The Case for Larger Scoring Rosters

Since I am so clearly being destroyed this year in the pool, I have been trying to figure out if it was a failure in strategy (partly), the unexpected enormous suckitude of my first two overall picks (largely), or a lack of appreciation of the way the scoring roster would affect things (somewhat).

My strategy was that high end defencemen and goaltending would separate me from the pack more quickly than the many many forwards who score between 40-60 points. This strategy has been exploited beautifully by Teehan who is in the top despite horrendous forward depth. I was confident that I would be able to be do a good job in the bottom half of the draft with my forwards, and have been largely successful in that regard. However, given the way the scoring roster works, that does not help you at all. So, I thought it would be interesting to look at how the standings would be if the scoring roster was 12 forwards, 5 defenceman and 1 goalie. Now, obviously I appreciate that people would have made different choices if this was the scoring roster system, but for the sake of interest, I've done it this way anyways. What I've done is added the three highest non-scoring forwards and highest non-scoring defenceman to each team's overall score:

Team	Rank	Points	Added Points	New Total	New Rank
Micahleks	T - 1	388	53	441	1
Teeyotes	T - 1	388	41	429	T - 6
Jewish Blues	3	384	48	432	4
Flyers	4	383	46	429	T - 6
Mackhawks	5	382	57	439	T - 2
Krugars	6	380	48	428	8
Wittmen	7	379	60	439	T - 2
Powder	8	377	34	411	10
Shizzarks	9	372	48	420	9
Fylanders	10	370	61	431	5
Lidstroms	11	360	29	389	T - 13
Moilers	12	352	57	409	11
Preydators	13	345	44	389	T - 13
Claassics	14	339	65	404	12
Roos	15	297	39	336	15

A couple things worth noting: This doesn't actually affect things quite as much as I had thought it would with some exceptions. Obviously, Fy, Stefan and I benefit the most as the result of a number of strong depth players. Powder and Dickie suffer from the complete lack of support on their benches and Roos continues to be awful.

I think that increasing the scoring roster is something that should be looked at in the future as it makes sense that if we're going to draft all these guys, more of them should count for something. This is particularly true given the currently small number of players who are going to be kept at the end of the year. There is a good chance that the lower scoring players will not count and will not be retained, so why pick them at all?