The goalie rankings

Since goalies are again, by far the most important position in yahoo fantasy, here's my personal rankings for most of the top goalies on yahoo.

1. Miikka Kiprusoff (Yahoo rank: 3d among goalies)-Kipper, Luongo and Brodeur are in a class of their own above all other fantasy goalies, of course. But why Kipper above Louie and Brodeur? Fist of all, he underachieved last season and should have a bounce-back year. Also, far more importantly: contract year! contract year! contract year! In the end, though, youre fine picking any of the top 3 guys in each other's place and so for all practical purposes the distinction between 1 and 3 isn't that big a deal. Just feel that Kipper has the edge this year.

2. Luongo (Yahoo rank: 1st among goalies)-Had his coming-out party last year but there's still a lot of unfinished business with him, considering he was shut out in awards voting, the Canucks didn't get past the second round, and his mistake at the end of game 5. No drop-off predicted.

3. Brodeur (Yahoo rank: 2nd among goalies)-With him there will indeed be a drop-off, partly because he had the 2nd best season of his career last year, and partly because the Devils are going to be quite a bit worse this year, or at least that's what it looks like. If you've got him, consider trying to trade him for Lulongo or Kiprusoff.

4. Henrik Lundqvist (holy crap I spelled that right on the first try, also, Yahoo rank: 7th among goalies)-He doesn't get as much credit as he should. Year in and year out(fine, for the past 2 years) this guy's right behind the three top guys, quietly finishing 3d in Vezina voting for both the past two years. A far surer bet than the three guys ranked 4 to 6.

5. Evgeni Nabokov (Yahoo rank: 8th among goalies)-Again, always good to go with a sure thing. Has the team to himself now, and the Sharks look good yet again this year.

6. Niklas Backstrom (Yahoo rank: 6th among goalies)-We're now out of the first two tiers and are at the point in the rankings that everyone listed starts to have some sort of flaw that keeps them from being considered a sure-thing like the first 5 guys. I'm actually not as high on Backstrom as most people. He put up his crazy good stats playing only the last few months of last year, while his team was going on an insane run of it's own (2nd best record in the league after Christmas). Any goalie's going to put up good stats when his team's playing .750 hockey for 3 months. Don't expect him to keep up that .929 save percentage this season. The main reason I'd still take him as high as he's ranked, though, is that this looks to be a big year for Minnesota (after they went through all that BS with the Gaborik injury and the bad start last year, they probably just want a full season to show what they can do) and they're almost always one of the best teams in the league in terms of goals allowed anyway. And anyways, when Kipper first got traded to Calgary and finished those last two months on a tear a lot of people (including me) said he couldn't keep it going next year either. He's more of a gamble than people think, but still worth a high pick.

7. J.S. Giguere (Yahoo rank: 5th among goalies)-I'm kind of reluctant to even place him this high. Never underestimate the power of a Stanley Cup hangover. The Ducks have also downgraded pretty significantly this year: from Selanne to Bertuzzi, from Neidemayer to Schneider, and losing Penner. Considering he just got a new contract, just won the Stanley Cup, and has some family concerns with his son's situation, the movitation's got to be at an all-time low for him. At the same time, he's still a better bet than the guys behind him.

8. Ray Emery (Yahoo rank: 15th among goalies)-Good stats last year (essentially the same as Giguere's, with a slightly worse GAA), good team, why take him any lower?

9. Marty Turco (Yahoo rank: 9th among goalies)-Probably the lowest he's been ranked in the past few years. There's nothing wrong with him, but Dallas really doesn't look good this year.

10. Dominic Hasek (Yahoo rank: 4th among goalies)-Well I guess I had to have him on here at some point. The risk of injury is just too huge to spend a top-round pick on him. Considering that that Detroit might also be slipping a bit this year (of course people say this every year), and I don't think he's worth the risk anywhere higher than here. His backup might make a good low-round pick though...

11. Manny Legace (Yahoo rank: 20th among goalies)-St. Louis was among the best teams in the league to finish the season last year, and they look to be equally good this year (they got the Paul Kariya seal of approval after all). Legace's save% in Dec, Jan and Feb last year, when St. Louis started playing better: .931, .920, .906. Also has a .915 career save percentage. Any pick you make at this point is going to be a bit of a risk, and he seems the best one to take at this spot in the rankings.

12. Rick DiPietro (Yahoo rank: 14th among goalies)-Quietly put up surprisingly good stats last season (.919 save percentage on a 8th place team), and you know he'll get lots of playing time. Of course, if you're one of those people that thinks the Islanders will finish last in the league just because they're the Islanders, stay away.

