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WHY NOT START A KEEPER LEAGUE?
There's just over one week left in the regular season, which means playoff pools are just around the corner.
If you're still in the race for your single-season league, then we'll have the Live NHL recaps with the full complement of info to help you with those last-minute additions. Twitter updates will also be available, as usual.
But for the next few weekdays (especially with light game loads tonight and Monday), we're going to use Hockey Hearsay to cover a topic which may be of interest to the majority of poolies who have nothing at stake today because the championship has already been decided. The subject: keeper leagues.
If you're in a one-year league, you just have to wait around for next season. Boring.
That's where a keeper league can come into play. The depth and involvement of any retention pool varies widely from group to group, but the basic concept revolves around trying to run your team like a real NHL GM would in terms of keeping it competitive for both today and the future. So even if your team has sucked the life out of you in '10-11, you can still attempt to swing trades and build through the summer draft with a low regular season finish.
In other words, there's always a reason to be interested in your team. Win or lose, there's always something you can be doing to make your roster more dangerous for the future. If you're in the bottom of the standings headed into the final few months of any season, then you can attempt to leverage the top teams by dangling your steady veteran and acquiring draft picks or a young star-in-waiting. The deeper the league, the more creative you can get with your deals too. More on that later in the series.
So in the coming days, we're going to take an expansive look at every aspect of building a keeper league. If you're looking to start one, this set of blogs will hopefully give you some insight of what to expect when you begin the process. If you're already in one, this may provide some ideas for tweaking your current set-up.
So without further delay, let's get our hands dirty and begin building your keeper league.
CHOOSE YOUR OWNERS WISELY
We are nothing without the people in our lives and a fantasy league of any kind can't exist without a group of people to run the teams. Know though that picking the owners for your league is one of the most important decisions you'll ever make and it can really set the tone for what sort of league you'll be involved with in the coming seasons.
The ideal fantasy owner is, for starters, one who is knowledgeable enough not to get taken by those ridiculous trade offers (or who will at least run the proposals by his favourite Sportsnet.ca fantasy hockey blogger first). A handful of lopsided trades can seriously affect the balance of power and ruin the experience for everyone but the trade thief. A few of those incidents can derail a league before it even really gets off the ground.
Generally the only way you're going to know someone's fantasy IQ is by having been in a league with them before and that's actually the best way to find owners anyway; draw from your own poolie experiences in recent seasons and try to hand-pick the good people. When I created my current league (just about to hand out its eighth championship) that's exactly what I did and although every owner hasn't worked out, I've ended up with what I'd generally consider a pretty strong core group of people that I'd take going forward into any new league too.
Have there been a few duds along the way? Of course. Occasionally there will be an inactive person or someone who has a personality that doesn't really mesh with the group, but that's to be expected.
Personality, by the way, is also a really key indicator of how someone might fare in your pool. Too many strong-willed personalities with not much flexibility in their beliefs can really put some bad mojo into the mix and create a negative experience for everyone. Unfortunately, sometimes you're just not going to know how someone might react under adverse conditions (when something, be it a trade vote or something else, doesn't go their way) and you'll just have to deal with things at that point. Once in awhile, for the betterment of the league, the commish will have to step in and replace an owner. I've done that myself and while it's not fun, sometimes it is the best thing to do.
DO YOU REALLY WANT TO BE THE COMMISH?
If you're interested in starting up a keeper league, give serious thought to whether or not you want to be the commish. Seriously - mull that one over. Take it from someone who knows from his own experiences and that of hearing so many reader stories over the years... it ain't necessarily all that it's cracked up to be.
While many key issues will be decided by a democratic voting process, there will undoubtedly be times where the commish has to step in on a matter and regardless of the fairness of the ruling, someone's going to be unhappy. It's part of the life of "The Decider", so you'd better be prepared to deal with that aspect of it.
That's where having a group of moderates as owners is especially helpful; rather than having one or two guys that tend to overreact to anything that doesn't go their way. Having to constantly battle with even one owner gets tired really, really quickly and it can drain you. No fun. Trust me.
The other important part of being a commish is that you need to be prepared to stay on top of any situation so it can be resolved quickly. Are you the kind of person who's reachable all the time, or do you have too many other time demands in your life that it'd really be unrealistic that you could dedicate enough time to making things work? As much as having a good group of owners is important, any successful league also has a good commish. If you can't be that person, then realize that from the start of the process.
As a side note, remember that when you're the person who is having to be "The Decider"... you could be putting yourself in the position of having to deal with the wrath of a scorned owner on a future trade deal. People who aren't the commish can skate under the radar and trash-talk your decisions behind your back; all the while helping to turn the knife in said back on a deal that will help their own team.
