Antti Raanta is on the verge of his long-awaited return to the crease.

The Arizona Coyotes goaltender will start Saturday's road game against the Colorado Avalanche, Coyotes head coach Rick Tocchet confirmed Friday, according to The Athletic's Craig Morgan.

Raanta was recalled last week after earning a 19-save shutout with Arizona's AHL affiliate, the Tucson Roadrunners, while on a conditioning stint due to a minor injury he suffered in the preseason.

The 30-year-old last played in the NHL on Nov. 27, 2018, when he suffered an injury in a game against the Minnesota Wild. He was placed on injured reserve in December and missed the rest of the season.

Raanta posted a .906 save percentage across 12 contests in 2018-19. He authored a .930 mark over 47 games in 2017-18, his first campaign with the Coyotes.

Arizona acquired him in a draft-day trade with the New York Rangers in 2017.

Copyright © 2019 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

TORONTO - Anthony Cirelli has never met a hockey puck he didn't want.

The unassuming Tampa Bay Lightning center is inherently drawn to the little rubber disc and will do everything in his power to retrieve it: waving his left-handed stick in passing lanes, poking at feet and shin pads, mucking it up along the boards, and generally harassing puck carriers.

They are not acts of intimidation. Gaining possession is the sole focus.

"If I'm not skating, I'm pretty useless out there," Cirelli said Thursday afternoon from his stall at Scotiabank Arena, sweat-soaked after a workout ahead of Tampa's statement win over the Toronto Maple Leafs. "I don't know where it came from. I've just always had that 'go' mentality."

Cirelli, one of the NHL's top faceoff men last year, wasn't at his best in the circle during Thursday's game, winning just seven of 17 draws against the Leafs. Two of those wins, however, quickly resulted in goals for the Lightning. By night's end, he'd quietly collected three assists. Though Cirelli was on the ice for 20 even-strength shot attempts against and only nine attempts for in a season-low 17 minutes of action, he still found a way to make an impact.

He approaches each shift as if it's his last moment on Earth, grinding away until something positive materializes even when the opposition's best - in this case, Auston Matthews, John Tavares, and Mitch Marner - are staring back.

"His determination to get his job done, to get the puck and to battle, it's really something you admire," Lightning defenseman Kevin Shattenkirk said. "His compete level on 50-50 pucks is tremendous. He has a low center of gravity, seems to really drive in, so he's strong on his skates. For that reason, he comes out of a lot of those battles with the puck."

Cirelli's well-roundedness as a center legitimizes head coach Jon Cooper's willingness to load up his top line - which is exactly what he did against Toronto when top pivot Brayden Point made his season debut. On a star-studded crew featuring Point, super-sniper Steven Stamkos, and reigning MVP Nikita Kucherov, Cirelli is easily the Lightning's fourth-most important forward. There's plenty to like about his two-way game.

"I guess the better question would be, 'What don't I like?'" Cooper cracked. "When you ask players on our team who plays the game right, it's (rare) that Cirelli's name doesn't come up."

Stamkos agreed.

"As a rookie last year, it was his responsibility on this team to shoulder the workload of shutting down other team's top lines, taking big faceoffs, being out there at the end of games," the Lightning captain said. "It's rare to find someone that young (and responsible). ... He's a huge part of our team. Everywhere he's gone he's kind of been that player, and he's that for us as well."

Cirelli's path has been well documented. He was just another minor hockey player, unknown until the age of 17 when the OHL's Oshawa Generals discovered him. He's been on a rocket-fueled trajectory ever since, scoring multiple championship-winning goals in junior, going to the Lightning in the third round of the 2015 NHL Draft, representing Canada twice at high-profile tournaments, and finishing sixth in 2018-19 Calder Trophy voting.

Now established at the NHL level, Cirelli's ready to assert himself during his second full season. Cooper has mentioned numerous times that Cirelli has the potential to be the next Patrice Bergeron, the Boston Bruins' two-way leader who owns a record-tying four Selke Trophies. And the coach isn't the only one who thinks so.

"The sky's the limit for him, really. It seems like he's trending toward the Bergeron-type of player," Shattenkirk said, the comparison unprompted. "He's everywhere at all times, taking care of everyone's job for them while doing his own."

For his career, Cirelli has a cool 53% Corsi For rating - despite starting 57% of his even-strength shifts in the defensive zone and typically shadowing opponents' best lines. What's more, he's drawn 15 more penalties than he's taken (32-17). As a key member of the first unit of a top-five penalty-killing team, he's already bagged five shorthanded goals in 104 regular-season games.

