[SFHL] Inside the mind of @full-measure during the draft

This post was authored by @full-measure, and all proceeds will be used to fund the Steemit Fantasy Hockey League.

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Inside the mind of @full-measure during the draft

Going into the draft I was completely torn on when I wanted to draft goalies, or even how many I'll want to carry throughout the season.

I am a strategy degenerate.

And coming off a devastating loss in the finals of my fantasy baseball league, I needed something to help move the fantasy sports section of my soul onto a new adventure. So I'm really thankful for father @bacchist and that the SFHL came along.

• I'm not trying to be funny, it actually was devastating to work all season and then you refresh a box score and Kenta Maeda was pulled in the 3rd and now you're basically drawing dead when it was supposed to be a cake walk

The SFHL is head to head, and it's also "roto" style, which means there are 10 scoring categories: Goals, Assists, Plus/Minus, Penalty Minutes, Power Play Points, Shots On Goal, Wins, Goals Against Average, Save Percentage, and Shutouts.

Those in bold are the goalie categories. And your weekly matchup is scored based on who wins the most categories.

I often like to do extreme things in fantasy sports. You can't worry about your team resembling what a real team might look like. You just have to look at the scoring structure and try to make the best decisions. And sometimes it will mean doing goofy things with your team.

In this case, it wasn't clear to me what the optimal strategy might be. If in doubt (like, in life, not just in fantasy sports) I sometimes like to think about what the smallest possible mistake might be. And I figured targeting high quality goalies can't be that terrible-- there will be opportunity to improve in the skater categories as the season goes on, but there are only so many NHL teams and therefore only so many starting goalies, so barring injuries and stuff like that, there isn't too much opportunity to improve there.

I ended up with the 12th pick, which is ok in terms of it being a good time to target goalies. But I don't like being right on the end of the snake: It's cumbersome to me to have to decide on two picks at once, and it's harder to anticipate that someone might slide and still be there for you at your next turn.

But you don't get the draft position you want, you get the one they give you. And here's what I did with it:

1st round: Carey Price (G)
@bacchist took goalie Braden Holtby with the 9th overall pick. I would have preferred him to Price, but not by a ton. Price is fine with me. In general I'm leaning on the rankings at fantasypros.com, but putting extra focus on their projection for Wins.

By Lisa Gansky

2nd round: Joe Pavelski (C, RW)
I wasn't opposed to taking another goalie here, but no one really excited me. Ben Bishop is probably the conventional next best value, but I don't like his win projection, and might even prefer Jonathan Quick and Martin Jones, who might be around when it snakes back to me. And Pavelski seemed like a really great value at this point, plus the multi-position eligibility, so it was really easy to take him, and I don't second-guess this pick at all.

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3rd round: Martin Jones (G)
This was really controversial in my mind. @Shenanigator sniped me taking Jonathan Quick, and Martin Jones isn't that much of a downgrade in my mind. But he's rather low in the Yahoo! default rankings. So it's possible most people will value him differently and I can risk that he slides back to me. But being on the end of the snake, there are so many picks to get thru, and so even if he slides he might not slide THAT much. I more or less decided it would be wise to abandon my obsession with taking goalies early and just see if he falls back to me.. but I was running out of time and not sure which skater I'd pick anyways, so I just went with Martin. (Sorry Martin. You may be an "oops" but you're loved all the same.)

4th round: Patrice Bergeron (C)
At this point I'm reeling from my indecision with the previous pick and struggling to get organized. I'm essentially leaning on my rankings list, but I don't have a clean mechanism for quickly sorting out who on my list is still available (there was probably a way to edit it within the Yahoo! software ahead of time, but I wasn't on that level). People are typing "c'mon guys, let's pick up the pace" and stuff like that into the chat. I'm staying calm through this, and I determine Bergeron is the best pick at this point. I don't love taking another C, but Pavelski counts as RW, so it's my first guy who I have to play at C.

