*Smooths down hairpiece*
*Dons red baseball cap*
Listen, folks. I hear this all the time, whenever I talk to people, and I talk to a lot of really great, beautiful fantasy-hockey managers. And they tell me, they say, “Jordan, my league doesn’t win anymore. We don’t win at statistics. We don’t win on prizes. We don’t even win on the waiver wire and we’re just getting killed by fantasy baseball, fantasy football, all these lesser sports.” And they are fed up. Fed up with losers who are laughing at them for counting dumb stats. Fed up with haters who say their pools aren’t fair—and they’re right! The pools aren’t fair, and we have to fix it, folks. Have. To. And there’s only one way to do it and you all know it: We’re gonna make fantasy hockey great again, OK? OK.
Now, classy Donald Trump speech done with, we can proceed to a simple, five-point plan that will help you haters and losers fix your league.
I know, I know, no one wants to take advice from a dude who can fit his entire platform on the front of a ballcap, but there’s a lesson in this. Your pool has probably gotten stale, and fixing it is so easy an imbecile could do it. You’re probably using some of the wrong stats, running your waivers and standings poorly, and if you’ve got a head-to-head playoff system, it’s a near-lock that the best player isn’t the guy going home with the money.
So let’s fix it.
Before you reconvene for this year’s draft, get hold of the most dedicated and successful players in your league—if you only have the support of the part-timers and losers, these proposals are going to seem like sour grapes—and run some of these ideas by them. If they jump on board, you immediately have a better, fairer league. And if they resist, well, they know they have an unfair edge, and they want to keep it. Or else they’re just curmudgeons who are afraid of change, and will stick to the traditional rules even after NHLers have jet engines strapped to their skates and the goalies are virtual, and you should maybe find a new league.
Either way, better to know now, right?
Step One: Stop counting PIM. You’re ruining a good game.
This is the oldest and stupidest rule still hanging around fantasy hockey—counting stats that actually hurt the team of the player amassing them. Imagine if your fantasy baseball categories included, say, wild pitches or caught stealing. Or if your fantasy football league gave you a point each time your running back fumbled the ball. But in a lot of long-running pools, the idea of counting PIM is ingrained and hard to shake. “We’ve always counted penalty minutes,” goes the cry. “Why should we change now?”
Well, because the NHL is changing. When PIM began as a fantasy hockey stat, there were a group of players who existed solely to fight. And since some of those goons were forwards and some were defencemen, you couldn’t even set aside a position for them on a roster, which was too bad, because they were often some of the most beloved players in the league—think Bob Probert, Tie Domi, Joey Kocur—and even your typical power forwards like Wendel Clark and Brendan Shanahan would drop their gloves fairly regularly.
Now, however, staged fights are all but gone from the NHL, and the vast majority of PIM are racked up on minor penalties or majors for dangerous hits and 10-minute misconducts. The players who get most of them aren’t the most beloved, either. They’re relics who have yet to make their exit or guys who might fight sometimes but mostly “play with an edge”—a very modern way of saying they come as close as they can to intentionally injuring their opponents. Neither of these things should be rewarded by hockey pools.
Step Two: Start counting shots on goal instead
This is the immediate fix to the “Well, what are we going to replace PIM with?” question. You’re going to replace PIM with SOG and you’re never going to look back. Generating shots on goal is the essence of offence in hockey, and as you get deeper into this book, you’re going to realize that this philosophy informs much of our rankings.
Look at a list of the skaters who took the most shots last year and you’ll see three kinds of players: superstars (Alex Ovechkin always leads the way, but snipers like Patrick Kane and Vladimir Tarasenko are never far behind), natural goal scorers with great shots (Max Pacioretty sat third in SOG in 2015–16, and players like Taylor Hall and Phil Kessel helped populate the top 10) and good players who just didn’t get the bounces (it’s no shocker to see Nazem Kadri and his 6.5 shooting percentage, as well as Evander Kane’s 7.4 and Torey Krug’s unreal 1.6 high up on the list, even though they’re much further down the ranks of NHL scoring leaders).
What you don’t see at the top of the SOG leaderboard are third- and fourth-line muckers, face-punchers or third wheels on lines with strong duos. Good players take a lot of shots, and counting those shots rewards them (and you!) even when they don’t go in. In a fair fantasy hockey league, you should be aiming to avoid scenarios that reward luck and create scenarios that reward skill. Replacing PIM with SOG is the clearest possible way to do it.