Thanks to his instincts and solid skating, Cirelli finds himself on breakaways or partial breaks fairly often for a player not known for his speed. He recorded a respectable 19 goals and 20 assists in 82 games last season, and he's been the driving force between veteran wingers Ondrej Palat and Alex Killorn through four games this year. Though he's rarely used on the power play - an average of five seconds per game right now - two of Cirelli's four assists thus far have come with the man advantage. Promoted this season to second-line center, there's ample opportunity for Cirelli to produce more offense.

Cirelli has spent the past few offseasons tweaking his skating mechanics with Barb Underhill, Tampa Bay's skating guru. He's learned, for instance, to swing his arms in a more efficient manner. The Toronto-area native also spent hours refining his shot each day this past summer, first during on-ice sessions led by instructors and then alone at his family's home. After a rigorous day of workouts at the gym and rink, he'd shoot 150-200 pucks before bed.

Cirelli's trainer, Dan Noble of Noble Sport and Performance, considers the 6-foot, 193-pounder a unique player because he had limited exposure to specialized coaches as a youngster. Relying on smarts and hard work to climb the ranks, Cirelli can still improve drastically within a single summer. His no-quit mentality doesn't hurt, either.

"Anthony's got zero ego," Noble said. "The humility he has, the desire to get better, it's there."

Re-examining the 2015 draft, it's comical to see Cirelli's name way down in the third round, sandwiched between Jean-Christophe Beaudin and Vili Saarijarvi, neither of whom has played an NHL game. Of the 30 third-round picks that year, Cirelli is the only one to have appeared in more than 17 games. Despite going 72nd overall, he ranks 28th in his entire draft class in games played, trailing third overall pick Dylan Strome by just three contests.

Since the Lightning burned the first season of his three-year, entry-level deal in 2017-18 by giving him 18 regular-season appearances and 17 playoff games, Cirelli is a pending restricted free agent. Having only turned 22 in July, he's already playing a crucial role for his team while making just $728,333 this season.

That's especially important for the cap-strapped Lightning, whose other big-time contributors - namely Stamkos, Kucherov, Point, No. 1 defenseman Victor Hedman, workhorse blue-liner Ryan McDonagh, and starting goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy - combine to eat up a large portion of the club's payroll.

"That's what you need," Stamkos said of Cirelli's rise. "In a salary-cap world, you need young guys to come in and have an impact right away. And he's one of those guys."

Cirelli said there's been no talk of an extension between his agent and the team. Of course, there's plenty of time to work out a deal between now and next season. For what it's worth, Cirelli appears perfectly content with his place within the Lightning's "well-run, unbelievable organization."

Already playing second-line minutes and on the verge of a healthy raise, Cirelli is not done growing. History tells us he will reach for the next rung on the developmental ladder as feverishly as he hounds a loose puck.

"You always have to have a chip on your shoulder," Cirelli said. "You can never be comfortable with where you're at."

John Matisz is theScore's national hockey writer.

Copyright © 2019 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

Find line reports, best bets, and subscribe to push notifications in the Betting News section.

Happy Thanksgiving, Canada. And a happy Columbus Day to Americans.

The long weekend treats us to an extra-busy NHL schedule, including a handful of Monday matinees. Enjoy the holiday, and here's to making it a profitable one.

Game betting

Anaheim Ducks at Columbus Blue Jackets (Friday)

No strangers to a Friday night home game, the Blue Jackets are typically stingy in these contests. Eight of the last nine have gone under the total (one push), while they've lost seven of 10. With John Gibson in town, a low-scoring Ducks win warrants a long look.

Winnipeg Jets at Chicago Blackhawks (Saturday)

If there's one thing the Jets and Blackhawks do well, it's score goals. Neither team puts much of an emphasis on keeping them out. The four meetings between them last season produced 34 goals, with at least seven in each game. You would be wise to give the over strong consideration.

St. Louis Blues at Montreal Canadiens (Saturday)

There's a reason Carey Price has earned the nickname "Mr. Saturday Night." The Canadiens goalie thrives on Hockey Night in Canada, especially at the Bell Centre. He should be locked in for a visit from the Stanley Cup champion Blues, guiding the Habs to another Saturday night win.

Toronto Maple Leafs at Detroit Red Wings (Saturday)

It's Leafs and Red Wings on HNIC. Both teams have been scoring for fun early in the season, but 10 of their last 12 meetings in Motown have gone under 5.5 goals. Six of them have gone under 4.5. Toronto should emphasize bouncing back defensively after allowing seven goals to the Lightning. With a high total projected for Saturday night, this is a great spot to get in on the under.

Philadelphia Flyers at Vancouver Canucks (Saturday)

The Canucks haven't enjoyed the best start to the season, but they're in a great spot Saturday as they play their second contest of a three-game homestand that spans 11 days. The Flyers are hardly as lucky - they fly back from their season opener in Prague for a solitary home game before having to fly across the country and north of the border for this one. That much travel in a short span borders on cruel. Back Vancouver.