13. Chris Manson (Yahoo rank: 12th among goalies)-Seeing what his stats were last year, you'd think he should be ranked higher (Alan Ryder at Hockey Analytics claims there's a case to be made that he was the best goalie in the league last year). Nonetheless, that was for a team that finished third in the league in points. I don't think the Preds' collapse will be as complete as generally assumed, but they're obviously not the same team they were last year.

14. Marc-Andre Fleury (Yahoo rank: 10th among goalies)-A good example of a goalie who'll get bad stats on a good team. If you just need wins, then by all means pick him higher than this. He won't do your goals against or save percentage any good.

15. Vesa Toskala (Yahoo rank: 23d among goalies)-You know how in my comments about Backstrom I said that a goalie can look better than he is when he finishes the season as the starter for a team that's really hot? Toskala's save percentage when this happerned to him three seasons ago: .930. His save percentages for the next 2 years: .901, .908. I dont know what kind of saviour he's gonna be for the Leafs. Nonetheless, for some reason I just can't rank him any lower.

16. Thomas Vokoun (Yahoo rank: 11th among goalies)-Good goalie, bad team. Not much else to say.

Magicpie's sure-to-suceed guide to fantasy players

Now that the general rules posts are out of the way here's a look at some of the specific players in this year draft and where they should be picked. A lot of these players can be divided in a few specific categories:

The "we've bottomed out" group. These are players who had bad years last season, and are thus at the bottom of their potential value, going as low as you could ever expect them to possibly go. A lot of good teams are built on guys like these. If they go back to their old selves then you just got a good player a couple rounds later than he should have gone. If not, then you only wasted a low pick on them. The only way to screw yourself over with these guys is to assume that their return to form is a sure thing and pick them higher than they're being picked (i.e. passing up 80 point guys to take Markus Naslund coming off his 60 point season because you just know he'll be back to his old self this year). Some notables this year:

Markus Naslund. Sixty points is as bad as you're going to get with him.

Pavel Demitra. Last year was probably the worst of his career and he still had 62 points. Injuries always a concern though.

Todd Bertuzzi. He's ranked like 500th. Take a chance on him instead of some miscelaneous left winger you'll drop right after the draft.

Marek Zidlicky. His ES points remained the same last year but he only had about 10 PP points (30 pts total). Now that Timmonen's gone he should be back to his customary 50 points.

Rob Blake. Remember him? He used to be pretty good... Kings should be much better this time around.

Joni Pitkanen. Bad year on a horrible team and he still had 40 points. Going far, far lower than he should be.

Pick him, you won't be sorry.

The "we were injured and are thus underranked" group. Guys who missed 20 or more games and still had good years on a per-game basis, but are ranked below where they should go because they still put up only 60 points instead of 80. And they are:

Martin Havlat, Wade Redden, Mike Modano, Ed Jovanovski and Marian Gaborik. Jovanovski and Gaborik seem to be on this list every year, though so you should probably take that into account before picking them.

The "we're coming off a contract year, whatever you do don't pick us" group. This group ruins more fantasy teams year in and year out than any other. These are guys that put up huge numbers last season but are due for a slowdown now that they signed their ginormous deal:

Sheldon Souray. Ranked fifth among defencemen right now. It's amazing what one 60 point season when you've never been past 40 in your career before gets you. Stay away, just stay away.

Daniel Briere. Before last year his best season was 65 points (although he did put up good point-per-game numbers in an injury-shortened season two years ago). It also bears noting that Philly is not Buffalo. Again, best to stay away.

Of course we've also got this group's distant cousin, the "I wasn't in a contract year but I still overachieved insanely last year" group, which includes:

Andrew Brunette. Fifty years from now Andrew Brunette will be telling his grandkids about the one year he got above 80 points in an NHL season.

Jarome Iginla. Turns out Iginla was sort of in a contract year last season. Either way, last year was only the second time he's had more than 73 points, and it's doubtful that Calgary's going to play the same kind of offensive hockey they played last season this time around. Not a good way to spend your first pick.

That's it for now, more to come.

Magicpie's sure-to-suceed fantasy guide (part 2)

Here's some more fantasy advice, as always focused mainly on Yahoo leagues, now that I've had a chance to actually do a draft:

I was wrong about LWs.Last time I said that since Yahoo doesn't let players play multiple positions too much anymore LWs are going to be in far shorter supply than RWs. This is usually true, but after actually looking at this year's player rankings, the division of skill seems to be pretty even between LWs and RWs this year. So nevermind what I said. RWs and LWs are equal this year.

