Transactions (first trade of the season!)

Two transactions to report.

Add/Drop
10/19/2013 Powder Rangers drop Kyle Palmieri and add Jiri Tlusty

Hilariously, the day the Patrik Stefans dropped Jiri Tlusty, he found his scoring touch, potting 2 while playing on the top line with Semin and Staal. The Powder Rangers almost immediately picked him up. Get your side bets going on Tlusty vs. Arcobello! (hint: Tlusty will score more points than Arcobello this year). 

Trade

10/22/2013 
The Dicklas Lidstroms send:

• Drew Stafford
• Michael Del Zotto 

to the Quebec Rordiques for:

• Dustin Brown
• Brendan Smith 
• Rordiques 6th rounder in 2014

A good old fashioned hockey trade.

The Rordiques have lost Boyle for at least a while and are generally weak at that position. Del Zotto should fill a need now and in the future as he may make the Rordique's keeper list, assuming he (and the Rangers) bump their atrocious start. In exchange he traded from a position of strength - his fairly deep set of forwards. Dustin Brown was expendable for the Rordiques. Stafford may or may not be an impact player for the Rordiques this year - if not, he will be a mere filler to make the trade happen.

On the flipside, the Dicklas Lidstroms have defence depth to spare, and in the words of the Lidstrom's GM, "drafting Enstrom made [Del Zotto] expendable." Brown should flesh out the scoring roster a bit and at least provide some stability in one of those final two scoring roster slots.

Add/Drop
10/22/2013 Dicklas Lidstroms drop Brendan Smith and add Sami Salo

Related to the above trade, the Lidstroms couldn't resist Sami Salo's 5 points in 7 games. The guy finally - finally - had something close to a full season last year. Injury threat aside, Salo should give the Lidstroms some much-needed veteran depth on a team featuring Jared Spurgeon, Patrick Wierciock and Ryan Murphy as top 4 scoring roster d-men.  Not a bad set of young defencemen, no doubt, but they have 230 NHL games combined (Spurgeon is the most experienced with a career high of 23 points).

KL Week in Review: Week 3

So I got busy yesterday and forgot to take a screenshot. I also have some transactions to announce. However, this is the way the standings ended up yesterday (points include Monday night):

Name	TTL
Fylanders	103
Mackhawks	98
Powder Rangers	93
G-Phil's Flyers	92
Moilers	91
Winter Claassics	89
Los Samjawors Kings	87
Milan Micahleks	86
Dicklas Lidstroms	83
Teeyotes	81
Patrik Stefans	79
Schizzarks	77
Vanrooser Canicks	75
Joshfrey Krupuls	74
W-Benham/Scranton Parkers	72
Quebec Rordiques	70

The Fylanders remain atop the standings for the 2nd week in a row. I keep telling myself that there is simply no way MAF is going to break the modern-day KL record for goalie points, and that there is no way Joe Pavelski, Nicklas Backstrom, JVR, Sean Monahan, Brent Burns, and Michael Grabner are going to all be PPG+ players this year, but so far they've proven me wrong.

Rising:
The Milan Micahleks. They have gone from last place to a somewhat more appropriate 8th place. 

Falling:
The G-Phil's Flyers. Good production throughout the lineup but just not enough to keep up with the top 3 this week.  Also the Quebec Rordiques, who have fallen from 13th last week to dead last.The KL's newest GM inherited a team that is going to require patience and careful guidance.

Surprises:
The expansion Los Samjawors Kings have moved into a playoff position, having hovered just outside for the bulk of this young season. Is this a plucky young team punching outside its weight class trying to prove the old guard wrong, or is this merely an artifact of a small sample size?

