On tanking and the joys and simplicitiy of the playoff pool.

My article is going to have two smaller segments this week. Mostly because everyone is focused on the first round of the playoffs and not too concerned about next year's projections yet. Things should pick up after each round and there will be more talk about the NHL Entry Draft in time too.

Tanks a Lot

Earlier this week the NHL revealed their lottery winner. Congratulations to the Florida Panthers, I hope you do well with the pick. Before the announcement, there was the behind the scenes formalities and process to producing the lucky ping pong ball or some similar ballot.

I am mentioning this because if you are in a keeper pool and do not have a lottery draft process in place you should consider adding one. It would help reduce the urge by keeper league owners that are near the cellar from trying to tank so that they can get first pick overall. The difficulty is in the formalities and process.

I don't know many people that have access to hundreds or thousands of ping pong balls. Even if you were to use pieces of paper or some random electronic method you probably need to get the majority of your owners together to witness the results. That can be difficult at the best of times. With the playoffs getting started many are likely to be at a draft somewhere or could possibly be unavailable for other reasons. If you wait too long people start going away on vacations and then it is like herding cats.

So what you need is something simple, quick and that places the commissioner out of the way, for the sake of not being called later on the possibility of influencing the results to benefit themselves.

I have something that does exactly that.

First, determine which positions in your pool are going to be a part of the lottery draft system, usually all non-winning ranks. Then decide the percentages to be allocated for each lottery draft position (make it out of one hundred and no fractions). The last thing you need to decide is if the winning lottery owner gets first overall pick or if they jump up X number of spots.

Now, once your regular season ends, total up the points earned by each owner and take the last two digits. That is the winning lottery number. Voila, now you know which owner has won your lottery draft.

Everyone knows immediately after the season ends, the commissioner is at an arm's length away and it's easy to execute.

By adding this or some other lottery draft system, you reduce if not eliminate the urge for owners to tank their seasons.

Playoff Love

The best thing about being in a playoff pool is that once the draft is done there is nothing else to do but watch and cheer. No waivers, no call ups or trades.

That is what being in a pool was like before technology advanced enough to allow and track daily stats. Don't get me wrong, I am on side with the advancements but being in a pool was more about projections than about transactions.

Back then you had to draft well and be lucky with regards to avoiding major injuries. Unfortunately, you had to endure the long season without changes. Some owners would even forget who they had on their roster, although I find some owners still forget.

We always wondered though…

What if my best guy gets injured early in the season? I want to be able to recover from that.

What if we could pick up players off of the waiver wire? I could get rid of under-performing players.

What if we could trade during the season? Oh the mess and arguments that would have caused, having to rely on daily newspaper box scores, which were not guaranteed to be accurate either.

Now, we lost the emphasis on drafting/predicting because we have the option of picking up undrafted players and making deals during the season. Some people get so caught up in it that they stay up till the wee hours of the morning to be able to pounce on a free agent claim. Not entirely what we had envisioned.

I think it is good to be in two regular season pools, one that allows all the current benefits technology can provide and one with no benefits.

The first is to keep in touch with new and surprising talent and trends. The second to keep your predictive side honed.

For now though, I yell, I scream and I cheer for my players.

I love the playoffs because there is nothing that I can do to change my hockey pool fortunes and it continues to be a lot of fun.