I signed up to be in a fantasy hockey draft this year run by James Mirtle. I'm not a big fantasy nut but I figured it would be a good way to get me to concentrate on the statistics side of the game.
So I'm busy ranking players on Yahoo! along with my fresh new copy of The Hockey News Ultimate Fantasy Pool Guide and various other Internet resources. It's entertaining yet frustrating at the same time.
I've got to admit, it's taking a lot more thinking than I expected. When's the right time to draft a defenceman? Does a goaltender who gets 30 wins rank higher than a forward who puts up 70 points? When do you grab a scoring pest like Daniel Carcillo? It's making my head spin.
But as I was looking through the goaltender rankings, I noticed something that really boggled my mind. Almost to the point that I declared all fantasy projections null and void.
The magazine gives an overview of each team and then proceeds to list every player, alphabetically, along with their projected stats. For goaltenders, this includes wins, GAA, SP and SO numbers. It's all based on last seasons numbers with an eye to where that player now ranks in the organization. Or so I thought.
For the Avalanche's incumbent #1 goaltender, Peter Budaj, he is projected to rack up a - wait for it - a mind boggling, incredulous, astonishing - wait for it again - ten (10) wins this season. That's right, 10 bloody wins.
The following goaltenders are all ranked to get the same or slightly higher amount of wins as Budaj: Craig Anderson, Alex Auld, Brent Johnson, Patrick Lalime, Michael Leighton, Frederik Norrena and Tobias Stephen.
Now, that's not the end of my flabbergastedness. See, I could forgive them if they had some inside knowledge and pegged Raycroft to take over the #1 role with a projected 30 win season. So I jump over to to the "R"s, take a deep breath and open my eyes to...7 wins.
The math on that isn't difficult. The Hockey News is projecting the Avalanche to win 17 games this season. That's about 20% of their games. That would put them on track for maybe a 40-point season with a couple of OTL's tossed in.
"Is that even possible?", I asked myself. When was the last time a team finished with less than 20 wins? Heck, Los Angeles and Tampa Bay got in the W column 30 times last season.
The Tampa Bay Lightning missed the mark a few times in the late 90's, as did Atlanta, and Ottawa and San Jose barely managed to barely crack double digits a couple times in the early 90's.
We can even go a bit more recent and note that Philadelphia only had 22 wins in the '06/07 season while Pittsburgh achieved that same mark in '05/06 after having racked up 23 wins in '03/04. The projected superpower Chicago blackhawks just slipped in to the 20-win category in '03/04 as well. So it's not entirely unfeasable.
But I'll keep chugging along making sure to take every number I see with a grain of salt. It looks like The Hockey News won't be my saviour and I'll have to don my thinking cap during the 3-hour draft tonight. And I suppose I'll have to bear the brunt of the blame if I come in last in the pool. But it's all in fun and I hope it improves the quality of my analysis on this site.
Subscribe with RSS
2 Comments:
38 W's for mr hilton eh...i guess they're going to triple shift ovie?
I think Mr. Leonsis is sitting on some cloning technology. Gotta do something with all those millions! ;)
Post a Comment