Transactions

A few roster changes yesterday and today (listed with effective dates - as a reminder, your add/drops take effect the next day, not the date the add/drop is made):

10/18/2013 Quebec Rordiques drop Charlie Coyle and add Chris Higgins

10/19/2013 Wilkes-Benham/Scranton Parkers drop Ben Jovejoy and add Marc-Edouard Vlasic

10/19/2013 Patrik Stefans drop Jiri Tlusty and add Mark Arcobello

The Rordiques make their very first free agent add/drop (super adorable, like watching a baby take its first steps), snapping up Chris Higgins. Higgins has looked quite good under Tortorella and is getting quite a bit of ice time in various situations. He isn't going to lead the Rordiques in scoring but should be an upgrade on Charlie Coyle. Reminder: Charlie Coyle is available for pickup notwithstanding his age (born in 1992) because he was dropped from a roster. 

Wilkes-Benham/Scranton Parkers GM, Romany Benham-Parker, has picked up the red-hot Marc-Edouard Vlasic. They have dropped Ben Lovejoy, who with only three syllables all season clearly does not fit into the team's long-term naming scheme. 

The Patrik Stefans have once again dipped into their inscrutable SYSTEM to pull up yet another player no one has ever heard of in Mark Arcobello. Jiri Tlusty (who the Stefans kept from last year) goes to the scrap heap. In fairness, Arcobello has 8 assists in 8 games playing with Eberle and Hall.

KL Week in Review: Week 2

So, we have completed the second full week of competition. Here's the standings:

Early surprises

Of course, we are still in the early days of the season and its hard to draw too many conclusions. However, subject to a couple surprises, generally speaking the teams are shaking themselves into their expected positions (I'm not sure this is a good thing - perhaps that is something the new Commissioner wants to address? Feel free to post ideas for increasing parity).

1) The Winter Claassics in 5th place (though my projection does suggest Claassen will finish in 6th). This may well be the first year in KL history that the Claassics GM does not advocate for dissolution of the league ("seriously guys, its not because my team is terrible.")

2) The Milan Micahleks and the Schizzarks in last place (aka the "expansion slots"). I projected them in 3rd and 4th respectively. Why? Well, injuries to Rick Nash, Vincent Lecavalier and James Neal certainly don't help, but a few extra points from those players wouldn't bump them out of the dregs. Slow starts to depth players is killing them. Note that the opposite is also true: hot starts for the top teams have artificially inflated point totals (The Fylanders will not get 223 points from M-A Fleury, nor will Mathieu Perreault score at a PPG pace for the Flyers this year).

3) The Los Samjawors Kings are somehow tied for 9th place despite being the only team remaining with zero point players on their roster (both Dmitry Kulikov and Erik Gudbranson play tonight, so c'mon Panthers!). Why are they not in last place? 10 points from Niemi, a little fella named Sidney Crosby and a PPG pace from Grabovski (fuck).

Projections

Its really early in the season, and already I can feel panic rising amongst bottom-feeders. I also hear that Fy (currently #1) has been seen already spending his expected 1st place winnings around Victoria.

Some of you may know that this year I decided to spring for Dobber's Guide as my primary source for projections. Time will tell whether that was a good move or not, but one of the benefits of the package is that you get the projections in a nicely organized, sortable, filterable spreadsheet. Taking a cue from the Patrick Stefans GM's playbook, I thought it might be interesting to create a spreadsheet that inserted the projected points of each of our players and count up the top 9/4/1 to see what the end of the season might look like. 

The results are interesting:

1	G-Phil's Flyers	931
2	Moilers	862
3	Milan Micahleks	852
4	Schizzarks	820
5	Dicklas Lidstroms	810
6	Winter Claassics	803
7	Powder Rangers	793
8	Joshfrey Krupuls	790
9	Fylanders	786
10	Mackhawks	778
11	Quebec Rordiques	778
12	Teeyotes	750
13	Patrik Stefans	743
14	W-Benham/Scranton Parkers	741
15	Los Samjawors Kings	734
16	Vanrooser Canicks	712

I don't think a top 5 finish like projected above would surprise anyone. Obviously the Flyers are the favourites to repeat. The Moilers have been very good recently and a good draft may help. The Micahleks may finally taste a money spot, and both the Schizzarks and Dicklas Lidstroms have been competitive.

