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.
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