If you opened your players' lockers, would you find reading glasses, Depends and prescription Viagra? Or fake IDs, posters of Taylor Swift and... Mexican Viagra?
When selecting players in a keeper league, GMs have to make valuations of different factors: reliability, potential, risk, situation, etc. One of those factors is age, because all else being equal, a player one year younger is a player on your scoring roster one year longer.
The graph below shows the ages of each team's protected roster. The top of the orange bar is the oldest player, the bottom is the youngest, and the blue marker is the average. Keep in mind that averages can be skewed by outliers (see Selanne, Teemu or Lidstrom, Nick). The teams are arranged left to right from last year's winner to last place.
A couple of observations. First, the averages are closer than I expected, from the Preydator's 23.8 to the Krupul's 30.3. Leaving aside those two, everyone is between 25 and 30. Second, being "old" isn't necessarily bad - the three teams with the highest average age finished first, third and fourth (the fourth highest, the
Of course, this doesn't take into account half of our rosters. The rebuilding Canicks got a lot younger through the draft, while the Preydators may have, against all logic, gotten older and more Czech.
I don't think there is too much to read into this - the best fantasy team is the one that scores the most points - but it's interesting to look at age as a potential indicator of current, pending or fading success.