Step Three: Get rid of first-come-first-served free agents—it’s not fair to the GMs who don’t spend all day at a computer
Meet Bob. Bob works as a police officer and plays in a fantasy hockey league with his friend Jim, who works as an accountant. At 1:30 p.m. on a Tuesday, the Pittsburgh Penguins announce that Kris Letang (sorry, Kris) will miss the rest of the season with a broken leg, but also that they’ve signed free agent James Wisniewski to a one-year deal to run the Pens’ power play in Letang’s stead. At 1:30 p.m. on this Tuesday, Bob is racing down the QEW in pursuit of a stolen car, while Jim is surfing Sportsnet.ca and wishing the afternoon was already over.
Jim, shockingly, manages to pick up Wisniewski for nothing as a free agent, whereas by the time Bob has engineered a peaceful ending to his workday three hours later, he sees the notification on his phone and doesn’t even bother to check. He knows Jim will always beat him to the wire.
But it doesn’t have to be like that. By giving every team an allowance of blind-bid money and having the silent auctions run for all available players every night at midnight, both Jim and Bob have a shot at Wisniewski, and whoever is willing to pay the most comes away with the prize. Nobody ends up feeling like they have zero chance to get better because a couple of wire sharks are ruining it for everyone—and if those wire sharks still want their prize, they can still have it, provided they pay more than the crowd.
Step Four: Don’t use the head-to-head format, and don’t use playoff weeks to determine your champion. But if you must do both these things, at least split your prizes.
Fantasy hockey was not made for head-to-head matchups—team schedules vary so much that any given week can go to any GM based almost solely on the luck of the draw. Fantasy hockey leagues end up using this format out of habits developed in fantasy baseball (where each MLB team reliably plays six or seven games per week) or football (basically, one NFL game per player per week). But in the NHL, a single week is not a microcosm of a team’s schedule, and can thus drastically affect fantasy performance. A quick illustration: It’s obviously far better to have Sidney Crosby as your top centre than it is to have, say, Derick Brassard, our 28th-ranked pivot, but when the Rangers play four games to the Penguins’ two in seven days, Brassard will score 2.9 points on average to Crosby’s 2.1, a big swing.
Barring injury, those points even out over time, but what if that aforementioned week happens to be the first round of your playoffs? Bam, you might well be gone, regular-season juggernaut or no. As the spice added to this already unfair stew, due to a compressed season in 2016–17, each NHL team will play a more hectic schedule (i.e. with more back-to-back games and more stretches of three games in four nights), and each will also get a full week off mid-season to recover from the frenetic pace. If you’ve ever played fantasy sports, you know how this ends—with you losing three categories in a critical week because the schedule-maker decided the Devils would need a break at this particular moment.
If you must play head-to-head matchups rather than full-season scoring, you can mitigate the schedule’s randomness by awarding half your prize pool to the regular-season champion. It’s not hard to win three head-to-head weeks in a row (the length of a playoff run in a standard league) with a crappy team just by playing the schedule, watching matchups and working the waiver wire frantically. It’s almost impossible to play a 23-week season that way and end up with the best record. Give half the money to the person who actually earned it—and give the playoff champion the rest of it, and the bragging rights.
Step Five: Get smaller and leaner
Leagues that have been around forever usually have some dead weight holding them down. Maybe you started the league as 14 buddies who were all watching hockey together at the campus pub after class. Now it takes a three-week-long email chain to find a few hours to do an online draft. Welcome to middle age!
But this is an easy fix: Before you ramp up for this season, make sure everyone in your league actually wants to be there. Chances are, if you’re asking nicely and honestly, there are a few players who return every year because they don’t want to back out and lose old ties, but they also aren’t that interested in investing the time it takes to ice a competitive team.
Have a look at your league’s results from the past few years and you’ll spot them quickly: They may start fast, but they sink to the middle and bottom before mid-season, and once that happens, they tend to make far fewer moves than the best teams, even though the opposite should logically be true.
Membership in a fantasy league is a privilege, not a right, and that privilege can be revoked for neglect. Often it comes as a relief to the poor fool who’s just signing up so nobody gets mad at him for making them work to replace him. Take a 14-team league down to a 10-team league and you’ll find that it becomes a lot more lively and competitive, and if you’re worried about the player pool becoming too shallow, simply add an extra roster spot or two to the teams until roughly the same number of players are being drafted.
And what about the friends who leave? What’ll they do on the rare Saturday nights when you and the rest of the gang can actually gather to watch the games and talk some trash? Well, that’s exactly what daily fantasy leagues were made for—set yourself up with a $5 tourney and someone will be a little bit richer at the end of the night. No waiver-wire sniping required.