First Draft - the Khyber No-look Pass

The Sunday of the draft, I was ready to go. I had crammed for information from websites and podcasts, and was trying not to let my fantasy football and baseball seasons distract from the most important night of the season for this new effort.

I got an email from a guy I’ve played football against for years inviting me to play in his hockey league. This was a complication. First of all, his draft time was only one hour prior to my chosen main league. Second, the stat categories of his league were non-standard, and required trying to figure out a lot more (and dealing with ever less-accurate pre-rank lists) as new categories threw off the “values” I was identifying.

In any event, I figured two leagues might be OK and decided to join up. This league is only 8 teams, head-to-head, with 7 offensive and 5 goalie categories. Now I need to figure some way to get shorthanded points and get goalie shutouts.

When the first draft (my “buddy” league) started, I found my franchise had the first pick. It took me about 0.3 seconds to take this as I sign I would be watching Caps hockey this year. Picks 16/17 saw Marc Savard and Dany Heatley join my squad. This league allows two centers and two LW, so picking Joe Thornton in round four pretty much meant my starters at the two prime scoring spots were wrapped up. Hmm. Maybe I should have held out and got a star at a tougher-to-fill position?

Before I had too much chance to second-guess (draft was whipping by), I took my first goalie, Tim Thomas. Luongo and Brodeur were my targets at the position, but they went half a round earlier. Hope you are right about those Bruins, Puck Prospectus. Next time up, I started filling out my two remaining positions, with Daniel Alfredsson at RW and Nicklas Lidstrom on D.

Puck Prospectus star Tomas Vokoun was still there in round 8 (remember, 8-team league) and Scott Niedermeyer in 9. By this time, I was thinking of filling out my remaining defense and taking a RW when it worked out, then filling out the bench. Sergei Gonchar was sniped right before my next pick, leaving me to grudgingly take Jay Bouwmeester. In my first true leap of faith pick, I picked up Brad Boyes, who I had never heard of. Next came David Krejci, which the websites loved, and Niklas Kronwall, cuz you can never have too much Detroit D.

Around this point, I was getting nervous that my second draft was about to start. I had five more players to take and a utility player and bench to fill out. Mikko Koivu seemed an obvious choice to get some more shots on goal, and I gather there is hope Minnesota’s new offensive attack allows him to break out.

My last four picks had a common theme: Nashville Predators past and present. Since I live near Nashville and they are the team I’ll mostly be watching this year (not to mention most of their players are available really late in this format) it doesn’t seem foolishly homerish to pick some Preds up. Especially when I can bench them when they might kill my plus/minus. Steve Mason (OK, ex-Pred), Ryan Suter, JP Dumont, and Steve Sullivan combined to give me one bench player at every position. The last couple of picks were made as my second draft was starting in another window.

One down, and I hope the team doesn’t stink. With the weekly head-to-head format, and the shallow bench, I guess no matter what happens, I have a fighting chance of fixing it during the season.

Draft prep

So on Friday, September 25, on a whim, I decided to join a fantasy hockey league. I went looking for a Yahoo league with people who seemed relatively intelligent, and possibly Canadian.

I ended up picking my league based on a Sunday night draft time I thought I could make. So….who do I want on the team? I hear this Ovechkin kid is pretty good, maybe I’ll take him?

The internet is a beautiful thing. I started downloading podcasts, looking at sites for rankings and information, and generally figuring out what I was supposed to do. More to come on some of the podcasts, but the websites I went to were:

www.fantasyhockey.com
www.fantasypros911.com
www.puckprospectus.com

Reading the content (including what I found on Yahoo!), everyone seems to agree so far, Yahoo!’s prerankings are ridiculous. As a fantasy baseball and football fan, this isn’t much of a surprise. Of course, without two months of pre-draft podcasts and websites to study up and get a sense of who really belongs where, how can I spot which ranks are wrong and how to spot that guy preranked 350 who will save my season?

Fantasyhockey.com seemed a fairly intuitive place to go, they have a podcast and a fair amount of content. Soon, I had a pretty good sense of injuries, situation changes affecting fantasy value (hmmm…Dany Heatley…), and a sense of the leaders in the stat categories.

I got to Fantasy Pros 911 based on reasonably good experiences with their content for football and baseball. It doesn’t look like the hockey coverage is as robust yet, but at least they have a good set of rankings I can crib for free.

Puck Prospectus will hopefully get more useful as I go. I think I can follow Football Outsiders and Baseball Prospectus’s style, but I’m still struggling with the basics in hockey, and these advanced metrics are too much. For now, all I understand is that Tomas Vokoun is underrated and the Bruins and Hawks are pretty good. That may be all I understand from that site for a while.

With my crash course underway, all remaining was to get online for the draft.

1st Post

There’s really nothing more interesting than reading about someone else’s fantasy sports teams.

OK, that’s not exactly true. In fact, it really isn’t true at all. Generally speaking, people with an interest in fantasy sports (already lost a fair number of folks right there) are interested in reading what “experts” say – information, opinions, good analysis of what’s happening in the sport in question. I play fantasy baseball and football quite a lot and consume a lot of content about these sports. I suspect other players have the same basic bias as me – information I can find on the internets that helps me win: good, complaining (or bragging) about your fantasy team: boring.

That said, I’m starting this blog to record an experiment – playing a new fantasy sport I admit upfront I don’t understand. Not “I don’t understand” as in years-of-work-have-not-led-me-to-a-constant-level-of-high-performance don’t understand. I mean I don’t really know all that much about hockey and I’m trying to learn as I go. Any actual knowledge you acquire about playing fantasy hockey from reading this blog is dumb luck. Comments, unsolicited advice, jeers, corrections, awkward silences, and cheap shots in response to my observations are expected, welcome, and par for the course.

Game on.