With the regular season behind us, it’s time to turn our attention to playoff pools. These pools come with their own unique set of challenges that don’t exist in the regular season. Participants must not only consider which players will score, but also which teams will advance deep into the playoffs.
If you’ve never participated in a playoff pool, they come in many forms. You can find snake drafts or auction drafts, similar to what you’d see in a regular season fantasy league. There are also the box pools that have been found in many local newspapers for years, as well as the basic “pick (x) number of players”, which predates the Internet because they are relatively easy to organize and keep track of.
Whether you are simply playing for pride, or you have money on the line (or both), here are some strategies that you can use to draft the best team possible.
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Strategy 1: Understand your scoring system
This strategy could be the most important of all, both for regular season and playoff pools. Does your league award more points for goals than assists? What about bonus points for playing additional rounds? Will goaltending stats count? Are you allowed to trade players whose teams have been knocked out? If so, how many trades are allowed and when are they allowed?
Study your scoring system so that you can look for as many ways to earn points as possible. This strategy becomes particularly important in the later rounds, when the player pool becomes scarce.
Strategy 2: Understand the league type
Are you picking from a group of players, as you would in a box pool? Are you given a salary cap, where you have to allocate your money accordingly and seek the best value? Are you drafting a player who will be yours and exclusively yours? Or are you simply submitting a list of who you believe will be the top playoff scorers? The type of league will determine which players will end up on your team, so research will be important.
If you are participating in a draft, have a plan before you start. But keep in mind even the best plans can go awry, so be prepared to change on the fly if the draft takes an unexpected turn. You may even be pleasantly surprised at what is available to you.
Strategy 3: Understand the league size
How you choose players should depend on how many competitors are in your league. Your strategy when competing in a simple playoff pool with a half-dozen co-workers should be different from your strategy when competing against thousands of other competitors online.
Making the safe, diversified picks is a better strategy in the smaller pool because your odds of winning are much better. You will need to be more creative in your attempt to win a larger pool. (At the same time, winning the large online pool will yield a bigger prize.)
Strategy 4: Pick players on teams that are projected to win
This is the strategy that makes playoff pools different from regular-season leagues because you’ll get more possible points out of more games. In playoff pools, the winner is often the participant with the most players left standing by the Stanley Cup final.
Part of your job will be projecting which teams will go deep into the playoffs. It’s worth your while to participate in the Bracket Challenge to map out your projections. You may discover that when you fill out your bracket, you’re overlooking one division. Remember that one team from each division will make it to the Conference final (barring a cross-over wild card upset).
In a large pool, you could roll the dice by using the opposite strategy: Pick players on teams that are generally expected to be knocked out early. Upsets are common in the playoffs, so you will really separate yourself from the pack by owning players very few others own. This is a high risk/high reward strategy, but it might be the way to go if the odds of receiving a prize are small.
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Strategy 5: Pick the best players
This strategy somewhat contradicts the previous strategy, but there is some merit to it. If your pool allows you to make a generous number of trades or even completely reset your roster after each round, this strategy doesn’t hurt.
There is downside to this strategy in many league formats, however. Steve Laidlaw of Dobber Hockey researched playoff data over the last 10 years and found that 97 per cent of the top 10 playoff scorers over that time made the conference final, while 70 per cent of the top 50 playoff scorers over that span also made the conference final.
So Strategy 4 supersedes Strategy 5 if you end up losing players from eliminated teams. However, you may get lucky by picking an elite forward who makes it further than expected.
Strategy 6: Have fun!
Playoff pools should provide you with one more reason to watch the post-season, particularly if your favorite team didn’t make it. In addition, a little friendly competition is never a bad thing. So sit back and enjoy the playoffs after you choose your team. Good luck!
