You will never be a professional hockey player. You will never be a billionaire owner. You will never work for an NHL franchise. You might never even learn to skate. You are the majority.
But you are smart. You are a visionary. You are a hockey fan. You have theories, and you want a place to test them.
Welcome. I have a secret for you.
I have been playing fantasy sports for 25 years. What began with pencil and paper in the school cafeteria morphed into jumping between sites and formats. One year, I ran nine teams covering seven sports. But I never found anything that filled the void I felt, nothing that ever felt anywhere close to real. Until I found my keeper league.
Daily or season-long formats are child’s play—introductory courses. Keeper leagues are where fantasy GMs earn their Ph.D.s. It’s the difference between taking guitar lessons and playing at Coachella.
While leagues vary, two things are universal: You draft players you have the rights to in perpetuity and you decide which to keep each season. Winning boils down to your ability to successfully manage that roster over the long haul with the kind of draft-and-develop model you ask of your favourite NHL team’s management. To weigh the short and long term. To tear it down and build it up. To strike while the iron is hot or to master your emotions and play the long game.
It took me eight years to climb the mountain known as the Backyard Oasis World League. Eight years of drafting juniors and watching them develop; or not. Eight years of finding hidden value in our annual auction—or spending way too much. Eight years of arduous trade discussions, heartache-inducing roster decisions and frantic deadlines. Eight years of annoying my wife, explaining to the uninitiated that they don’t know what they’re missing, and defending myself to those who just don’t get it. All while managing a salary cap.
And when it came to fruition in 2014, it was by the slimmest of margins. On a team led by Steven Stamkos, Taylor Hall, Carey Price and an emerging Vladimir Tarasenko, the title came down to an innocent-looking move made mostly because I didn’t want to be inactive at the trade deadline. With 34 minutes to go, I acquired Ilya Bryzgalov for a third-round pick. And, wouldn’t you know it, in his 11th-last NHL game “Cool Bryz” posted his final NHL shutout, which put my team over the top. After all the research, scheming, drafting and wheeling-and-dealing, I had a championship-calibre squad with a strong core, but felt it needed some added depth. So I went out and found some, and brought home the Euclid Cup.
Does any of that sound familiar? There’s more.
It took some maneuvering to get Stamkos. I had to consummate a blockbuster trade to be able to make him the first No. 1 draft pick in BOWL history when he was just 16. He then played two seasons with OHL Sarnia after I selected him and, while I put other pieces in place, he was stashed on my minor-league team to keep his salary escalator from kicking in until he took off as an NHLer. I turned down all kinds of trade offers for him during the following seasons. And when he missed 45 games with a broken leg for my title contender, I stuck with him, and won. Then, last summer, I decided he was going to take up too much cap space, so I traded him.
Still not convinced keeper leagues are the closest thing to being an NHL GM out there? How about this: More and more, the management theories you can put in place as a smart fantasy GM are aligning with what’s actually happening in the NHL, where teams are increasingly looking to predict future success by monitoring the types of underlying numbers available to anyone with an internet connection. Running a keeper franchise is about stockpiling players you believe will garner statistics in specific categories. Those calculations will take into account a player’s on-ice chemistry with teammates, but the intangibles hockey people have spoken about for generations, which have always been impossible to measure in fantasy—leadership, grit and the like—are less obsessed over in the real world with each passing season.
The most successful keeper GMs are armed with information, patiently develop players over a period of years, smartly augment their teams with an eye to the present and the future by slotting in specific player types and make tough roster choices.
Seems damn close to the real thing to me. Welcome to fantasy nirvana.