Calgary Flames at San Jose Sharks (Sunday)

It's a daunting weekend for the Flames, who visit Vegas on Saturday and then immediately fly to San Jose for a date with the Sharks. San Jose got the monkey off its back by defeating the Blackhawks on Thursday night, and Patrick Marleau looks 25 again. I get the sense the Sharks are about to hit their stride. They're too good not to.

Anaheim Ducks at Boston Bruins (Monday, 1 p.m. ET)

Over the past three seasons, the Ducks are 3-10 in away games after playing a back-to-back, which they have Thursday-Friday against Pittsburgh and Columbus. Making matters worse for Anaheim is an early start against the Bruins, with puck drop scheduled for 10 a.m. PT.

Game props

Winnipeg Jets at Chicago Blackhawks (Saturday)

Not only are a lot of goals scored when these teams meet, but it tends to happen early: Of the 34 goals across their four matchups last season, the highest percentage of them came in the first period (12). Hit the over in the opening 20 minutes here and don't look back.

Toronto Maple Leafs at Detroit Red Wings (Saturday)

This is another spot to double down. The last 12 meetings between these teams in Detroit produced just eight first-period goals. Under 1.5, anyone?

Columbus Blue Jackets at Carolina Hurricanes (Saturday)

Both of these teams play Friday and Saturday. The Hurricanes are on a 12-1 run in the second game of a home back-to-back, while the Blue Jackets were 0-5 last season on the road when playing at home the night before. Lower the likely juice on the Canes here by taking them to win in regulation.

Calgary Flames at Vegas Golden Knights (Saturday)

The Flames have never won in Vegas and have four goals in four visits. They were shut out twice by the Golden Knights. Take their team total under and their alternate team total under 1.5 if you're feeling especially frisky.

Player props

Florida Panthers at Buffalo Sabres (Friday)

Aleksander Barkov is still looking for his first goal in the infant stages of the season and you know an explosion is coming soon. Back the Panthers sophomore as he faces a Sabres team he put up eight points on (four goals, four assists) in four games last season.

Toronto Maple Leafs at Detroit Red Wings (Saturday)

Keep riding Auston Matthews to score in October. He's up to 31 goals in 37 October games in his career, more than he has in any other month by far. He will run cold soon - he always does - but take him Saturday; he has 10 goals in 11 career contests against the Red Wings.

Columbus Blue Jackets at Carolina Hurricanes (Saturday)

The Andrei Svechnikov breakout is upon us. I promise. He's yet to find the back of the net but he has been buzzing, with six assists through Carolina's first four games. He's driving play and it's a matter of time before the goals follow. Against a Blue Jackets team that's conceding goals in bunches, back Svech to get on the scoresheet.

Alex Moretto is a sports betting writer for theScore. A journalism graduate from Guelph-Humber University, he has worked in sports media for over a decade. He will bet on anything from the Super Bowl to amateur soccer, is too impatient for futures, and will never trust a kicker. Find him on Twitter @alexjmoretto.

Copyright © 2019 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

When Peko Hosoi competes against her 12-year-old nieces in fantasy football, she abides by a firm rule: never play for money. In a family of self-proclaimed "excellent smack talkers," bragging rights alone constitute a worthy prize. And she’d rather not veer too close to fraught ethical territory; as the founder of the MIT Sports Lab in Boston, she has firsthand access to a trove of data about the results of games played through the daily fantasy provider FanDuel.

Based on the insights Hosoi has gleaned from that data, even the staunchest fantasy football players among us - the diehards who mine draft rankings to find potential steals and monitor the waiver wire all week to optimize their shot at dominating Sunday - will realize they can't prepare for every twist of fate.

In U.S. and Canadian daily fantasy sports, football is the toughest game in which to make an easy buck, given how influential random chance can be in determining the outcomes of its matchups. Deep knowledge of NFL depth charts, or proficient navigation of the weekly transactional churn, is often not sufficient to guarantee victory, at least compared to the experience of expert players in fantasy baseball, basketball, and hockey.

This quirk is a major takeaway from a 2018 research paper co-authored by Hosoi. She and her colleagues devised a metric to quantify the extent to which luck and skill decide winners and losers in different daily fantasy sports - a mathematical answer to the initial policy question of whether these games were skill-based enough to convince state legislatures that they should be legalized.

Hosoi's findings seem particularly relevant in October, the only time of year that the MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL calendars - and, with them, each league's parallel fantasy universe - all intersect. For the millions of fans across those sports who manage a team of their own, one glance at the above spectrum should be enough to process another lesson.

