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The puck drops on the 2022-23 NHL regular season in just eight days.

While the opener always seems to creep up on us during the first few weeks of the NFL season, it’s not like we are completely unprepared at this point.

Last night, my fantasy hockey season officially got underway with a draft for a keeper league that spans more than a decade. 

While I had my work cut out for me as a manager that sold last year in an attempt to accumulate as many high picks as possible, I was fortunate to build around one key player that I think is still being slept on both in fantasy hockey leagues and among the trading team at FanDuel.

Let me explain with a look at an NHL futures bet to consider right now at FanDuel.

Here’s the Morning Coffee for Wednesday September 28th, 2022.

Will Jack Hughes Take Another Step This Season?

The New Jersey Devils selected Jack Hughes with the 1st overall pick in the 2019 NHL Draft.

After accumulating 52 points in 117 games over his first two seasons in the league, Hughes took a major step as a 20-year-old last season.

Hughes scored 26 goals and recorded 56 points in just 49 games.

For a little perspective, his 0.53 goals per game matched Jake Guentzel and Nikita Kucherov for the 15th-best mark in the entire NHL.

His 1.14 points per game ranked among the top-25 skaters in the entire NHL – the exact same number that Brad Marchand produced.

After showcasing some of his immense potential last year, Hughes is primed to take another step forward as a 21-year-old in his fourth NHL season.

He’s skated with free agent addition Ondrej Palat and 2020 first round pick Alexander Holtz in the pre-season, and it didn’t take them long to showcase their chemistry.

While I’ve built around Hughes as my fantasy hockey keeper league centre, I also stumbled on the over/under for the number of points that Hughes will finish with this NHL season at FanDuel.

The traders at FanDuel set Hughes’ over/under at 70.5 points.

Keep in mind, if we take Hughes’ average points per game mark from last season and multiply it by 82 games, then we know Hughes was on pace for a 93.5 points last season, which would be well clear of the over/under set at FanDuel for his points prop.

While there’s always the chance that something goes wrong, a healthy Hughes should have no problem recording over 70.5 points this season.

While I usually don’t like locking in NHL futures bets that are priced at anything below +500, Hughes is quickly becoming one of my favourite players to watch, and I’ll already be cheering him on from a fantasy perspective this season.

I’ll recommend Hughes to go over 70.5 regular season points as an NHL futures bet to consider at FanDuel for the 2022-23 regular season.

The Judge Home Run Watch Continues

It wasn’t by mistake that my fantasy hockey league drafted last night.

With no NFL, what else were we going to do on a Tuesday night?

Fortunately for us, there were no major distractions in Major League Baseball.

Aaron Judge failed to match Roger Maris’ all-time AL record for home runs once again, but he did score a couple of runs as the New York Yankees clinched the AL East title with a 5-2 win over the Toronto Blue Jays.

Once again, it’s a tough break for anybody that went down to the game to see if they can witness history.

The good news is that Judge and the Yankees are right back at it tonight as a -132 money line favourite in Toronto.

The Blue Jays will send Mitch White to the mound, and he’s certainly had his fair share of struggles this season.

White is 1-6 with a 5.12 ERA this season, and Toronto has lost each of his last five starts dating back to August.

Meanwhile, Judge is 2-for-2 at the plate in his career versus White.

FanDuel has Judge at +255 to hit a home run tonight.

They have him at +2200 to hit two home runs.

Judge to hit a home run and the Yankees to win pays +363 at FanDuel for tonight’s game.