Building off of last week's Ramblings where I started discussing how I review and prep for my fantasy seasons, and the next big step is mock drafts. Yahoo mock drafts are open, and I have run through a couple before gathering some thoughts here. I have a bit of a usual routine in prepping for the season, and I'll outline it here, what I do, and why I think it has been successful.

First off, I play in six leagues right now, two dynasty cap leagues (which are all but irrelevant here) one eight-team full redraft H2H league, one twelve-team full redraft Roto league, one ten-team keep any six players H2H league, and one twelve-team keeper with a few more nuances, but the basics are that you keep six forwards, four defencemen, a goalie, and a prospect.

With that out of the way, my usual prep begins with outlining my lock keepers in my keeper leagues, and then looking to trade anyone outside of that list for the best draft pick value, keeping whichever couple of the close to equivalent non-lock players are left to fill out the rosters. For example, I have a ton of guys in one league I could keep at forward, but Brayden Point and Aleksander Barkov are the only locks, while players like Filip Forsberg, Ryan O'Reilly (faceoff wins are valuable), Max Pacioretty, and Oliver Bjorkstrand are players I would be happy to keep, but I don't have a huge preference. At that point, if I have one spot left, I trade away the three that net me the best value in return, and keep the last one.

From there, I start running through a few mock drafts. This isn't as simple as opening a mock draft and picking players though, there's a bit of an art to it. I go into the mock drafts with the mindset that I am drafting for my most complex league with the shrewdest group of GMs, and select whoever I would as though I was drafting there. That league is a 12-team league though, and to account for how well the GMs draft, I always run the 14-team Yahoo mocks in order to better mimic the actual available value at my picks. If you do this enough, you reach a comfort level in knowing about who should be available at your picks, and then by about the mid-point of the draft, there's an extra player on your roster that you hadn't accounted for in the mocks.

In these mocks, it's also important to focus on where the values are, and where the tiers are, both positionally, and for certain stats. The league I mock drafting for has goals, assists, plus-minus, shots, power play points, and hits as the skater categories. It being a Roto league, each stat is important. Obviously, you want the most well-rounded player at every pick, but what does that actually look like?

Well, I've found great success in this league ensuring that no skater I select is a slacker in the hits category (first round notwithstanding). The draft tends to run from the best offensive player to the worst anyways, with some GMs targeting guys like Ryan Reaves or Nikita Zadorov in the last slots, but as soon as you're trying to catch up on stats with one-dimensional players, you have probably already lost. What this means, is that if I'm selecting between a few guys like David Pastrnak, Mikko Rantanen, Brad Marchand, or Artemi Panarin, care to hazard a guess which I lean towards? In the one-year league, I'm taking Brad Marchand, because his point totals are similar, but the hits are consistently double the other three (if you really don't like that option, then you're going with Pastrnak who still hits some, and also has the highest shot totals). These kinds of decisions I make throughout the draft, and that means in round eight or nine when someone like Brock Boeser slides, you can grab him without having to worry about a make-up pick because you already have yourself covered.

I may have gotten off track there a little, but the gist of it is that if you can grab well rounded players (with some upside) with most of your picks, then things come together a lot easier for you, and adjusting in-season is also a lot easier because you won't fall very far behind in any one category. For H2H leagues, there's a similar strategy, though it gets a little easier as you don't need your players to be as well rounded. The way to win H2H leagues (outside of building an absolutely dominant roster) is to guarantee you win 50% of the categories. That means building a roster that dominates 50% of your league's categories (it does not matter which ones, but the more projectable ones such as hits, saves, and faceoff wins are easiest), and coasting in the other categories, winning maybe 10-30% of them. Like with the Roto strategies, when making a pick between players in the same tier, you lean towards players that give you the stats you're loading up. For example, between Johnny Gaudreau or Elias Lindholm, I will always end up with the Lindholms on my team, stacking faceoff wins, hits, and shots while leaving some more variable stats like points or plus-minus on the table.

