Some drafting tips that could both help and hurt your fantasy team.

You don’t need all this. Endless research. Numbers coming at you from every which way. Corsi, Fenwick, and PDO just get you all bogged down. Let the Puck Pastor take you away to a simpler and better time when you didn’t need a calculator and a protractor in order to figure out what players to choose. I’m talking about following your heart my friend. And what follows are some heartfelt principles which I absolutely guarantee will have you standing out this season.

Keep your integrity.

Take players you like, and don’t take ones you can’t stand. I don’t care what makes you like a player. It can be flat out weird. I know a guy who under no circumstances will take Henrik Lundqvist. His reason? The man is too damn attractive.  My buddy can handle someone being paid millions of dollars a year to play a game – but only if they are ugly. Lundqvist's style and GQ cover boy looks make him undraftable. I’m not sure what my friend is going to do now that Kiprusoff retired.

You don’t need empirical reasons to validate your choices; pseudo-mystical sounding ones are fine.

Gilbert Brule hasn’t played an NHL game since who knows when. Doesn’t matter. He has healed from his father issues and is good to go. 

Jarred Tinordi moves like the second coming of Jason Allison. Doesn’t matter. This is the year he grows into that big body. 

Nikolai Zherdev is fleeing from the Russian mob. Doesn’t matter. Vladimir Putin appeared in a dream and told you to draft him.

So draft accordingly (I’ve noticed that if fantasy writers add “draft accordingly” to their suggestions it basically serves as a buffer for any criticism).

Rely on instinct.

You are at the draft.  Notes are ready.  You know who you have planned to pick.  But something makes you wonder, a brief check in your spirit that maybe you should go off the board with your next pick.  What do you do?  Bail on the plan and follow that hunch baby!  It’s your heart transcending your reason and there is no conceivable way it will mess you up.

Need proof?  Look no further than these two geniuses:

“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” – Blaise Pascal

“When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons.  In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves.  In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.” – Sigmund Freud.

I assume Freud would put fantasy hockey in the ‘important’ category with job and spouse.

By now I trust you’ve realized I’ve given you some good advice – if you want to lose your draft. So, feel free to treat this column as a guide to what NOT to do. At the same time, I think I’ve probably zeroed in on some of the reasons why you like playing fantasy hockey in the first place. So in that sense, you can think of this as a guide to recapturing some of what you love about fantasy hockey. Which may have you a little confused at this stage.  Let me clarify; is this column good advice or bad?

It’s both – draft accordingly.  

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