"If you're somebody who's trying to make a bunch of money out of this," Hosoi said, "play fantasy basketball."

In order to situate each fantasy sport on the spectrum, Hosoi and her fellow researchers set out a few years ago to study the results of salary-capped baseball, basketball, football, and hockey games played on FanDuel during the 2013-14 and 2014-15 seasons. If skill tended to trump luck in those competitions, a straightforward comparison - a player's average performance in the first half of a season versus their average performance in the second half - would illuminate its impact.

"One of the hallmarks of skill is persistence," Hosoi said. If a game is mostly based on skill, a player who wins more often than not remains likely to keep winning all season. If you lose in a blowout every week, it would be reasonable to expect that dispiriting trend to continue.

"Whereas if I'm flipping coins," Hosoi said, referencing an activity that appears on the spectrum for context, "and I happen to do well (at) flipping coins in February, that's in no way predictive of what I'm going to do in March."

By delving into win splits, Hosoi and her team found that victory in all four fantasy sports - and in their real-world versions - depends mainly on skill, though to varying degrees. The actual NBA, where teams play 82 games and hoist nearly a hundred shots per night, rewards aptitude more than any other competition. The actual NHL, where teams play 82 games but generate far fewer quality scoring chances, hews closer to the midpoint of the scale - closer to flipping a coin.

Devoted hockey fans already know that a single fortunate bounce can mean a lot on any given night. The spectrum's innovation is showcasing the rapport between the balance of luck and skill in a real sport and the balance of luck and skill in most corresponding fantasy variants. In both types of basketball, talent is overwhelmingly likely to prevail, since it's a more predictable game. Hockey, in whichever form, is comparatively chaotic.

Two points initially struck Hosoi as odd, she said: "One of them I can explain and one of them I can't."

The first of those surprises is that fantasy baseball scored higher on the skill spectrum than the sport itself. Her theory? The proliferation of advanced stats in baseball has created a gulf between the best fantasy players and the rest of the field that exceeds the distance between MLB championship contenders and cellar-dwellers. Equipped with their detailed spreadsheets, these fantasy managers are better positioned to exploit a skill gap than they would be in other games.

It's harder to explain the NFL's close proximity to the pure-skill end of the spectrum. The gap between luck's hold on fantasy football and on actual football is greater than in other sports, even though logic suggests that random chance should be consequential in a league whose teams play only 16 games and don't score all that much.

"I'm going to speculate wildly," Hosoi said, putting forth two ideas as to why skill carries the day on the field. Maybe, like in fantasy baseball, there is a vast talent imbalance between NFL rosters, and it doesn't take many games for the proper pecking order to take hold. Maybe, as one of her students has hypothesized, it doesn't matter that scoring plays are infrequent because every down is a scoring opportunity, increasing the likelihood that the best teams will win out over time.

Individual skill doesn't carry the same sway in fantasy football, which many players who compete in leagues against their friends may intuitively understand. Despite that, football is the favorite fantasy sport of two-thirds of the 59.3 million people who play all manner of such games in the U.S. and Canada, according to 2017 data from the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.

To Hosoi, fantasy football's popularity goes hand in hand with its accessibility. When even diehard players need a little intangible help to win, odds are better that parity will reign.

"It's a game where a lot of people can participate regardless of their ability," she said. "You don't want to walk into a game where you're just going to get trounced every time. The way you make that fun for that population is you have to add an element of chance."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2019 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

Jake DeBrusk almost had a goal and an assist on Thursday night against the Colorado Avalanche, but the winger remains pointless on the season due to a couple of calls that went against his Boston Bruins.

First, DeBrusk assisted this disallowed goal by Karson Kuhlman, which was called back for goalie interference on David Krejci.

Later, DeBrusk thought he'd finally gotten off the schneid when he roofed one on the power play, but that goal was called back for an offside during the zone entry.

The two goals wound up being the difference in the contest, as the Avs went on to win 4-2. DeBrusk was notably frustrated afterward - from both a personal and a team perspective.

"Any time that you get production finally and it gets taken away from you - twice - it’s just one of those things where, you know, I almost don’t believe it but at the same time that’s how things are going for me," he said.

"I scored and had an assist tonight, but they got pulled back. We should’ve won this game 4-2, but honestly, those weren’t goals, I guess. One was offside and goaltender interference. They looked at it and called it how it was. I don’t think it’s going to snowball, but it's definitely pissing me off, for sure."

DeBrusk scored a career-high 27 goals in 68 games last year. Now in his third NHL campaign, many pundits had predicted a breakout season for the 22-year-old, but he's off to a slow - and perhaps unlucky - start through four games.

Copyright © 2019 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.