But seriously, what the fuck are the Winter Claassics doing in 6th place?? 
Let's look a bit closer at the projections for their season:

D	P.K. Subban	62
D	Mike Green	59
D	Matthew Carle	41
D	Raphael Diaz	35

The top 4 projected D are where he makes up the bulk of his points, with a huge season for Subban, a rebound season for Green, and good performances from Carle and Diaz. The rest of his forward group are all good (not great) fantasy performers - what the Claassics lack in top end talent they make up for a group of bottom forwards that will be above average across the board. I think this reinforces the general consensus that the Claassics GM did a fine job at the draft this year (Erat aside, but who saw that coming?)

Also, the Fylanders in 9th? 
Dobber predicts declines across the board from the Fylander's aging forward group, with no single player scoring at > PPG. That said, the Fylander's roster rarely looks the same at the end of the season as it did at the start, so who knows what might happen here.

WTF happened to the Vanrooser Canicks? 
This, folks, is what happens when you lose your franchise forward to the KHL. I am told that Canicks GM Nick Roos and NJ Devils GM Lou Lamoriello have been seen together poking pins into dolls and filling Matryoshka dolls with their tears. 

General observations 
Top 4 Total Defence Points

League Average: 164.625 points
Best: G-Phil's Flyers at 203. Second, Claassics at 197 (Subban and a bounce-back from Green). Third, Moilers at 195.

Worst: Los Samjawors Kings, with 134. Rordiques, Teeyotes, and Canicks all with less than 150 points on the back end.

Top 9 Total Offence Points

League Average: 542.93 points

Best: G-Phil's Flyers, by a wide margin - 630. Shizzarks in the 570 range. Moilers and the Joshfrey Krupuls in the 560s.

Worst: Canicks, by a mile, with 480. Wilkes-Benham/Scranton Parkers with 507, the Patrick Stefans with 508. 

Questions? Comments? Want to see the spreadsheet? Let me know.

Transactions

In the first transaction of the year, the Winter Claassics drop Martin Erat and add Mason Raymond. (edit: the answer to my rhetorical question from earlier is "almost exactly 1.5 hours" - G.)

Not much to say here. Erat is averaging like 7 minutes per night. Raymond has 4 points and looks rejuvenated and sort of pissed off. Even if MayRay fails to keep up his torrid pace.... he was going to outscore Erat.

Fun fact: On January 5, 2012, the Mackhawks traded Teemu Selanne to the Dicklas Lidstroms for Martin Erat and the Keeper League almost imploded.

Between January 6, 2012 and the end of the regular season, Erat actually outscored Selanne, 36 points to 30, meaning that Dickie came out the loser on that trade that year, and we lost our collective shit over nothing. 

Last year they both had 24 points each, in 45 games (Erat) and 46 games (Selanne).

KL Week in Review: Week 1 (also, waking the blog)

Welcome to the first full week of the Keeper League.

Last year was a weird, short, scary one, and things didn't really ever feel normal. To celebrate turning the corner on a new CBA, I've decided to resurrect this blog for announcements, commentary, etc.

If you have a google account, you can create your own posts, comment, etc. I encourage you to do so as it was a lot of fun like 2.5-3 years ago (holy fuck time flies).

Who's numbers are overinflated?

In short, damn near everybody has one or two guys on pace for ridiculous point totals. That is not surprising given the sample size. 

That said, a few teams stick out:

The Winter Claassics. Despite a fairly good draft and a suprisingly well-rounded team, the Claassics are the beneficiaries of some early-season scoring bumps from Lars Eller (currently on pace for 205 points), Mike Green (on pace for 109), Brian Gionta (on pace for 82), among others. Simply put, this is a pretty good team, but it is not THAT good. 

Who's numbers are underinflated?

The Milan Micahleks. This team is not a 15th place team. Looking at the projected point totals, the Micahleks have very few outliers (Vrbata is NOT getting 123 points this year) but the rest are at least plausible (St. Louis could well get 82 this year, Legwand is good for 41.) Not having any points from two D spots hurts.

Who's numbers are where they should be?
 

Stay tuned for my projections. Suprisingly, many of the teams are within a position or two of where I expect them to be in the end. 

Commissioners thoughts

How long before someone picks up Mason Raymond?