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5th round: Wayne Simmonds (RW)
I'm pretty happy with this pick. He seemed like fine value at this point, and something "felt" right about him. Simmonds is a "bruiser" type, he gets a lot of Penalty Minutes (which counts in your favor in this). I like having players who are slanted towards extremes in certain categories, rather than players who are more evenly rounded. Cause sometimes you'll have a decision who to bench and who to start, and you can tailor more to which categories are closest when you have players with extremes. (This is more important as the players become more marginal though. In the 5th round you're not really intending to bench him much.)

source: Twitter

6th round: Joe Thornton (C)
So again I'm kind of fumbling to figure out who I should want next, and taking a lot of time. Thornton seemed pretty safe. Sure it's another C, but if in doubt I'd rather just take the value and worry about position scarcity later. He's still only my second pure center, so I'm not overflowing there yet. And players sometimes gain multi-position eligibility during the season anyways (not sure how likely it is that Thornton or Bergeron will).

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7th round: John Gibson (G)
My plan was to grab a 3rd goalie at some point. We seemed to be getting close to where goalie value would deteriorate, and I liked Gibson's Wins projection, so I took him. In retrospect, looking at the NHL schedule, there are a days where every team plays, so that nerfs the value of a 3rd goalie somewhat (since he'll be dangling on the bench sometimes), so this was maybe too early. Given that goalies have days off and don't start all of their team's games, it isn't terrible. So whatever. But I probably wouldn't do it again.

8th round: Jonathan Huberdeau (LW)
Really regret this pick. Again I had wasted a lot of my time and energy deciding if I wanted a third goalie, and now I'm under the gun for another pick. I didn't have any LWs yet, so I narrowed my focus to just finding the best LW available and figured that couldn't be a huge mistake. Huberdeau is what I came up with, but it kind of felt weird and wrong as I was doing it, and it turned out there was someone else (Alex Steen) ranked decently higher on my list. (And as fate would have it, Huberdeau would go on to get lacerated by another player's skate a few days later, and he's out for several months. That's what I get for muffing it.)

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9th round: Rick Nash (LW)
Alex Steen was close to sliding back to me, but @bacchist gobbled him up. Nash seems like a clear downgrade relative to Steen, so it was a little heartbreaking, but it still made sense to me to focus on LW at this point, and I couldn't find a better pick than Nash. He's decent at SOG and also PIM, which seem like categories that will be reliable year-to-year, so seems like a safe enough pick.

By Robert Kowal

10th round Sean Monahan (C)
He seemed like pretty good value at this point, ignoring position scarcity. So seemed like the right pick now that I had all the wings full. Of course I'm completely neglecting D up to this point, but the remaining D's seemed all pretty mediocre with marginal difference between them at this point, and given that the league is daily roster changes, Monahan will still play plenty of games for me.

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11th round: Dion Phaneuf (D)
Time to start filling D, and Phaneuf seemed like the best combination of overall value plus solid at PIM. PIM seems like something that a middling defenseman can offer that at least accomplishes something for you, so seems to raise the floor a little when they have that going for them.

12th round: Zdeno Chara (D)
He's not getting any younger, but he's a name-brand who I remember being good. And that's comforting to me for some reason.

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13th round: Mike Hoffman (LW)
I'm happy with Hoffman at this stage in the draft. He projects for a lot of SOG which could make him reliable, and solid as a backup-grade LW.

By Sarah Connors - Flickr: pbruinsbsens59

14th round: Brendan Gallagher (RW)
I don't really see much difference between the remaining defensemen, and prefer to round out my backups. Same as above basically, Gallagher is solid at SOG and could be a fine backup who I don't drop.

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15th round: Johnny Boychuk (D)
At this point the chat box is taunting me that I need defense, and I opt for Boychuk to stop the bleeding.

16th round: Sebastian Aho (RW)
Maybe just as a token of defiance to the chat box, I opt not to draft a complete team and leave an empty D slot. I'm reading that some people have Aho as a sleeper, and for some reason he's projected for really big stats in the Yahoo! software. So I decide to take him just in case, and can decide on it later and add a 4th defenseman at my convenience.

That's the team. Despite my best attempt to be GTO (game-theory optimal), I don't actually like my draft too much. But you never really know until they get out there and start playing. And it's a long season with a lot of chances to improve.

Thanks to @bacchist for running this league, and I wish good luck to all the contestants!!!