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START YOUR OWN LEAGUE!
On Friday we looked at some key components for starting a fantasy hockey keeper league.
Topics covered included choosing your ownership group wisely, asking yourself if you really want to be the commish, as well as various ways to maintain some sort of balance of power on a year-to-year basis. Those can include a salary cap, choosing shallow vs. deep in terms of the number of keepers and also deciding if you'd prefer roto or H2H.
Today we're going to give some consideration to which categories you may want to employ, along with some things to keep in mind for trading within the league.
CATEGORICALLY SPEAKING
Scoring categories are especially important to get right off the bat because it can be really difficult to incorporate new categories once a league has been established.
Why? Owners will draft, trade away & for and add players based on a certain formula for success revolving around your initial categories.
If someone built his team around stud goalies, as an example, he'd be much more likely to push for adding a shutout category after the fact compared with the guy who has weak goaltending but a dynamic offence.
Back in the day we took part in pools that used the basic goals/ assists or straight out points format. For some people that formula still works the best because it keeps things simple and may involve a little less time in keeping track of your players. If it works for you, that's what matters.
Today, thanks to the evolution of the internet, there is virtually no limit on the stats that are tracked and which can thus be employed by fantasy leagues.
Let's begin with the basics though. Hockey is fundamentally about scoring more goals than the other team, so the lifeblood of any pool is going to be goals and assists. But do you believe all goals and assists are created equal? Or would you prefer a goal-heavy ratio where scorers are rewarded with more points than set-up men?
I tend to side with keeping goals and assists weighted equally because it's really the classic chicken and egg argument: you can't have one without the other. But some poolies prefer to go with a 1.5/1 or even 2/1 ratio for goals to assists and if that's what you like, then more power to you. Picking any category for your league is going to come down to what your particular group of owners prefers, so don't let anyone else dictate what you should or shouldn't do.
Beyond goals and assists though, there are a whole host of categories you can incorporate to spice things up.
You can debate the merits of the statistic itself, but +/- is a pretty standard category tracked in fantasy. Players from better teams tend to carry a bit more weight than the stars on the bottom-feeding franchises that are carrying a -15 rating. If your rosters and league itself tend to run fairly deep, there may even then been a benefit to adding guys like Toni Lydman (+32 with 25 points) in Anaheim or Adam McQuaid (+30 with 96 PIM) with the Bruins throughout the season.
Their main contributions are really only in the +/- category, but they have dominant numbers there. I've mentioned more than a few times how a few years back, when Ottawa was a lethal offensive team, I used both Chris Phillips and Anton Volchenkov on my back end specifically for +/- because I had more than enough offence up front to make up for their deficiencies there. They were key in turning around that category for me and pushing my team on to a win.
One way to slightly increase the weight of goal scorers without tampering with the goals/ assists ratio directly is to work the SOG category into your league. You've got to shoot the puck to score and guys who put up a lot of shots tend to score more goals than those who don't. Pretty simple math there.
Maybe one of the most hotly-contested categories in fantasy hockey is penalty minutes though. They are, by nature, something that generally hurt a real-life NHL team because they're putting a player in the box and leaving his team short-handed. Because of that, some pools will mitigate the worth of a penalty minute by making each PIM count for 0.25 points or 0.50 points, or something along those lines.
The argument against the negative side of PIM is generally two-fold: 1) power forwards tend to post healthy penalty minute totals and their worth is invaluable to a team on the ice and 2) fights are generally considered a necessarily evil in the game of hockey because of their ability to change the flow of a contest before it becomes too one-sided, so grabbing PIM from enforcers is, in essence, one way to reflect their worth from real life to fantasy.
I'm kind of torn on the issue myself, although I think I've finally fallen into the "get rid of PIM" camp. Despite generally faring really well annually in the PIM category (Dan Carcillo was a one-man wrecking crew for a few years for my roster) and building my team around as many power forwards as possible, I'm not really a fan of being able to use goons to steal points in that category and put it on the same plateau as goals and assists. 10-minute misconducts carry too much weight in that format and are a pet peeve of mine.
If you're going to go beyond goals and assists, one of the most popular categories to work in is power play points. Some leagues will just use PPG instead of PPP (or PPG and PPA vs. just PPP), but that goes back to your preference of the weight of goal scorers.
So in my league, offensively speaking, we run with G, A, +/-, PIM, PPP and SOG. Six of nine categories dedicated to offence. We'll get to the goaltending stats momentarily, but let's not forget some other potential offensive categories to really put an interesting touch on your league.
Minute-eating players are critical to any team's success in the NHL, so with stats being so easily tracked in today's world we've seen a number of leagues put icetime into the mix. I love it. If I were starting a new league I'd absolutely put ATOI on the list of things we'd count. Aside from anything else, it really enhances the value of a player who is important to his on-ice team, which would then be reflected onto your fantasy squad.
How about hits? Third and fourth line energy guys can change up a game and while they might not warrant a spot on your fantasy roster in most instances without hits included, in deeper leagues they can find a place for that stat alone.
How about blocked shots from a defenceman? Giveaways? Takeaways? Shooting percentage? Shootout goals?
