The Wild West

Change is always constant in our everyday world. We change the way we talk, we change the way we walk, and we even change our daily rosters in our fantasy hockey squads. Some change is good, some is bad. We conclude this week with the final installation of this series. We’ll take a look at which teams are due for changes and which will be forced to make some. Buckle up and get ready for the ride.

Change is always constant in our everyday world. We change the way we talk, we change the way we walk, and we change our daily rosters in our fantasy hockey squads. Some change is good, some is bad. Last week we took a look at the first five teams and their rosters as to what changes we could potentially expect from them, this week we’ll take a gander at the next five. Buckle up and get ready for the ride.

Change is always constant in our everyday world. We change the way we talk, we change the way we walk, and we even change our daily rosters in our fantasy hockey squads. Some change is good, some is bad. For the next few weeks we’ll discuss what changes may occur in the Western Conference at the trade deadline. We’ll take a look at which teams are due for changes and which will be forced to make some. Buckle up and get ready for the ride.

We are nearing the Christmas break for the NHL season. We have had plenty of surprises as well as plenty of disappointment, hopefully you have been reading many of the articles that are on the website to help you keep up to date on the latest news that’s happening on the fantasy front.  

I apologize. This was supposed to coincide with the release of the new Bond movie, but I wanted to finish the previous series before taking on something new. We’ll take a look back at the past Bond films, but with a Western Conference fantasy twist.

If you can remember way back when you were a kid in primary school, your teacher taught you a very valuable lesson in life, what goes up must come down and what is down will eventually come back up. Sure, it might have been for a science lesson or an outcome from your first creative way of attempting to fly, but that lesson still holds true today. We’ll just have to apply the same concept to fantasy hockey. For the past four weeks, we covered goalies, defensemen, wingers and centers while examining team-by-team who is primed for fantasy success and who is due for a fall in the coming weeks. As a bonus installment we will look at a whole team approach this week.

For the past three weeks, we covered goalies, defensemen and wingers while examining team-by-team who is primed for fantasy success and who is due for a fall in the coming weeks.

We conclude the series with centers this week and I hope you have gained some valuable information with this mini-series. Centers have always been the deepest position in fantasy hockey and the gap that exists between a top-tiered center compared to a waiver wire center is not that apparent especially if you play in a custom league where your league settings may include faceoff wins or shooting percentage.

Last week, we covered how fantasy defensemen could potentially play a big role in fantasy leagues and how they are widely undervalued in many fantasy pools. This week we’ll take a gander at wingers to see who is primed for success and who’s due for a fall. Yes, I mentioned last week that defensemen could make or break a team, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can completely ignore the wingers though. You just need to recognize that the disparity between quality defensemen and waiver wire defensemen is much more noticeable than the disparity between quality wingers and waiver wire wingers. 

The value of defensemen is a widely debated topic in fantasy hockey, a few people believe strongly in “big named” D, while some completely ignore it and depend solely on waiver wire pick ups throughout the season. My argument is that the difference in owning Niklas Lidstrom, Dion Phaneuf or Chris Pronger is quite apparent when compared to just owning waiver wire D. Let’s look at an extreme example, Team A owns, Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Alex Semin along with Alex Edler, Paul Mara, and Roman Hamrlik. Team B owns, Dion Phaunef, Dan Boyle, and Shea Weber along with Jason Chimera, Mason Raymond and Alex Ponikarovsky.


 

A month of the 2008-09 NHL season has come and gone and I figured I would change it up a bit in this week’s format and do a three-part series regarding fantasy hockey. We’ll start with goalies this week...