular linemates. In a four-game preseason, most of those games are split rosters, veterans play sparingly, and the sample any individual player generates is close to meaningless.

That has two consequences. Camp battles will be decided more on practice reputation and prior-season deployment than on preseason production, which favors incumbents and hurts young players trying to force their way in. And fantasy content will overreact to the few preseason data points that exist, because there is a month of coverage to fill and very little to fill it with.

The correct response is to weight opening-night line combinations, which are usually visible in the final days of camp, far more heavily than anything that happens in a preseason box score. A player who scores twice in a split-squad game against a lineup of prospects has told you nothing. A player skating on the top power-play unit in the last full practice before opening night has told you everything.

What's next

Line rushes from the first three days of veteran camp are the highest-value information of the month, and confirmed goaltending tandems typically emerge by the second preseason game. Track both, ignore the rest, and set your draft board in the last week of September rather than the first.