Plus Minus Matters.Don't ignore plus minus when making your picks. It's easy to get caught up in the "well Kovalchuk will get me so many points that this should cancel out his horrible +/-" line of thinking and draft 2 or 3 horrible +/- guys as your forwards. For the love of God don't do this, it's not worth the cost. The -20 that a bad +/- guy will get you will almost always lose you more standings points in the +/- stat than the extra points he will get you in goals and assists. Basically a bad +/- should be a dealbreaker. If a guy's got a bad +/- just don't pick him, simple as that.

Another argument against picking up guys with bad +/- is this: as we all know, people in yahoo leagues often realise they have no chance/just stop caring halfway through the season and stop updating their team. Injured players stop getting substituted, and so forth, meaning their teams stop accumulating stats as quickly in most categories. Simply by sticking around and being active for the entire season you should thus be able to beat these guys in most stats. Thus even if you actually have the worst team in the league, if half your league quits you should end up at least 5th/6th in goals, assists and most other stats. Plus minus, though, doesn't work like this. Even if a guy quits and benches all his players, his +/- won't actually go down but will stay at +28 or whatever it was. If your team's at -20 and last in +/-, you'll still be last in +/- at the end of the season and only get one standings point out of it. Thus even if your team's not great in points/assists, the worst you'll realistically be is 5th/6th in these stats, but if your +/- is bad you'll be dead last in it. So the short version is this: +/- is the only stat that doesn't benefit from people quitting so don't ignore it.

If you have to make changes to your team after the draft wait two days. All players go on waivers in the first two days after a draft. Thus when people decide to make minor changes of the "I didn't like my 15th pick let me get this guy instead" variety they don't realise that they're taking the guys off waivers and going to last in waiver priority in the process. Just wait two days until players aren't on waivers anymore to make these minor changes so you don't lose your waiver priority.

The two defencemen rule. A lot of times, because of off-season acquisition, a team will end up with more good offensive defencemen than it should have. This worries fantasy owners because they think there might not be enough powerplay time to go around, and so not everyone will be able to get their usual stats. Usually, if a team has two very good offensive defencemen, this doesn't become a problem. If it has 3 or more, then in general only the best two will get the minutes they need to have a season that's up to their regular standards. For example, last season Pavel Kubina went from 26 powerplay points to 8 because he went from being one of the top 2 guys on his team to playing behind McCabe and Kaberle in Toronto. If you're thinking of picking Dick Tarnstrom or Schneider(if Nedemayer comes back), you have been warned.

Get guys on overachieving teams. Every year there's one good offensive team that has "one of those years", where everything just clicks and the team performs well above its already high offensive standards. Last year it was Buffalo, the year before that Ottawa, and the year before that it was Tampa. This year, it will probably be Pittsburgh. The reason I mention this is that everyone on that team overachieves. More specifically, there's always a couple of fringe players that are usually not quite fantasy worthy that end up being quality, point-per-game guys for this one season and can usually be picked up cheaply at the start of the season to fill holes in your lineup. Thus, if you find yourself looking for a sleeper this year, take a chance on Pittsburgh's second-tier guys.

Magicpie's sure-to-succeed fantasy hockey guide

Allright it's fantasy season. So with that in mind, here's my fantasy league advice, focused mostly on yahoo leagues. This post is mainly going to be about general advice that applies every season. I'll try to have something more specifically related to this year's players and rankings once I have a better look at the player list.

Goalies Should Be Your Top Priority. As anyone who's played will tell you, this is by far the most important rule of yahoo leagues. Goalies take up two of your twelve roster spots but make up 40% of your total stats. What's more there's only about 20 good goalies in the league, and while you can usually pick up plenty of good forwards and defencemen off waivers throughout the season, good goalies are almost impossible to find after the draft. Your team can recover from not drafting enough left wingers, or picking crappy defencemen. The only sure way to fuck your team over for the rest of the season is to pick bad goalies. So make these your top priority. Unless you can get Sidney Crosby if any of the top 3 goalies (Lulongo, Brodeur, Kipper) are still available when you pick in the first round you should take them.

