If you’re doing a mock draft, trust in your player rankings.

Last week the people at NHL.com ran a mock fantasy hockey draft. You can view the results in the article, "Analysis of NHL.com's fantasy hockey mock draft" by Pete Jensen.

It is they who say that "Having a strategy entering your draft is important, but improvising is just as essential to strong decision-making. You should always consider the best player available, fill positional and category needs when possible and be mindful of which players will be attained in later rounds."

Before we get into the results I want to establish what the purpose of a mock draft is.

In my opinion, having a mock draft is important to simulate who you would have the opportunity to select based on what you can forecast of the other participants. You simulate what your opponents would pick. Some examples would be, a particular owner always takes the best goalie in the first round, one owner is a huge Montreal Canadiens fan and always wants one or two on his team and another owner cannot stand having any Toronto Maple Leafs so you'll know he will pass up on any opportunity to select them.

A secondary purpose to a mock draft is to understand where you can pick certain players. You have someone ranked very high but through a mock draft he ends up slipping several rounds, you kind of understand that there is some potential for you to hold off on selecting him and take the next best player instead. You hope that you can pick him up later but there are no guarantees. There is the case where you have a player ranked very low but the player gets selected very early. In these cases you most likely feel like the other owner wasted their selection but you hardly ever feel like you need to readjust your rankings because of their wildly early selection.

All in all, you still are simulating what you expect your opponents will do. Sometimes you know them very well and other times you have never met them before. If you never met them before then you are guessing.

One popular site, Yahoo! Sports Fantasy, gives you the opportunity to participate in mock drafts to test out your draft rankings. There are some major issues though.

Your league rules might not apply to the ones that they run under (roster positions and/or stat categories). They have mock drafts for eight, ten, twelve and fourteen participants but no other variations. Those are big caveats.

If you do end up participating in one of their mock drafts, you will find that you have an option to use your draft list or to use Yahoo's pre-draft rankings.

Once your mock draft starts you will notice that a substantial number of participants immediately turn on auto picking and logout. After a few rounds go by more participants end up doing the same thing. They do this so that they don't have to sit there waiting for the results. Once the draft is over they do have the option to get them e-mailed.

If you actually participate in the mock draft you will see a list of players, their positional availability, their Yahoo rank and the average pick they are drafted at.

The assumption is that everybody uses a customized list but the reality is that they don't because there is an option to use Yahoo's rankings instead. Why do they care to run a mock draft if they do not even create their own list? If they participate in one mock draft they get a virtual fantasy medal, at 10 mock drafts they get another medal. The reality is that people like getting medals and don't really care about the purpose of a mock draft. This isn't very important in the big scheme of things.

What this does do is skew the average draft ranking because if most people use the Yahoo rankings then the average will most likely tend towards those rankings. Maybe not so much for the top end talent but certainly for the mid to bottom tier players and this doesn't mention the fact that you don't know how the value is altered because of someone selecting a low level player to be auctioned off early in an auction draft. While you have all this data in front of you it has limits.

The net result is that you don't simulate your true opponent's draft tendencies.

Now specifically back to the NHL mock fantasy draft I found a bigger issue which bothers me even more than the caveats and assumptions that I detailed earlier.

It starts when the Fantasy Insider team published a list of the Top 275 Ranked players back on September 1^st, 2014.

Their column says, "NHL.com fantasy hockey insiders Matt Cubeta, Pete Jensen, and Matt Sitkoff have constructed a pool of players who they believe are the top 275 in standard Yahoo leagues. The writers then went their separate ways and individually ranked those assets based on a number of factors, including but not limited to offseason moves, position eligibility, line combinations, category coverage or lack thereof, contract situations, and statistical performance from previous seasons."

The list has the overall rank and how each fantasy expert individually ranked the players.

"These rankings should be viewed as our experts' opinionated projections of the NHL's most valuable fantasy players based on expectations entering the season. They should be used as a basis of reference when making your educated selections on draft day", the article continues.

What find troubling is that the three experts don't follow their own individual rankings. So why should other people?

I understand that when you are drafting for positional requirements you have to drop down 20 to 30 players to get the best goalie available as an example. What I do not understand is that they pass on higher ranked players for lower ones of the same position.

In Matt Cubeta's case, he drafts Matt Duchene (who he ranks 31^st) and David Backes (37^th) over Chris Kunitz (19^th), Nicklas Backstrom (23^rd), Henrik Zetterberg (24^th), Pavel Datsyuk (25^th), Patrick Sharp (26^th), Joe Pavelski (27^th) and Ben Bishop (28^th). Why, when some of the other players fit the same positional need?

In his particular case he gets lucky and is able to draft Backstrom but many of the other players that he passed up on were now gone.

There are other situations where Cubeta does the same thing, Jeff Carter over Martin St. Louis, Joe Thornton and Henrik Sedin.

Jensen is a little bit more stable with his picks but he too decides to ignore his own rankings by taking Ryan Johansen (41^st) over Joe Thornton (35^th) and Marian Hossa (40^th). You could make the argument that Johansen is a multi-positional player whereas the other two are set in one position but surely Ryan Johansen's contractual status must have been scaring off the others at the draft.

Then there is taking Marian Gaborik (50^th) over Thornton, Hossa and Kris Letang (47).

Again, what is the point of ranking a player higher if you don't believe in taking him? Hossa is a right winger just like Gaborik.

Then there are Matt Sitkoff's picks and it starts off right in the first round when he takes Patrick Kane (11^th) over Tyler Seguin (10^th). Okay, I will give him a pass and say the he might have been hoping that Seguin sneaks to his second round pick but it didn't work.

When he takes Bobby Ryan (84^th) in the fifth round over 29 other players it makes you wonder what is going on.

Patric Hornqvist (101^st) was taken over 27 others. T. J. Oshie (95^th) was taken ahead of 19. Cam Fowler (152^nd) was selected over 40 available players and some of them were defensemen.

Where is the credibility in using the NHL's top 275 player list if these experts don't believe in their own rankings?

To reiterate, they said their list "should be used as a basis of reference when making your educated selections on draft day" but they seem to have ignored their own advice.

What good is spending all the time and effort formulating and compiling a list if you don't end up trusting the results that you generated? This goes to everyone and not just the folks at NHL.com's fantasy division.

If you are going to do a mock draft remember that you are trying to figure out who your opponents are going to select. If you are able to successfully forecast that, then you can maximize when you select your higher ranked players. It is not perfect nor is it easy to do.

Going through a mock draft when you don't trust your own rankings and expecting there to be any value coming from it is just a crock.