WE'RE JUST SCRATCHING THE SURFACE HERE...
Ok. So you have your ownership in place. The commish has been named.
Now what?
The bulk of the work still needs to be done, although creating a keeper league from scratch is a lot of fun. It's completely nerdy, which is right in my wheelhouse, but crafting something like this from the very beginning is really a pretty cool thing to do. It'll also give you a real appreciation for a well-run league, as opposed to the myriad of disasters that will eventually implode on themselves.
Before we close out today's blog, let's tackle one of the more important issues in this scenario: maintaining a balance of power.
Dynasties are only fun for the team doing the winning, so providing some sense of equality in a keeper league can be a key factor to contributing to its long-term success. The onus should certainly be on any given owner to produce a winner on his or her own, to be sure, but the fact remains that teams with no chance of winning can lose interest quickly. There needs to be an element of responsibility where any bottom feeder tries to collect high draft picks and trade for the future, but there are certain steps you can take right from a league's inception to create some equality for all.
ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS
Although good management will almost always rise to the top, in the NHL parity has been more or less been achieved through the use of a salary cap. A number of pools have taken note and have used the implementation of said cap to prevent one franchise from accumulating too many superstars. As is the case for a real life NHL GM, fantasy owners who can find the great dollar bargains (be it via young players or third liners who get an increased role) can really use those deals to drive their team's success.
Depending on your fantasy service, use of a salary cap can be relatively painless or it could also become a headache. To each his own, but my league will never institute a cap. Would it make the experience more realistic? Certainly. I just don't want my fantasy fun time to be taken up with the business side of the game. Personal preference.
SHALLOW OR DEEP?
Other than a cap though, there are some easier ways to maintain the keeper feel of a league while still allowing for a decent competitive balance each season. The most crucial decision related to that is how many keepers per team do you want? The math is fairly straightforward here: the more owners you have in the league and the more keepers allowed per team, the less player turnover there will be per season and the more "entrenched" each franchise will become in the standings.
Shallower formats with three to five keepers allow owners to hang onto their favourite players, but still basically have that single-season fresh start each fall with every owner having a fairly legitimate chance to win. The deeper you go beyond that, the more difficult the task of winning can become for teams that fall behind. Again, it's up to each owner to, um, man up and to create a championship team... but it takes a dedicated owner to be on the bottom end of that equation and commit to rebuilding.
There is no right or wrong answer here when it comes to choosing the number of keepers, so have a lengthy group conversation and try to make sure you're all as close to being on the same page as possible. If nine of 10 owners are on board for a deep league, as an example, then you've identified a potential problem with one guy down the line and everyone will have to decide what's best for the league at that point. Belly-aching about something that's already been decided can get really old, really fast, so the group and that owner should then decide if it's the best situation for him or her.
ROTO OR H2H?
Something else to consider when it comes to keeping as many teams active for as long as possible each season is deciding on either a rotisserie format or a head-to-head look. Roto basically involves tracking all stats from beginning to end, with season-ending numbers deciding who comes out on top. H2H involves weekly match-ups with another owner, where your win-loss record determines your regular season standing. Playoffs, like the NHL, mean teams begin anew. Fresh slate. Anything can happen.
As you know, roto tends to have half the league out of the race by Christmas or shortly thereafter, where H2H keeps most teams involved right up until the playoffs begin. At that point, a team that barely skated by into the post-season dance could get hot at the right time and steal the championship. So in that respect, H2H is vastly superior when it comes to replicating the feeling of running a team throughout the season.
One major downside of some H2H formats, IMO, is that weekly games played limits tend to be far too lenient and it turns into a situation where a chunk of your roster (fringe players) may be turning over on a nightly basis. Again, it's just a personal preference kind of thing. I'm not a big fan of it, but it's just my opinion. There are H2H leagues that put a tighter cap on weekly game limits and that idea goes a long way to improving the format.
Some leagues, be they roto or H2H, will also strictly max the total number of moves you can make in a season. All leagues have some sort of limits, of course, but these formats tend to allow for just a handful of injury subs and/or discretionary moves each season. In some respects, especially if trades are included in the max number of moves, that almost acts as a backdoor salary cap of sorts.
On the whole though, remember the crux of today's blog relates to how important the concept of truly building a deep franchise feel is to your owners vs. just having a few players you really like and still having everyone be able to compete each season.
ON TAP
Next week we'll continue this topic with a look at which categories you may want to implement, whether or not a farm system is right for you and how you may want to use trades within the keeper league framework.
