Fantasy Hockey Friday - Goalies: A Never-Ending Saga

By John Cullen

Hey folks, this will be the first of my weekly column, Fantasy Hockey Friday. I’m currently in 5 fantasy pools and having been an avid hockey fan and statistics follower for the last 20 years of my life, I’ll look forward to bringing my unique brand of advice to you each Friday.

Each week I’ll focus on a different topic in relation to fantasy hockey to help you best with managing your team. 4 of the 5 pools I’m in are pools with daily roster updates, so my advice will sometimes focus on pools with day-to-day rosters and each column will end with a small sit/start section for the Saturday slate of games. My hope is that you’ll find the advice useful, regardless of the format you pool in. This column will never be a “recommended pick-ups” column, but will instead focus on long-term advice that will serve to help you this year and in the future.

With the slow starts of elite fantasy goaltenders Roberto Luongo, Evgeni Nabokov, Martin Brodeur, and a few others, many have been left sitting at their laptops shaking their head. “Why did I ever draft a goalie in the first round?” is extremely common to see on message boards and Facebook statuses across the web, and really, you shouldn’t have. But that’s another conversation for another time. Goalies are the bane of every daily roster update poolie. Goalie stats normally account for half (sometimes more) of a poolie’s entire statistical output, and an injury or a slump for a key ‘tender can sometimes be the difference between winning a pool and finishing completely out of the money. So what can you do to avoid the massive amount of frustration that comes about every time you’re forced to make a sit/start decision, an add/drop decision, or simply when you are forced to sit idly by and watch your goalie get blown up? Sometimes, not much. Over the next two weeks we’ll be examining 5 tips for keeping your goalies straight. Here’s the first two:

2 Tips For Managing Your Goalies

I. DON’T play match-ups. What? Yeah, that’s right, I said it, DON’T play match-ups. Or what I should say is don’t play match-ups EXCLUSIVELY. Far too many poolies look at the team their goalie is playing and make the decision on whether or not to play their goalie based entirely on the team their goalie is playing, which is faulty logic at best. Would you sit or start a skater because he might receive a minus playing a great team? Probably not, so why would you do the same for a goalie? There are a lot of factors that go into sit/start decisions and while the straight-up matchup is not a bad way to go for the casual poolie, there are a few questions you should probably ask yourself first:

1. What is your goalie’s team record in the last 5 games? To me, this is the most important question you need to ask yourself. Playing net at the NHL level is a very fragile position, and you need to constantly be aware of how your goalie and his team is playing. If the team is playing hot and the goalie’s playing hot, the match-up shouldn’t matter, run the hot hand over the other every time. The opposite holds true if the goalie is playing cold. Another key thing to remember is the sheer difficulty of an 82-game NHL schedule and long-term winning streaks are a thing of the past. More often than not if my goalie has won his last 4 or 5 starts, I may bench him for another goalie because the streak is bound to end sometime, and the same goes for a goalie who has lost a few. You always need to exercise SOME caution, but food for thought nonetheless.

2. Back-to-back? Given the sheer volume of B2B games this season because of the Olympics, this is something you need to have on your mind all the time. Goalies will very rarely get a win in a B2B start, regardless of whether or not they played both games. It definitely depends on the overall trend of the team(see #1), but generally speaking, a team will split a B2B situation so take a look at how they performed in the first game.

3. Is your goalie streaking? This is similar to #1, but an individual goaltending streak can be just as important as a team streak. Pay attention to your goaltender’s individual numbers over the last 5 games and ride the hot hand. Wins are much harder to guarantee as they're more reflective of the team than the goalie, but individual goalie statistics come in bunches so if your goalie's running GREAT(sub-2.00 GAA or over a .920 sv. % over his last 3-5 starts) then throw the match-ups out and start that goalie.

II. Handcuff, Handcuff, Handcuff. If you’re new to fantasy, “handcuff” might not be a term you’re familiar with, but it’s one you should get to know right away. If you own an elite goalie, you need to own their backup, because if they go down and you DON’T own the backup, you’re basically telling the rest of your pool they can pick them up first. Unless you’re prepared to be the absolute fastest to the internet when your goalie goes down, you may as well give yourself some ease of mind and keep that goalie on the bench. The only excuse for not handcuffing your goalie is that if you have one of the few elite goalies whose backup is so bad that if your goalie ever got injured his team would trade for a goalie straightaway(a great example being Curtis McIlhenney in Calgary: if Kipper ever goes down, they’re buzzing Anaheim, Minnesota, Washington, or the Islanders immediately to enlist some help). Most backup goalies in the current NHL will get 15-20 starts anyway, and if your backup plays on a good team, a lot of those starts will be wins, so they’re certainly worth your investment over a bench skater who might only pay a minimum of dividends. So look up the number of Brent Johnson, Mathieu Garon, Ty Conklin, Josh Harding, et. al. and keep yourself on the happy side of goalie heart attacks.

The remaining 3 tips will come in via FantasyMail next week. I always want to err on the side of low blood pressure, and since goalies are such a difficult position to fill on a nightly basis, the best thing to do is to ease your own pain.

Now let’s take a look at some one-sentence goalie/team sit/starts for the upcoming weekend, October 10, 2009.

Team Forward/Defense

Start:

Los Angeles Kings: Ryan Smyth is finding the Captain Canada magic with Kopitar and against a still-jetlagged Blues team, Kings forwards are an easy play.

Columbus Blue Jackets: The team should be due a big game after mid-week let down at San Jose; Phoenix can’t play this well forever and should be the perfect medicine for the Jackets.

Sit:

Minnesota Wild: The team still hasn’t found its happy place yet and until they find some offence it’s hard to find a lot to like fantasy-wise outside Koivu and Havlat.

Toronto Maple Leafs: While it’s unlikely you have too much vested interest in the Buds, they’re at home to Pittsburgh who they’ve had minimal success against and it’s best to leave any Leafs you’ve got on the pine.

Goaltenders

Start:

Cristobal Huet @ Colorado: Huet needs to start winning some games to keep rookie Antti Niemi on the bench, so look for him to assert himself against an Avalanche team devoid of real shooters.

Ryan Miller @ Nashville: Miller’s off to his usual excellent start and Nashville looks to have another year of scoring 2-3 goals a game on their hands.

Sit:

Tim Thomas @ New York Islanders: I know what you’re thinking, but Boston’s been embarrassed twice already this year, Thomas hasn’t looked great, and this plucky Islanders team has shown a real willingness to go to the net so far this season.

Ilya Bryzgalov @ Columbus: Breezy can’t carry this team forever and a letdown needs to happen somewhere: the hands of Rick Nash, perhaps?

There goes the first FHF. Swing by next week for the remainder of my goalie tips list. Thanks for reading and may your bench players never score a point and your goalies never let in a goal.