The first 8 picks are when the draft is lost, the last 8 picks are when the draft is won-In your first 8 picks you should have only one priority: Don't fuck up! By this I mean, don't waste any of your top picks on players who overachieved the previous year and are consequently overvalued. People who picked Chechoo in the first round last year know what I'm talking about. The first 8 rounds of the draft are littered with possible mistakes like these. As long as you recognise who these players are (it's actually not that hard...you think Andrew Brunette's gonna put up 80 points again this year?) and avoid them, you should already be better off than most of the managers in the league who will probably have wasted at least a couple of their high picks on these overrated players at this point. As for the last 8 picks, well there's not much to say about this except that there's much more value to be had here than people assume. Players fluctuate to the point that a 4th-5th round pick 2 years ago goes 10th or 11th this year because of one bad season. Don't let that one bad season scare you. Take these guys and if they come back to their old selves you have a good shot of winning your league.

Better to take the misranked players earlier rather than later-For those of you that don't know what I mean by misranked players, these are quality players that end up being ranked way way lower than they should be by yahoo because they missed most of the previous season and thus put up no stats. I'm not talking about players ranked 10 or 20 spots lower than they should be, but top-20 picks being ranked 500th. This means that they're put at the bottom of everyone's draft list and everyone forgets about them, meaning they can be picked far later than they should be. The draft then becomes like a game of chicken between some managers, as they see how long they can wait before finally taking these guys. My advice is this: don't wait. If you see Alex Tanguay ranked 600th when you know he should be going in the 4th round, don't push your luck and wait untill the 9th or the 10th round to take him because some some other jackass who's thinking the same thing might take him in the 8th and letting you end up with nothing. Even if you get him only 2-3 rounds later than he should be going, you're still helping your team, and you're running a far lower risk of ending up with nothing.

Draft magazines are useless-There I said it. They're not bad for entertainment but their predictions arent too great.

Positions matter. Back a few years ago every left winger turned into a player that could play both left and right 10 games into the season so you could get away with just picking the best players and worrying about the rest later. This is no longer true. Most wingers can play only right or left, meaning that left wingers are in far shorter supply and thus more valuable than right wingers. Make sure you're solid at this position before picking any RWs. As another note, centers are probably the deepest position fantasy-wise so you can get away with picking them later in the draft, and defencemen, while important (aside from a good goalie, a defenceman who can put up a point per game is the most valuable commodity in yahoo fantasy) tends to be overvalued, so a lot of the good defencemen get picked earlier than they should be, so my advice would be to stay away from them in the early rounds. In contrast, defense is also the position where you're most likely to pick really really good contributors in the later rounds. It's usually possible to not pick any defencemen with your first 7-8 picks then pick four midrange/undervalued guys in a row with your next 4 picks and still end up with a solid defense corps.

Follow this advice and I guarantee...well nothing. Good luck to all in their drafts.

Finally

There. It's over. It's done. Now we can all shut up about it.

By the way, Linden's stats last season adjusted for ice time:
points/60 min ES ice time: 1.53
points/60 min PP ice time: 2.71

And Bryan Smolinski's:
points/60 min ES ice time: 1.57
Points/60 min PP ice time: 2.70

I don't hear anyone calling Smolinski washed up.

This needs to happern

One of the most annoying things about watching hockey on TV is all the pauses. Icings, penalties, goalies freezing the puck, pucks going out of play, etc. Basically for every minute of actually watching the game you get another minute of watching players skate around getting ready for a face-off. This kills the flow of the game and makes it a lot more boring to watch (us kids these days, we don't have long attention spans). As such, I really wish they'd start running edited replays of Canucks games with all the pauses between plays cut out, and just the actual game being shown.

Yeah, I know the CBC already shows edited versions of its Hockey Night in Canada games later that night. The problem with these, though, is that they're edited pretty badly. They cut out about a third of the game itself along with the pauses in play and the whole thing seems random and disjointed. That's not what I want. Instead they should show every second of actual play, as well as leaving in a few seconds before a face-off and after a stop in play so the whole thing doesn't look to disjointed. Also, after a perticularly nice goal it might be good to leave room for some replays before going to the next face-off. Basically the editing needs to be done right for something like this to work.

If done right, though, game replays like these could actually make for a pretty good programming choice for, say, the more dead time slots like those on mornings and late-nights when some networks (this means you, Sportsnet) don't feel its worth the cash to buy actual shows and just end up playing the same damn Sportsnet News re-run over and over.

I demand a recount!

