Fantasy Hockey Friday: 10/16/09

By John Cullen

Hello everyone and welcome back to the second edition of Fantasy Hockey Friday, your weekly dose of fantasy musings.

Last week, we began to take a look at how best to deal with fantasy goaltending, an much-maligned issue amongst poolies and one that seems to be a huge struggle for fantasy players year in and year out. We began a countdown of my top 5 tips for poolies on how to deal with goaltenders, designed to minimize your stress level and maximize your goalie’s potential throughout the course of a fantasy season. We also looked at not playing your match-ups specifically and handcuffing your elite goalies. This week, the final 3 tips for making your life with your goalies that much easier.

The Last 3 Tips for Fantasy Goalie Management(it’s really not so bad):

Create a depth chart.

This is a tip that is more for your own personal benefit than anything else, but I think it’s a great way to manage your goalies(and your skaters, to that end). Each week, sit down, review your goalies, and create a depth chart for the week. Number your goalies according to what you believe their role would be if your fantasy team were a real hockey team. So, for example, in one of my pools, I have 4 goalies, but can only start 2 each night.

My depth chart right now looks like this:

Henrik Lundqvist--putting up consistent numbers and the Rangers are winning a lot of games. If he’s starting for the Rangers, he’s starting for my fantasy team.

Jonas Hiller--his GAA/save % have been startlingly low and despite not racking up as many wins as Lundqvist, I still prefer him over...

Ray Emery--While Emery and the Flyers have been racking up the wins, his goalie numbers haven’t been too impressive outside his first two games and he seems to be in a bit of a stats funk. Unlike my number four...

Jean-Sebastien Giguere--...who is in a huge wins funk. He makes enough saves to win games, but his team seems reluctant to put a game together in front of him.

By making a depth chart, you ease the pain that is coming to your computer after a Saturday slate of games and realizing the goalie you benched recorded a shutout or made 40+ saves in a winning effort, and the goalie you started let in 5 goals for a sub-.900 save percentage. It won’t ease the pain entirely, of course, but at least you can rest easy knowing that you made the decision well in advance of game day and you made the decision to the best of your ability.

You can always update your depth chart on a daily basis as well, but that’s a whole other can of worms. And of course, you don’t always stick to it religiously, if you have a gut feeling about a match-up, go for it, but this is a great way to not only ease your pain, but also to analyze the trends we talked about in Tip #1 last week. It’s hard to remember how well your goalie has been doing over the last 5 games, so sitting down and making a depth chart is a great way to force yourself into it.

Winning isn’t everything.

If you play fantasy hockey in the dreaded “office pool” where you pick guys out of categories or boxes and then never take a look at your lineup for the year, then wins are everything. But in the real world of fantasy hockey where daily updates are the norm, you have to remember that wins are not the only goalie stat ever invented. This might be more of a draft day strategy than anything else (where I laugh as guys like Tomas Vokoun perpetually fall to the “teen” rounds and end up on winning teams a good percentage of the time), but it’s important to note as you go through the year that wins are usually only one stat of five, and there is great, great value to be had in keeping goalies around with great support statistics.

It helps if you have a wins magnet like a Kiprusoff or Nabokov, but without great GAA and save percentage stats(and Kipper owners of the last two years will testify to this), you’re screwed. They are without question the hardest stats to accrue/make up, especially late in the season, and if you’re playing in 10- to 12-team pool, the numbers that win GAA and save percentage are usually on the extreme high end(in my 2 pools last year they were 2.17/.918 and 2.24/.920 respectively). So get in now while the getting is good and don’t be afraid of a Craig Anderson, Tomas Vokoun, Jon Quick, or even Mike Smith, who is putting up some mighty fine numbers down on the Bay.

Be patient.

Guys panic when their goalie stats plummet, and they do really, really stupid things like drop bonafide starting goalies for the hottest back-up in the game. I’ve seen guys drop goalies like Carey Price and Marty Turco for Antti Niemi because he’s won a couple of games in a back-up role, and when you do that, you’re losing yourself a pool. Unless the starting goalie is injured or a miserable excuse for a starter like Andrew Raycroft(who thankfully isn’t doing that anymore), a back-up is NEVER worth as much as a starting goalie. A platooned goalie like Hiller/Giguere, maybe. But a back-up? No way. I understand it’s hard to sit back while Cristobal Huet puts up a 25.29 GAA with a .400 save percentage on the night, but take a look at his numbers tonight following that debacle: 1 W, 1.00 GAA, .923 save percentage. As I’ve said before, goalie is a very, very fickle position and goaltenders will struggle. Be patient. Ride the storm. Have faith in your drafting. Until your goalie has struggled for 15 games or more(I’d say more if the goalie is on a particularly strong team, much like Huet) or has been completely usurped by the back-up, let it go. Fantasy seasons have been made on second-half goalie performances and there’s no reason why it can’t happen to you.

I’m going to cut off the sit/starts this week due to an illness(just can’t seem to shake this damn sinus infection), but in short, I love the Rangers and Henrik Lundqvist @ the Leafs on Saturday, as I still don’t think the Buds are there yet and the Rangers always seem to have the Leafs’ number, and I like Roberto Luongo @ Minnesota, whose inability to score this season won’t be helped any by meeting the league’s best netminder. On your pine, I would really hope to find either Dan Ellis or Pekka Rinne as Washington is never a good match-up for a struggling defensive team, and Mike Smith or Antero Niittymaki for Tampa Bay, as they roll into Pittsburgh after a humbling loss at Ottawa and Pittsburgh’s power-play should carve Tampa’s Bay’s 9th-worst PK unit into pieces.