Belated Fantasy Hockey Monday: Week Three

Jason made this awesomely awful logo for me. Thank you.

I'm sure you were all wondering why I hadn't posted my weekly fantasy hockey update. Surely, without hearing about my fantasy hockey teams, your Monday was incomplete and you have wandered through the last few days in an existential void, unsure of whether this world held any meaning and value.

Quite frankly, I wanted to avoid an update this week as I lost every single matchup. Badly. I wanted to do everything in my power to avoid thinking about how badly I lost. I didn't want to share the evidence of how terrible I am at fantasy hockey.

But, one of those loses was to my wife, and she was legitimately upset that I didn't write about it. And, since today is our wedding anniversary, I feel obligated to detail the extensiveness of her victory. That will come up in my Pool Three recap, but first...

Pool One - Office Pool

Team: Aldergrove Awesome

Week Three Result: 4-8-1 Loss

This first loss was the most frustrating, as my players actually performed fairly well. Looking across the rest of the league this week, my team would have won if they had been matched up against almost any other team. But instead, I was up against the Celery Cap Specials, who dropped me to 9th in the league with a 15-22-2 record.

My goalies were good, but my opponent had Tim Thomas's 2 shutouts. I had six players who put up multiple assists; my opponent had nine. Mike Knuble chipped in a shorthanded assist and often one shorthanded point is enough to win that category: my opponent got shorthanded points from Nicklas Backstrom and David Perron. On the positive side, I won in goals, penalty minutes, shots-on-goal, and hits. Ed Jovanovski led the way with 12 shots and 4 hits, with Taylor Hall being the main offensive contributor with 2 goals and 2 assists.

A look at the team stats for the league reveals that I'm near average in all of the categories for skaters and near the bottom in all of the goalie categories. It's still early, but I might need to look into a trade...

Pool Two - Nucks Misconduct

Team: I Miss Kyle Wellwood

Week Three Result: 2-7-1 Loss

Two syllables: bru-tal. My goaltending trio of Roloson, Mason, and Bernier was, unsurprisingly, not very good. Not that it matter, because my opponent had Tim Thomas and Roberto Luongo, who put up 3 wins, a 1.00 GAA, a .966 SV%, and 2 shutouts. I didn't have a hope of winning those categories.

I managed to win in goals thanks to Tomas Plekanec scoring 3 on his own and, for the first time in any of my pools, I won in +/-, despite Blake Comeau going -5 for the week. Dan Boyle, Tobias Enstrom, and Steven Stamkos were the main contributors there. Otherwise, everyone was terrible. I'm going to try to forget this week happened, as it dropped me below .500 to a 12-13-5 record. Considering this team had 2 straight victories prior to this debacle, I'm hopeful that this is just an unfortunate confluence of events.

Pool Three - Friends Pool

Team: Emily Carr Echidnas

Week Three Result: 3-6-1 Loss

After my wife's awesomely named team, The Pain Lions, dismantled my Echidnas, she had one thing to say: "Really, you beat yourself." Thanks, wife. I'm glad you think that I have mismanaged my team and thus caused my own downfall. Of course, what she meant by that is that I have taught her everything she knows about hockey in general and fantasy hockey in particular and have therefore, by proxy, defeated myself this week.

Of course, the former is basically true as well. Tell me this: if you had the choice of a goalie tandem of either Ilya Bryzgalov and Miikka Kiprusoff or Michael Neuvirth and Antero Niittymaki, who would you choose? It would be obvious, right? Not this week: Neuvirth put up 2 wins, including a shutout, to go with a 1.34 GAA and .947 SV%, while Niittymaki got a win himself with a 2.00 GAA and a .931 SV%. Kiprusoff (or rather, the Flames) imploded, leaving Kiprusoff with a bloated 5.08 GAA and a meager .831 SV%. Bryzgalov was better, but not enough to make a difference.

I do have a third goalie, Brent Johnson of the Pittsburgh Penguins, who was still available in free agency. He had a shutout last week. I could have started him in place of Miikka Kiprusoff on Saturday, but I wasn't sure if he or Marc-André Fleury would get the start. So I went with Kiprusoff, who had a wonderful .778 SV% against the Washington Capitals that day. Fantastic.

On the positive side, Patrick Marleau put up 5 points and was a +6 this week, Nathan Horton almost single-handedly won the penalty minutes category with 17, and Steven Stamkos, Martin St. Louis, and Tomas Plekanec continue to be excellent. And, thankfully, Alex Burrows is back. Oddly enough, I won the +/- category in this pool as well, with a sparkling +13. Thank you Patrick Marleau. That actually puts me at the top of the league in that category, which is meaningless as I'm third from the bottom of the league in the actual standings.

Ugh.