Steve's Expansion Team
The Fonthill Hockey Pool League (FHL) started in the year 2000 with nine (9) teams. Each team chose thirty (30) players, from established NHL talent to draft eligible prospects. After these first 270 players had been chosen, a tenth team entered and took thirty (30) remaining players. It was this tenth team that I inherited in 2001. Since my entry into the league, I have been doing everything possible to improve my team and eventually lead it to victory over the eighty-two (82) game season, but this remains slow going for a number of different reasons, that pertain mostly to:
As stated earlier, the original draft took place in 2000 with nine (9) teams choosing 270 players. Thirty (30) more were chosen by the manager of the team that I inherited later that NHL season. In September of each year, all of the team managers get together to draft new players for any of those that we have found to have outlived their usefulness. This is not a complete redraft, we keep the players that we had on our roster from the year before, it is merely a replacement of selected individuals.
The team with the first pick in each draft round is the team that scored the fewest NHL points from his/her active roster from the previous NHL season. This is called the regular draft. From 2001-2003 inclusive, the 1st, 11th and 21st selections, etc. belonged to me. The 2003/2004 NHL season was the first time that my team did not finish in last, which would have otherwise guaranteed me the top selection in each round for the 2004 Draft - leading into the 2004/2005 season.
At the conclusion of the regular draft, each manager selects twenty (20) players from his/her total roster of thirty (30) to protect as part of the waiver draft. In the waiver draft, the team that chose first in the regular draft also has first "waiver priority" and may use this priority to select a player from any of the unprotected players on any other FHL team.
To complete this transaction, the selector must:
The team that had a player chosen from them must:
The whole process of drafting usually takes between six (6) and ten (10) hours and can get fairly intense, especially as various opinions of certain players float about.
The rules for the league are fairly simple, and yet also fairly complex:
There are no hard and fast strategies to win at this type of pool. The objective is merely to find the twenty most productive players possible on a bi-weekly basis and accummulate more points than your opponents over the eighty-two (82) game schedule. Nonetheless, as it is possible to keep most of your players from year to year, age is an important characteristic for any player - with youth being far preferable to that of seniority.
My general tactic over the last few years has involved loading up on young and (hopefully) talented players such as Alexander Ovechkin, Evgeny Malkin, Jason Spezza, Martin Havlat, Eric Staal and others. Occassionally, I have been willing to trade players in their prime years (26-30) for even more draft picks or young players. Slowly, but surely, this seems to be putting me on the right course.
This is not to say that there has not been a learning curve. For example, in my first draft year I had the opportunity to select Ilya Kovalchuk but instead chose a resurgent Mario Lemieux. The next year I traded the first overall selection (Rick Nash) along with Tomas Holmstrom and Vaclav Varada for Maxim Afinogenov and David Vyborny. Given how well Nash and Kovalchuk have performed, the egg was certainly on my face in the eyes of the other poolies at the beginning.
However, with a little time and a little more research, I started to catch on. The following are a selection of trades that I have made as my reign as a team manager has progressed:
From Steve:
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From Steve:
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From Steve:
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From Steve:
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From Steve:
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From Team #3:
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From Team #8:
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From Team #1:
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From Team #9:
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From Team #7:
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Over the past few years, I have also come up with various ways of ranking players for the regular draft, so as to refrain from making selections based on emotion rather than the value that only sound judgment can derive. My 2003 FHL Ranking Scheme (49.5kb) shows my attempts to attach an appropriate weighting to the Points Per Game (PPG) category to the difficulty of the league in which the points were scored, along with a series of other minor factors. The highlighted cells in blue denote my regular draft selections, in purple my waiver draft selections and in green my waiver replacement selections.
In 2004, I had four of the top twelve selections, so developing an appropriate ranking scheme was even more critical than ever. However, because of the likelihood of a lockout, there were no hockey pool books in print to come to my aid. In the absence this type of information, I made a comprehensive review of the 2004 NHL Entry Draft and hockey websites such as www.hockeysfuture.com. My 2004 FHL Ranking Scheme (50kb) shows my thoughts at the time. The same cell colour highlighting as last year applies, with a grey cell indicating a player lost in the waiver selection rounds and a black cell indicating a player dropped in favour of another outside of the drafting rounds.
One thing that the ranking scheme makes obvious is that I do not always get numbers, 1,2,3,4, etc. on my list. This is only partly because they are chosen between my selections. Sometimes it is more prudent to select a player that might be picked by someone else and then hope that a player you have ranked higher will still be there with your next pick. Often I have gotten lucky in this regard because I have a young team and not everyone wants to add 18 year-old draft selections to their roster.
However, I look at the pool differently. First of all, I have a young team, so I like young players - the bigger the collection of young, promising players, the better. But more than that, the combination of the labour dispute and the resulting new NHL place a premium on younger, faster players.
The difference between my views and those held by the other poolies allowed me to pick up Alexander Ovechkin (1st overall), Evgeni Malkin (2nd overall), Andrew Ladd (7th overall) and Lauri Tukonen (12th overall). The only other 2004 NHL Draft Entry player that I would have like to have added would have been Alexandre Picard. I just didn't have enough selections to make my entire wish list come true. To see a list of the decision rules that I used for the draft, please download my Draft Decision Rules Document.
Still, as good as I believe that the draft went for me, there is room for improvement. Specifically, the 18 year-olds were not ranked as high as the 19 year-olds because the couldn't score as prolifically yet. I need to either increase the age bonus point weighting or add a bonus for anyone under 19.0 years of age on draft day.
As always, if anyone has any comments, thoughts or suggestions, please feel free to write to me via my contact information section.
The Standings from the 2003/2004 Season
To get a better idea of this league and the difficulties in turning a perennial loser into an eventual winner, please feel free to download the league standings (422kb). This will give you a better idea of who scored how many points and how much depth it takes to win the league championship.
Even though it looks as though there will be no NHL season, please feel free to download the current league rosters(438kb). This will give you a better idea of how the average age per roster decreases after the draft and what the lineups will look like once hockey starts up again.
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