Four Fantasy Hockey Hacks to Win your Pool

It’s almost September and I can’t decide whether I’m more excited for the NHL season to begin or for another year of fantasy hockey. This will be the 11th consecutive year our league has been operating, and while some managers have come and gone, we have a good group of hockey nerds who rank fantasy draft day ahead of the birth of their own children.
This year we’ve rented a boardroom for 6 hours, and have 3 managers Skyping in from out of town. Pizzas will be ordered and beer will be drunk, and at the end of the day, we will all have our own baby fantasy hockey teams. Before you do your own fantasy hockey draft, here are 4 tips that might help you win it all.
1: Tier players by position
The Yahoo fantasy hockey rankings provide a great resource for determining the order in which players should be selected; what it doesn’t do is tell you how much better one position-player may be than the next guy after him.
The most important position to tier is goalies. It will be difficult for you to win your pool without having a goalie in the top two tiers, or at the very least, two third tier goalies.
The three criteria you should consider when determining how to tier your players (goalies especially) is by (a) the strength of the team they play for, (b) the amount of competition they face in their position, and (c) history of injury.


These tiers are not set in stone, but rather something I threw together in the last 20 minutes. Decide for yourself where each player belongs amongst his peers and go from there.
Forwards are much more difficult to tier because of the C, LW and RW position, but it may be worth doing — at least for the top 10 in each position — to help you decide if you need to take a lower ranked player to fit a positional need (LW is always a challenge). Remember, the more work you put into your pre-draft strategy, the better prepared you’ll be on draft day.
2: Know your overall pick positions
This one seems obvious, but I’d be surprised how many people actually take the time to write out the numbers of all of their draft picks. For example, in my upcoming draft I will be selecting 6th in a 14-team league. That means my first pick is 6th, second pick will be 23rd, third pick 34th, fourth pick 51st, and so on. Using basic math you can figure out how many spots are in between your picks and create a table. From there you can compare your draft positions to the pre-draft player rankings to help you figure out which players might be available at each pick. Of course the pre-draft rankings should be used with a grain of salt, as there is no guarantee a 60th ranked player will still be there for your 51st pick. However, knowing your overall pick positions will help you contemplate whether a certain player might still be available when you next pick, or whether you’ll have to bite the bullet and take a player 10 spots higher than his fantasy rank.

I like to make a spreadsheet that includes my overall pick numbers and 5–6 players who may be available at that pick. If you want to go crazy, you could colour code players by position, but if you get to that point, you should probably consider getting a second hobby, or who knows, maybe even a job.
3: Beware of the goalie run

While standard fantasy hockey leagues have less goalie point categories than player categories, your season will be an absolute headache if you don’t select at least one quality starter. The more teams that are in your league, the sooner you’ll need to draft your number one guy. When other managers start drafting goalies you will be tempted to instead draft the quality forward that slips down the rankings. Before you do, it’s important to know how many picks there are until your next pick, and how many quality starters are left before you make that decision. You have to be prepared for the worst case scenario that every manager who has not selected a goalie may do so. Use your goalie tier to decide whether you can afford to hold off taking a goalie until the next round.
4: Have fun

At the end of the day, fantasy hockey is just a game. An extremely fun 8-month long game that you play with your best buddies. Organise a live draft and have everyone pitch in a few dollars for a championship trophy.
Don’t make the buy-in so high that it will affect your friendships, but make sure you decide on a good punishment for your league’s loser.

Last year our last place finisher had to get a belly button ring as an earring, and this year the worst manager will be getting a weekly spray tan in time for the summer festival season. If anyone has some good suggestions for humiliations I’d love to hear them.
Good luck to all the fantasy managers out there, and if you’re in my league, please ignore all of the above advice.
