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I have started to do something I have never done, and that's start working on my projections early. Taking July and August to largely think about anything except hockey is usually the order of operations but getting rain for most of the last 10 weeks has given me more spare time than anticipated. Thanks, Mother Nature, I guess? My projections won't be finished until sometime in September – I procrastinate with the best of them – but I did want to go through some best ball thoughts.

For anyone unfamiliar, best ball leagues are fantasy formats that remove the in-season managing. Fantasy owners draft their rosters before the season, and then they don't touch them. There are no trades or waivers, and most best ball leagues involve no lineup setting. Scoring is almost always a points format – five points for a goal, two for an assist, half-point for a hit, and so on – and only a portion of the roster's production counts towards the final standings. For that reason, even if a couple of your roster players suffer lengthy injuries, their zeroes don't count. 

These aren't as fun as traditional fantasy leagues with friends and family, but they are a good way to get a wider variety of players on different rosters. It is also a great way to practice drafting and get a feel for this year's values before your more meaningful fantasy drafts.

I wanted to take some time to review the 2022-23 season in my best ball leagues on Underdog Fantasy, and some general thoughts on the 2023-24 season. Underdog is not affiliated with Dobber Hockey in any way, it's just the site I use for these types of leagues.

[Note: Settings are six points for a goal, four for an assist, 0.5 for a PP point, one point each for a shot and block, and 0.5 for a hit. Goalies are W(6), SV(0.6), and GA(-3). Each week counts one centre, two wingers, one defenceman, one utility, and one goalie towards that week's stats, and no one else.]

For anyone looking for more in-depth research on this topic, I recommend checking out this YouTube video from D.J. Mitchell and Matt Moody. They are also not affiliated with Dobber Hockey either, but they do a lot of work in the DFS space – where I do most of my in-season work – and their NHL best ball research is easily the best available to the public.  

2022-23

It would be easy to assume that not having Connor McDavid would ruin chances for winning a league last year. He had 64 goals and 153 points, a total that cleared second-place Leon Draisaitl by 25 points, and third-place David Pastrnak by 40. In Underdog's scoring format, McDavid scored 1212 points, which is 320 points more than Auston Matthews managed, and 245 more than Draisaitl. Even on a per-game basis, McDavid was more than a full point higher than Nathan MacKinnon.

With all that said, I did three 12-team best ball leagues and one 10-team league last season, and the team with McDavid won just one of them. Conversely, the team that drafted Rasmus Dahlin won three of the four leagues. Small samples and all, but that was interesting to me.

One of the reasons is simply because of what was available between picks 20 and 30 for the McDavid owner. Last season, names that were often taken in the neighbourhood of the 2/3 turn – where the McDavid owner would make their second and third picks – were names like Jonathan Huberdeau, Johnny Gaudreau, Filip Forsberg, Jacob Markstrom, and Victor Hedman. A couple of those guys had decent years, but when your opponents are drafting names like Timo Meier, Mitch Marner, Juuse Saros, Connor Hellebuyck, and Steven Stamkos instead, it eats into whatever lead McDavid gets you. The gap between Steven Stamkos and Huberdeau was bigger than the gap between McDavid and Draisaitl, so the McDavid+Huberdeau owner was behind the Draisaitl+Stamkos owner.

Here are the first three picks of the four teams that had McDavid in my leagues last season:

The problem with drafting the Hart Trophy winner becomes really obvious when we see all the people that also drafted Huberdeau. With weekly points totals, one league saw a McDavid owner get more points towards their final standings from Tanner Jeannot (!) than Huberdeau.

One of the fantasy adages I adhere to is this: You can't win your league in the first few rounds, but you can lose them. Drafting McDavid didn't win leagues but stepping on land mines in rounds 2 and 3 certainly lost leagues for the McDavid drafters.

Rasmus Dahlin being so well represented among the top finishers is for a couple reasons. First is that he was always drafted outside the top-50 picks, and sometimes outside the top-75. The owners that focused on Dahlin did not draft a defenceman in the first two rounds, and in only one of the four leagues did they take a defenceman in the third round. These owners loaded up on forwards and goalies early and then grabbed later defence value. The people that avoided Makar-Josi-Hedman and waited for Hamilton-Burns-Dahlin generally did much better.

The second reason Dahlin is so well represented is his games played. It is great to get 60 awesome games from Cale Makar, but that leaves a quarter of the season to your other defencemen. Drafters that took Makar or Josi in the first round tended to wait several rounds for another blue liner, and that often landed them in the Zach Werenski-MacKenzie Weegar-Seth Jones range. Again, it's the McDavid problem rearing its head with the added twist of injury problems.

Hockey is a random sport, but top producers tend to always be top producers. Players have down years, but McDavid, Draisaitl, Matthews, MacKinnon, Pastrnak, Kaprizov, Brady Tkachuk etc. tend to be elite year after year (Tkachuk has reached that level now). Agonizing about whether to take MacKinnon or Draisaitl second overall is losing the plot. Flip a coin and focus on later rounds.

Finally, for a bit of tactical talk, we have to touch on the importance (or lack thereof) of stacking teams. It is simply drafting a couple (or many) of the top stars from the same team and hoping they explode. It can lead to huge weeks, huge seasons, and championships. In my four leagues, two won with stacks: 

• Edmonton: McDavid-Hyman-Bouchard
• Buffalo: Thompson-Skinner-Dahlin-Power

One league-winner that didn't stack started their draft with B. Tkachuk-Vasilevskiy-J.T. Miller, and also got Dahlin 80^th overall, Linus Ullmark 128^th, and Jared McCann 185^th. Sometimes, you just can't stop getting the cards. The other had a mini-Buffalo stack with Tuch-Dahlin. Stacking works, but it's not compulsory, and trying to find the best value outside the top-50 picks is vital.  