Well it seems I lost the canucks blogger contest thing. So instead of voting for me this round I'm gonna ask you all to vote against the guy that beat me. Vengeance will be mine.
At least this time around they're asking people to submit their email every time they vote (last round you could vote as many times as you wanted) therefore hopefully preventing a scandal of "vote for Rory"-like proportions.

UPDATE
Since I took the time to write it I might as well get something out of it so here's what my post would have been if I'd gone through:

I have to say that I came down with a bit of writer's block trying to come up with a post about the Canucks' prospects. So after seriously considering putting up a post titled "Harold Druken: The Man, The Legend"(I'm not joking), I've instead decided to rip off ESPN's Bill Simmons and write a post based on quotes from the episode of The Simpsons where Lisa and Bart are on different hockey teams. Why? Why the hell not. Each notable Canucks prospect gets a quote from the show and an explaination.

Homer [upon seeing Uter the German kid]: "Look, that kid's got bosoms! Who's got a wet towel?"
This one goes to Michael Grabner. Based on everything the Canucks are saying, Grabner better start putting on weight if he wants a shot at making the team. There's a small chance that the Canucks may know more about this stuff than me, but count me among the people who don't get the whole "this guy's too small to play, he's not getting ice time unless he bulks up" approach to prospects. It just seems like a lot of the time it does more harm than good.

Apu[after shooting a puck at Lisa]: "The goalie of my dreams!...Now let's try a hard one to make sure it wasn't a fluke."
He may not be a goalie but this quote goes to Janik Hansen. He played surprisingly well during his short call-up in the playoffs last year, but a lot of young players play above their normal level their first few games in the league purely because of the andrenaline (look at how Alex Edler's play worsened later into his stint with the team last year). Hopefully he gets more of a long-term shot this year and we find out if that was the real Janik Hansen we saw in the playoffs.

Homer: "Oh my God Marge. A penalty shot with only four seconds left. It's your child versus mine. The winner will be showered with praise. The loser will be taunted and booed until my throat is sore"
This one goes to Luc Bourdon and Alex Edler. Based on our current defence situation, there's only really room for one young defenceman to earn himself a regular spot on the team in the next couple of years. Wether they like it or not, those two have a bit of a competition on their hands. It would also make for a great running sub-plot for this season if these two played equally well and the town split into "pro-Edler" and "pro-Bourdon" camps that reularly duked it out on sports radio and message boards and such. Seriously, this needs to happern.

Marge: "I don't know how you two can sit here laughing at poor Lisa while she's out there probably scared to death."
Luc Bourdon gets himself an additional quote here. All reports during his 9-game stint at the start of last season indicated that the problem was not lack of talent but mental. And you know what, I actually feel pretty bad for him. It would probably suck to know that you've missed your chance chance at an NHL career not because you didn't have enough skill but because you couldn't get it together confidence-wise. Here's hoping that he pulls it together this year.

Milhouse[playing goalie for Apu's team]: "I could have been equipment manager, but noooooo."
To Cory Schneider. I don't know why it was just a great quote.

And now for another exciting edition of "people who look like things"

OMG! OMG! OMG!

The good people canucks.com are having a "choose our new blogger" contest, and your humble corespondent had his entry chosen as one of the options. To the five of you who actually read this blog, if you guys could throw a vote my way that'd be great (my entry's the one named Magicpie). Either way if you want to check out all the entries here is the link.

Burke doesn't match

As you've no doubt heard, Brian Burke did not match the offer sheet and Penner is now headed to Edmonton for 5 years at 4.25 million per year. This offer, or rather the muted reaction to it, might be the most significant thing to happern this off-season. The surprise and anger that you would have expected after Burke didn't match hasn't been there so far. Yes, it's still early, but there haven't been any angry quotes from anonymous GMs calling Burke a pussy for not matching and claiming his actions will destroy...well I don't know what exactly. Compare this to last year, when even though Nonis matched Kesler's RFA offer he still got angry calls for other GMs for not doing so quickly enough. By now, though, he stigma that used to be associated with RFA offers, both in terms of offering them and even remotely contemplating not matching them, seems to have mostly dissapated. For the first time in a long while, or I guess ever, we've seen the RFA process occur without a huge ammount of scorn being heaped on all sides by the hockey community. Offer sheets are now a legitimate tactic. In the hockey world, this might be one of those huge historical moments that changes the way things are done from this point on. I think it's pretty likely that next summer we're going to see a lot more RFA offers and that not a lot of fuss, at least of the "RFA's are forebidden asshole!" variety, will be made about them. So congratulations Kevin Lowe. Your desperation has created a new world for us all.