My Fantasy Hockey League Team

Yes, I know you don't care, as indicated by your lack of response to my plea for assistance, but I'm sharing anyway. Consider it punishment for not helping out a blogger in need.

My Yahoo! fantasy hockey league draft was held earlier this week. It was the autopick variety, but I did pre-rank my selections. For the fantasy geeks in the audience, here is more specific info. It's an eight team, head-to-head league. We have a starting lineup consisting of two centers, two leftwingers, two rightwingers, four defensemen, two goalies and two utility players. (Yes, in this supposed new era of offensive hockey, we are using two "designated hitters".) We have three bench players.

The stats for the league are goals, assists, power play points and plus/minus for the non-netminders. For the 'keepers, it's wins, save percentage, shutouts and goals against average.

Here is how many squad turned out. Oh, they are called the Scooby Doos, by the way.

C- Joe Thornton, Boston
C- Jason Spezza, Ottawa
C- Sidney Crosby, Pittsburgh
C- Daymond Langkow, Calgary
LW- Rick Nash, Columbus
LW- Alex Tanguay, Colorado
LW- Sergei Samsonov, Boston
LW- Henrik Zetterberg, Detroit
RW- Nikolai Zherdev, Columbus
RW- Danny Heatley, Ottawa
D- Ed Jovanoski, Vancouver
D- Sergei Zubov, Dallas
D- Jordan Leopold, Calgary
D- Wade Redden, Ottawa
C- Sidney Crosby, Pittsburgh
C- Daymond Langkow, Calgary
G-Miikka Kiprusoff, Calgary
G- Andrew Raycroft, Boston
G- Jose Theodore, Montreal

Now, I can see problems, especially in the area of plus/minus. Zherdev and Nash could really bite me in this category. I'm hoping they will offset this by piling up points, particularly on the powerplay.

I'm a bit leery of my defensemen. Not that they aren't a nice foursome, but I'm not sure if they will score quite enough. Oleg Tverdosky is a free agent and I might pursue him. Both of Florida's potential scoring blueliners, Mike Van Ryn and Jay Bouwmeester, are available, too. As is Niklas Kronwall of the Wings, who I liked as a sleeper. Although, I just read where he is out for six weeks.

Overall, I like the team. They are a bit young and I'm taking some chances on guys like Zherdev, Heatley and Crosby (someone always grabs the hyped rookie too early, but I didn't think it would be me). However, I don't think you win too often without taking some chances on draft day.

Again, none of you give a rat's you-know-what about this, but I could say that about the entire blog. Obviously, it has yet to discourage me.