If you've separated wingers and centres in your league, which is another aspect to consider at your league's inception, then you'll no doubt want to think about adding face-off wins or face-off percentage as a stat. They're a critical facet of any NHL game because of the ability to control the puck for a certain amount of time after each draw won, so face-offs can certainly be considered an important part of a fantasy team. It makes a fantasy star like Jonathan Toews that much more valuable, but it can also give someone like Manny Malhotra a home on somone's team as a specialist. Prior to his injury, he had an unreal 61.7 winning percentage.
Speaking of the LW-C-RW vs. straight forwards debate, that's also one of those personal preference things. Using specific positions instead of only forwards does make the experience more real, but it can also be extremely frustrating because you're generally counting on someone else to assign a player wing eligibility when a centre is shifted over or vice versa. I employ straight forwards in my league.
When it comes to goaltending, there are a number of ways you can go when you set up the categories. Part of the decision-making process will certainly depend on how many offensive categories you've enlisted, since you'll want to have some sort of relatively proportionate breakdown between the two.
Wins are certainly the most popular single category. Goals against average and save percentage are pretty common, although some leagues prefer to use total saves instead of save percentage or total goals against instead of the average. Should shutouts count for extra, or is their impact on GAA and SV% reflected well enough in their worth? We didn't include shutouts in my league when it was formed nine years ago, but I'm pretty sure I'd want the bonus for shutouts if we started over.
Do you want to count minutes played as a stat to jack up the value of those heavy-start goalies, or are their normal stats enough? And do you have the ability to incorporate the points and PIM your goalies accrue throughout the season? If so - and we just started this with our league this season - it is really fun to see your goalie grab an assist here or there.
Anyway, you can see that there is a lot to consider when choosing your league's categories. It's really nice to be able to get input from every manager who wants to be involved right at the beginning, so that each person has a real sense of ownership in the process. Ideally you're going to build a long-term group commitment here and that's one of the tools you can use to realize that goal.
TRADING: A FOUR LETTER WORD?
Trading.
In fantasy hockey, it can often be a four-letter word.
Think about it. There are leagues you'll be in where barely anyone will even respond to an offer, let alone actually make a deal. Other times people who actually will make deals are asking outrageous prices for their players. Although that's their right to do so, it definitely doesn't help the overall trade atmosphere.
Then there's a matter of the trades that are accepted. What's fair and who's to say what's fair? Deals can be subjective at the best of times, especially when a team higher in the standings is dealing with an owner much further down. Trades can then often be at the root of some very passionate arguments and huge rifts can often be created.
Equally important as any aspect of creating your keeper league is how you're going to approach handing trade review. The answer to that quandary really depends on your particular ownership, how well you know them and how much you trust them.
In many cases, you may well just want to use the in-house review system in place for whichever fantasy service provider you're with at the time. One benefit to that is by using a third party, it takes the anger from any vetoed or allowed trades away from the ownership group and moves it onto someone else. There are some downsides to that too though, including the fact that some fantasy services' review panels are seemingly staffed by poorly-trained hamsters. Plus, what if you're in a really deep keeper league and a trade involves draft picks and prospects? Explaining that on a protested trade could get a bit sticky.
Another alternative many pools allow is for the commish to be the ultimate voice that has the final say. That can work in many instances, although the potential for the appearance of impropriety is there for any deal that involves him directly or indirectly with one of his own trades or one that could impact his place in the standings.
In my league, we've got a system in place where owners have 48 hours after the completion of any trade to voice their displeasure. If five of the 10 owners cast a veto vote, which has yet to happen since we started in '02-3, then a trade will be overturned and the teams involved can feel free to re-work it. It's not that there haven't been what many of us would consider lopsided deals, but we're generally more of the mind that an owner is free to make his own mistakes. As a commish, it's my job to make sure that any owner that we come to discover doesn't have what it takes to compete at this level is replaced... which has been done before.
There are bad deals that can happen which will impact your league for years to come and as commish, the earlier you can step in to weed out the weak owners the better off your whole league will be in the long run.
In general - and assuming you're not going with the in-house hamster trade review option - it's crucial that your group takes the time right at the inception of your league to attempt to establish what's acceptable in terms of trades.
First of all, will you allow draft picks to be included? That might mean not only picks for the prospect draft each summer, if you have one, but also picks from the post-keeper player draft held each fall. The fewer keepers you have, the more valuable one of those picks could become. Our league allows both types of picks to be dealt and we can deal those prospect picks up to three years in advance.
If you have a farm system then you'll obviously be allowing prospects to be included in any potential trade. You then have to realize that depending on how deep your league is, there could be some really debatable trades between contenders and rebuilding teams where established stars are being dealt for what might really be long-term considerations. Assuming you have owners that are all in the same general fantasy skill level, all you really need to concerned with is that both teams are making legitimate attempts to improve their rosters. How they choose to do so should really be up to them.
STILL TO COME...
The last piece to the keeper league puzzle revolves around prospects and whether or not a farm system of some sort would be right for you.
We'll tackle that tomorrow.
