Being able to perceive a player's true fantasy value is an elusive sense every fantasy manager covets. Who wouldn't want to know exactly what Jonas Gustavsson's save percentage or John Tavares' average shifts per game will be? Alas, as more cognizant managers continue to hone their fantasy skills on DobberHockey, so too does your sense of perception become more of an important x-factor in the season-long battle.

So unless you know how to travel through time or see the future, you're stuck foretelling (…or is it foreseeing) just like the rest of us. It's easy to imagine a world where you never failed at picking the right sleeper or uncovering the hidden gem, but it's quite difficult to actually choose them in real life. There are too many unknowns, too many different paths to travel down and too many directions a player can take.

Nevertheless, we are all capable of doing incredible things if we try hard enough. Your level of perception isn't any less than anyone else's. You're smart enough to predict a player's value or output correctly – you just have to know how use certain tools to your advantage. Most importantly, being confident in your plan of action and never wavering from the path you take will effectively improve your decision making.

Now as more people learn about Dobber's website, you become more inclined to keep the site a secret. But let's be honest, you can't waste time trying to hide it. That means more poolies are benefitting from his wisdom and the advice from his writers. And that means the time has come to extrapolate info in an even more efficient manner than ever before. It's time to squeeze every last drop of insight out of this site and leave nothing behind.

Fortunately there's a new tool that is not only capable of increasing your perceptive powers, but can also save you a lot of time and headache. I speak of the Frozen Pool, which was created by Jason Arbuthnot. This one-stop fantasy hockey shop comes complete with eight tools dedicated to breaking down a player's fantasy-related statistics. They include extensive reports on line combinations, line productivity, player roto rankings and everything in between.

For those with a small window of opportunity to execute trades and roster moves on a daily basis, the Frozen Pool is a real godsend. As a man OBSESSED with GOALIES, I can finally start to close the gap between me and my pesky veteran opponents that excel at choosing forwards. Sure, it's a lazy man's move to let Dobber and Jason compile important stats for me, but it would also be ignorant to spend a lot of time trying to do it myself.

So in order to give back to these guys for their hard work on this new tool, here's some GREAT insight on how to use the Frozen Pool to improve your overall goaltending observations and perceptions.

STAT REPORT GENERATOR
This tool provides you with incredible depth for goalie statistics with a single click. The site is faster and more effective than ever before, so take advantage of seeing all the pertinent goalie stats in a minimalistic fashion. All of the juicy stats categories are there; W, L, GA, SO, GA, GAA, SV% and SA. But look beyond that and you'll find much more than meets the eye.

First of all, make sure to click on the table headers in the dark grey box to sort your results from ascending to descending order, or vice-versa. Heads up – your mouse icon will roll over to a text field image, but it's still clickable!
Secondly, and probably the most important lesson you'll learn in this week's class, is to ALWAYS set your report criteria to TOP 200 RESULTS!! Real quickly, here's an example of why this is so important:

Choose only the Top 50 and then click the Avg Shot Distance tab. The category's default setting ranks goalies from furthest distance to closest. So #1 is Tuukka Rask with an average shot distance of 49 feet. The lowest number in the Top 50 is Manny Fernandez at an average of 35.14 feet.

Now go back and file the same report for Top 200. Rask will once again show up at #1 on the list because of the default ranking. Now click the AvgDist category header in the dark grey box so that the report ranks from closest to furthest. What do you know…it's actually Antti Niemi who faces the closest average shot distance at 28.88 feet!

So remember to ALWAYS set your search criteria for goaltending reports to the TOP 200 no matter what!

Most impressive in the Report Generator is the Shots 1-15 feet, 15-30 and 30-45 stats categories along with Avg Shot Distance. Be sure to check these totals on a weekly basis and you'll learn a lot about a goalie's consistency and focus over the course of a season. I'm guessing 80-85% of the managers in your league will over-look this feature completely! But use them and they will quickly elevate your understanding a goalie's mental toughness.

I love how I can click the Shots 1-15 feet button to see if a goalie is sharp or soft when shots come from the slot area. It also shows me how many prime scoring chances a goalie handles (Lundqvist vs. Osgood). These are most revealing categories because shots from in close are of better quality and more effective. It's no surprise to see Manny Legace, Jason LaBarbera and Justin Pogge near the bottom while Tim Thomas, Roberto Luongo and Craig Anderson are near the top.

The last effective aspect of this tool is the numerous different options you have for dates. There's everything from seasonal to monthly to weekly, and to top it off there's a customized form where you can select start and finish dates. It's simple, effective and totally catered to your own time frame or league's settings.

ROTO RANKER
The Roto Ranker tool reveals a goalie's overall rank in different statistical categories for different date ranges. The scores are a composite rank of every category's individual rank, so the most effective goalies have the lowest average and are therefore given the lowest score. This tool is more extensive and more valuable than the Stat Report Generator, and that is mainly due to the custom rankings.

To start, be sure to choose Top 200 and then click the "goalies" option. Under the fantasy scoring template option, click "custom". This is where the fun begins. Now you can add any number of different goaltending categories as well as change the weight (modifier) for each stat category. So depending on your league's scoring setup, you can evaluate and rank goalies based on the importance of your own specific needs. The most obvious ones would be to change the modifier for shutouts to three or five.

A goalie's fantasy value depends mainly on the number of games they play and the number of saves they make. So take a few minutes to create a custom Roto Ranker report that includes games played, shots against and saves. If your league penalizes for goals against, add that category and change the modifier to -.5 and that will create an outstanding visual representation of some of the best goalies available for your league.

The Bargain Bin template is another quality aspect to the Roto Ranker tool. It covers all the basic stats seen in most fantasy league settings, but includes their hit against the team's salary cap as well. So now you can find some hidden gems by seeing which goalies rank highest when it comes to their output vs. cost. These are just a few ways to use the Roto Ranker and this is merely scratching the surface of what's possible when it comes to improving perception.

Legends in the swampy south tell stories of numerous blues musicians that sold their soul to the devil in order to master playing the guitar. I honestly believe many of you would do the same in order to see what the future holds for a player or goalie you want to draft. Well, now you can save your soul and valuable time just by using DobberHockey's Frozen Pool. Between this tool and GoaliePost.com, you should have everything you need to succeed this season!