Blog Post of Shame: December 2015 Edition

In keeping with the “loser” theme of this series, I set out to do something fairly straight-forward: find the KL’s biggest loser. No, I don’t mean singling one of you GMs out, but rather singling out a player who has not had any staying power with any one team, perpetually thrown to the dogs only to be used and abused by the next insolent GM. 

I am only about 90% sure I have found our man; my certainty is compromised by the precision of our archives. A missed “e” in Versteg, for example, could have saved Kris from this ignominious honour (actually, I have ruled this specific possibility out, but you get the idea). My certainty is also compromised by my simplified method. This is all I did:

• Compiled all drafts into one worksheet
• Parsed out last names
• Counted instances of each unique last name
• Sorted unique last names by count
• Scrutinized the high end for duplicates (like Smith, Johnson, and of course, JOKINEN)

This allowed me to identify six players who have been draft in EVERY KL Draft:

PLAYER 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 Zach Bogosian Micahleks Krugers Blues Rordiques Flyers Flyers 141st 105th 33rd 80th 144th 138th Troy Brouwer Roos Mackhawks Flyers Flyers Micahleks Kings 164th 112th 142nd 33nd 95th 102nd Jussi Jokinen Mackhawks Flyers Micahleks Rangers Moilers Kings 161st 34th 125th 15th 72nd 66th Frans Nielsen Krugers Fylanders Teeyotes Mackhawks Parkers Canicks 286th 114th 10th 58th 15th 67th Antoine Vermette Krugers Preydators Teeyotes Rordiques Krupuls Lidstroms 136th 48th 105th 118th 79th 75th Marek Zidlicky Teeyotes Flyers Rangers Mackhawks Krupuls Schizzarks 216th 65th 109th 74th 41st 155th

I then took this list to a worksheet that included every transaction ever made and simply ctrl+f’d ‘em to identify the player among those six who has most often changed hands between GMs or gone in or out of free agency. I found the following:

PLAYER	1st move	2nd move	3rd move	4th move
Zach Bogosian	to Blues       2010-11	to Lidstroms 2011-12	N/A	N/A
Troy Brouwer	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Jussi Jokinen	to Schizzarks 2011-12	N/A	N/A	N/A
Frans Nielsen	to Stefans    2011-12	to Micahleks 2014-15	N/A	N/A
Antoine Vermette	dropped by Preydators 2011-12	picked-up by Lidstroms 2011-12	to Kings       2013-14	to Parkers       2014-15
Marek Zidlicky	to Rordiques 2013 pre-draft	to Schizzarks 2014-15	N/A	N/A

And there you have it: The Village Bicycle / Mike Sillinger (Sillinge Bicycle?!) of the Keeper League to date is none other than Antoine Vermette. 'Toine went on record as saying that one of his most shameful experiences was getting dropped by the Preydators, only with leave from the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner, in the days following the 2011 draft when she realized she only had three defencemen on her roster. He compared the experience to serving a too-many-men-on-the-ice penalty when not even being on the ice at the time it was called.

It is worth noting that Vermette, despite being shit on time and again by his abusers was the first KLer with two championship rings. The other guy on this list with two rings is Troy Brouwer, who sipped from the cup twice after being drafted in consecutive seasons by our most ungrateful GM, Mr. Greg Phillips (6 instances of “usery”).

Final tidbit, The Winter Claassics are the only squad not to have touched any of the above mentioned six-pack, at least not inappropriately.

Well, that was fun for all of me.