card-counting

It’s getting to be almost nearly soon to be hockey season, which means it’s also time to begin anticipating the other best thing about hockey season: fantasy hockey season. With that in mind, I figured I’d write a brief primer on fantasy hockey and how it works, since some of our readers may want to play but not understand how (I had truly no idea how any of it worked when I first got into it), and since it’s a great way to enjoy the game from a different perspective, following other teams and players and whatnot.

The basic gist of it is the same no matter what kind of league you’re playing in – you draft a roster of players and when they do things in real life you get points for your fantasy team. Different leagues weight things differently, but usually a goal is worth more than an assist, poweplay points are worth extra, penalty minutes are worth something smaller, etc. For goalies the way it works is they get a small amount of points for every save they make, minus points for letting in a goal, and then points for a win and/or shutout.

Since there’s hockey games almost every night you’re bound to have players playing every night, so you should check your lineup daily in case there’s conflicts that mean you might need to make a decision. Usually this isn’t the case (although we’ll get more into this later) but on big game days where there’s like 10 games at once you’re going to need to make decisions about who to play.

One of the most fun parts of fantasy hockey is the drafting. Depending on how your league commissioner sets things up it may vary, but more likely than not you’ll be doing a snake draft. This means that the draft order goes first to last, then repeats the last person and goes last to first (imagine a snake). Draft strategy is important going in – with your first round pick you’ll likely want to land one of the league’s big stars. I usually go for Henrik Lundqvist because I’m an unabashed fan, because it annoys this other guy in my league, and because he’s head and shoulders above the rest, but you’ll probably want to go for a high point scorer like Alex Ovechkin or Jamie Benn. If you pick towards the back end of the snake you may miss out on a superstar but still land someone very good, and then you’ll pick again sooner in the second round so not to worry. You’ll be allotted a certain amount of forwards and a certain amount of defensemen – when picking the latter make sure you go for offensive defensemen first, as they’re most likely to get you points.

In one of my leagues however (it’s a Yahoo league) players are designated positions beyond just forward – RW, LW, and C. This becomes important to consider in draft strategy because you’re only allotted a certain number of each but some players are designated as more than one of the three, meaning on nights where you have conflicts at one position but not another a player with more than one designation can be useful.

At the end of the draft there’ll be a lot of players left over, and they’re important to pay attention to. This is because guys on your team may get injured or go on a cold streak, and you can add/drop players to replace them with someone who’s putting up more points at that specific moment in time. You should also be a aware of trades to be made depending on need – if you see someone’s got a need for a defenseman and you’ve got one to sell, by all means take advantage of the situation. I once got Matt Duchene for Sami Vatanen and Charlie Coyle, then replaced Vatanen with Zdeno Chara off the waiver wire. It’s all about maximizing the amount of points you can score per day, so that you can win the week. Try not to get emotionally attached to players (I do sometimes) because they can always be added/dropped for someone more useful, but also have patience if a guy like Sidney Crosby is on a down swing; do you really want to put him on the waiver wire for your friends to claim?

This is just me rambling at this point, so why not make this an open thread to talk about fantasy hockey. If you have any questions, comments, strategies, or general smack to talk feel free to post it below. Looking forward to October y’all.

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