Fantasy championships are built many different ways, much like real-life championships, but they all have one thing in common: superstars providing superstar value with depth picks over-performing. The easiest way to do that is to try and get 2-3 high-end options from the same team and hoping they explode (like Buffalo did), but it's not the only way to win. My stacks revolved around Vancouver and Tampa Bay, so… no it wasn't a great best ball season for me.

2023-24

Just briefly, I want to go over this season. I did one (1) Underdog best ball to get a feel of where players are going. I don't have my own projections done so I'll be relying on the Dobber draft list for this one. Here are some things I noticed in this one draft.

This is my roster:

I quickly found that having first overall led to the same problem as McDavid drafters had last year: lack of options at the 2/3 turn. Here is how the first two rounds went up until my second and third selections:

After Alex Ovechkin and Nikita Kucherov went, I was hoping two of Mitch Marner, Tim Stützle, Kyle Connor, Timo Meier, Jordan Kyrou or Andrei Svechnikov would fall to me. Only Svech fell (I noticed Kyrou is listed as a centre on this site, which took him out of the running), and it left me with the choice to either pick a second winger I had in a tier below or grab a defenceman/goalie. I could have taken Jake Oettinger or Andrei Vasilevskiy, but decided to start double-winger instead, and landed on Filip Forsberg. It wasn't the start I was looking for and preferred the drafter in the five-hole who started with Matthew Tkachuk-Meier-Vasilevskiy, or the person in the 9-hole selecting Kirill Kaprizov-Marner-Zach Hyman.  

At the 4/5 turn, the problem with a wheel pick becomes evident. I wanted to grab at least one more winger, but there were only two wingers left in my third tier of flanks: Cole Caufield and Patrik Laine. I have trepidation about how the Jackets will fare under Mike Babcock, so I went with Caufield, even though it was an overpay. I paired him with Stuart Skinner, whom I think was the only goalie left that can really threaten 55 starts, other than less-certain names like Joonas Korpisalo and Thatcher Demko.

Without combing every pick, I was thrilled to get John Carlson (73^rd), Jakob Chychrun (96^th) and Michael Matheson (168^th) where I did for my blue line. In this format Carlson put up 9.3 points/game last season, Chychrun was at 8.5, and Matheson at 8.1. Brent Burns, Victor Hedman, and Adam Fox all performed worse, two out of the three have direct competition for their top PP roles, and all were taken ahead of my three selections. Injury issues and all that, but I think there's a lot of upside there, and certainly good draft value.

I paired Akira Schmid with Vitek Vanecek and feel good about it. Skinner will get most of my goalie points (hopefully) but it leaves room for New Jersey to have a great season that lifts the fortunes of its goalies.

Rounding out my draft is the duo of Bo Horvat and Oliver Wahlstrom. The concerns about Horvat in New York are valid, but he also out-pointed Mark Scheifele by 0.75 points/game last year and was drafted three rounds later. I will take the end-of-draft gamble that he and Wahlstrom (I wrote about Wahlstrom's upside recently) can figure things out with Mathew Barzal and form a great top scoring line.

To finish up, there is the board for the first 10 rounds:

The teams picking 4^th, 5^th, 9^th, and 11^th have the four highest projected scores and none of those teams took a defenceman in the first three rounds. Preseason score projections aren't reliable, but I think it does give a bit of credence to waiting on your blue liners until later in the draft.  

People are still banking on a Jonathan Huberdeau rebound. If he puts up 30 goals, 60 assists, 200 shots, 30 PPPs, 70 hits, and 25 blocks – a massive rebound from last year – he'll manage roughly what Jeff Skinner did in 2022-23 on a per-game basis, and Skinner went two picks later. It shows just how far Huberdeau must go to pay off a top-72 pick, let alone bring great value.

I was a bit stunned to see John Tavares go 99^th overall. On a per-game basis, he out-pointed Zibanejad in this format last year, and Zibanejad went 39^th overall. He also out-pointed Brayden Point (36^th), Aleksander Barkov (53^rd) and Roope Hintz (55^th). I get the concern about age-related decline, or the team around him, but I'd rather Tavares at 99^th than Point at 36^th by a wide, wide margin.

Finally, fantasy owners should note Connor Bedard going 42^nd overall. His ADP is actually 33^rd overall, so this represents good (relative) value to other drafts. For anyone wanting to draft Bedard as a centre in one-year leagues, you'll probably have to decide between him and names like Sidney Crosby, Mika Zibanejad, and Brayden Point. He needs to put up roughly 40 goals, 80 points, and 275 shots to pay off this kind of ADP, not including opportunity costs, so there are decisions to make.

This is just one draft done in early August with rough projection estimates. A lot will change over the next six weeks as I refine everything, and as everyone else gets their draft seasons underway. I do think it helps highlight the problem with getting McDavid first overall, though, as well as some early value opportunities on players like Tavares, Matheson, Kyrou, Travis Konecny, and so on. I will be doing more best balls over the next couple months, so I'll keep an eye on ADP to see who rises and falls. Thanks for reading.