Shifting to the positions, this year it appears that there are a TON of goalie options. The only first-round option should remain Andrei Vasilevskiy, however there are four that I would consider in the range of round two or three (which is early even for me as I tend to fade goalies due to the variance). That being said, I am extremely confident in all of Robin Lehner, Darcy Kuemper, and Connor Hellebuyck this season, and they should be the first names off of the board. After that, Yahoo as usual gets a little wonky, and ends up dropping some high-quality options outside of the top 150 overall, and outside of the top 30 goalies. Elvis Merzlikins, Cal Petersen, John Gibson, Tristan Jarry (going to be a top-10 goalie this season), Anton Khudobin, Pavel Francouz, Jake Allen, and others are all too low. What that tells me, is that I can wait forever on goalies, and still get some I like. If I had two or three of the netminders I listed there as my only goalies this season for every fantasy team, I would be very happy. Knowing I can get them after draft rounds get into the double digits, I'm getting giddy.

I also tried a mock-draft where I only took skaters for the first 10 rounds (14-team draft) from the 13^th overall position, and it ends up as a stacked offence: Jonathan Huberdeau, Sidney Crosby, Gabe Landeskog, J.T. Miller, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Elias Lindholm, Tyler Seguin, Blake Wheeler, Anthony Mantha, and Patrik Laine.

*Also noteworthy is that of those players, only Crosby doesn't have multiple positions, and Yahoo doesn't seem to ever remove positions in a season once they are added.

Separating the forwards out into positions, as always Yahoo has a ton of multi-position players, so flexibility isn't too much of an issue. There are a few top options at each wing, but as always, centre is much deeper than any other option, so that is always the spot to wait on if you can manage it. Obviously don't pass on Auston Matthews if he slips to you at pick 15, but in general grabbing the other positions first will leave you with a deeper roster.

Looking at the back-end, these were the defencemen I was then able to fill in with afterwards (starting at pick 153 – Defenceman #41 off the board): Brent Burns, Rasmus Dahlin, Noah Dobson, and Evan Bouchard. Starting to thin out a little with the peripherals, but for the tail-end of the draft it's not bad at all.

Noah Dobson especially is someone I expect to have a bit of a coming-out party this year, taking over the powerplay time, and getting some of the easier minutes behind Adam Pelech and Ryan Pulock on Long Island. He put up some decent numbers in a limited number of games last year, but wasn't getting regular minutes, in part due to a road-block named Nick Leddy, who has since been shipped off to Detroit.

Back to the draft, even after nabbing my 14 skaters (14×14=196 players off the board), had I wanted to I could have grabbed Jarry instead of Bouchard, but in keeping with my outline from the start, I let him go, and ended up with Pavel Francouz and Anton Khudobin. Both likely timeshare goalies, but there should be some excellent ratios there, and a fair share of wins.

All in all, it goes to show that there are a lot of goalie options this year with the rise of the timeshare – though a limited amount that you can bank on for 60+ starts, so if that's hugely valuable, make sure you nab one. Additionally, I may not wait as long on defencemen in my drafts as I did with the example above, but that extreme was just used to show that there are potentially more valuable options late in drafts this year than there have been in the past. It will depend on the league format and settings just how much you can wait on defence and goalies, but this year of all years you really don't have to feel too pressured into filling the other positions first – go out there and get your star forward!

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I nabbed Francesco Pinelli in a couple of my dynasty leagues, and I was stoked about it at the time. He fell in the draft because of the lack of exposure without an OHL season. The big knock on him was his skating, and it seems as though he has been working hard on that. One of the guys I expect to be a riser in the rankings soon, and very valuable for fantasy leagues.

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It has been a sad week in the hockey community with the passing of jimmy Hayes, Caleb Reimer, Ronin Sharma, and Parker Magnuson. All gone too early, and they will not be forgotten. Rest in peace.

Long-time New York Ranger Rod Gilbert also passed away at the age of 80. Also known as Mr. Ranger, he was a key part of one of the original six franchises, and will be sorely missed by the entire Rangers community.

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Feel free to either drop a comment, or find me on Twitter @alexdmaclean if you have any fantasy hockey questions.

Stay safe!