Despite never having laced up a pair of skates (except for those of his two young sons) and growing up in Red Sox crazed Massachusetts, Rick Roos has been a huge hockey fan nearly all of his life. Inspired by often wearing a Canadiens jersey to the old Boston Garden (it’s a long story…) and living to tell about it, Rick started to join fantasy hockey leagues back in the 90s, where he found himself waiting eagerly by a fax machine for weekly stats updates. He has since been in – and won – leagues featuring elite fantasy hockey writers. In real life, Rick is an attorney, which made him the perfect choice to write his previous “Holding Court” column on DobberHockey, where he debated both sides of a fantasy hockey issue and rendered a verdict for readers to debate. Later, for several years, he did similar for the popular “Cage Match” series. Today, Roos is freewheeling through a variety of monthly pieces: Forum Buzz takes a look at some hot topics our readers are discussing in the forum; Mailbag allows readers to write in to Roos with fantasy hockey questions; Goldipucks and the Three Skaters takes a look at three players (in the spirit of the old Cage Match, except Roos determines who is too hot, too cold…and ju-u-ust right); The Tournament is where Roos polls the readers and the forum community on a certain topic, just the way Tourneys ran in the old Cage Match, until a winning player in that topic is declared.
P.K. Subban vs. Kris Letang
Laidlaw's latest cage match - PK Subban vs. Kris Letang
I have been waiting for months, nay years, to spring a Kris Letang vs. Erik Karlsson Cage Match. It feels like it should be a compelling matchup. The problem is every chance Letang gets to sneak ahead he goes and gets hurt. He’s now officially on Dobber’s Band-Aid Boy list. Injuries are always going to be a problem with him – there’s just no avoiding that now. So as much as I would love to spout on about how Letang could be a better bet than Karlsson in a fantasy league I can’t because he can’t stay healthy long enough for that to be a reasonable possibility. And yes Karlsson is out with that gross Achilles slicing incident, which caused us to demote him from god-status to demi-god, but the freak of nature may actually play on Thursday! He’s back up to god status – nothing can hold him back. It feels like it’s taken Karlsson less time to get back from this Achilles cut than it has for Letang to get back from his groin pull (and that’s only part hyperbole). Seriously, I would love to do this Cage Match, but Karlsson is in-human. We’ve got to find a better comparison.
Enter Pernell-Karl Subban.