The Salary Cap League Rankings are here! All of the top 200 skaters.

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With the draft wrapped-up and free agency past the frenzy portion, there's lots of dust to settle out. We have new faces, old faces in new places, and all sorts of new contracts to face. Got it?

Only a couple of new draftees make the initial list, mainly because they are farther away from producing right now, but also because their eventual production levels are so varied, that it is impossible to rely on them to pan out as incredibly valuable assets, especially outside of the top-five. They do make excellent trade chips at this point, though if you have lucked into one, then often it's because your team isn't fully in contention right now anyways. Hold onto those guys,

We also has a lot of players move around, with Johnny Gaudreau heading to Columbus, Tony DeAngelo onto another new team in Philly, Jonathan Huberdeau and Mackenzie Weegar flipped for Matthew Tkachuk, and more. These movements don't usually have a huge impact on a player, though they do need to be taken into account, and it forces me to go through every player and account for all of the ripples in fantasy values. It also works as a double-check for all of the player filters and values, meaning every once in a while something is caught, like Devon Toews who jumps up 100 spots because of some faulty counting. He's now the sixth ranked defenceman to own in cap leagues, though still only second on his own team. The Avalanche are going to win another Cup next year, aren't they?

I'm also very proud of how well the salary projections have done this year. There are always a few that are way off when you get the Erik Gudbranson signings, and when players inexplicably fall out of favour like Ilya Samsonov, but when a guy like Matthew Tkachuk can sign his mega-deal, and his ranking does not change at all because he was already projected for $9.5 million, it feels good. There are still a handful of free agents left, and most of these, such as Nazem Kadri, John Klingberg, and Evan Rodrigues, we would expect to be taking a bit of a pay cut at this point, because if they were offered what they (and we) thought they were worth, they would have been signed already. It shouldn't hurt you in a cap league to check in on these free agents and see if you can use the uncertainty in order to acquire someone who is about to be paid 80 cents on the dollar.

Standard pre-rankings note:

This isn't meant to be a be-all and end-all rating system for you to use without thinking and just trade your players for anyone above them on the list that you can find, but used with some foresight for managing salaries. The assumed league setup is for points-only leagues, and I have made an effort to balance it for a range of league and roster sizes. Cap hit is used for the player cost, so if your league uses salary or AAV, please account for that, as it can greatly change the impact of rookies. The rankings are set up so as to provide the most value in the current season, while providing some value in future years, based on modeling for predicted salary increases and production growth.

For those of you with variations from this setup, whether in terms of number of teams, salary space, roster positions, or scoring categories, you can make your own personal tweaks to move players up or down as necessary. This list is made to be a baseline guide for player evaluation, and to promote discussion and understanding of how to optimize rosters in a cap league setting.

If you note a mistake, or have any further questions about the ranking system, please let me know. You can find me on Twitter here @alexdmaclean.

Comments help with optimizing the values, because they're not perfect and they never will be.

We're sticking with the +/- 5.0 rating that Dobber uses on all of his rating schemes as the range for approximately equivalent value. The skater and goalie rankings are synched so that the value of a skater against a goalie can be compared, though the scale of the ratings has changed a little since the last update.