Draft day

I joined this league about 35 minutes before the draft was scheduled, so had no time to prepare.

The league was a Yahoo public league, however the GM had 2-3 friends in the league from the beginning. The rest of the league managers were either publics who chose to join, or randomly assigned publics who wanted a points-based league. That said, of the eight GMs, seven showed up on draft night - at least for a portion - so the guys running the show weren't all focused on auto-drafting. They're just not good at fantasy.

I picked fifth in the draft, nice and in the middle, which is a solid position to have in an eight team league.

So here's my squadron:

RD POS PLAYER
01 C   John Tavares
02 C/R Claude Giroux
03 G   Carey Price
04 C/L Matt Duchene
05 C   Anze Kopitar
06 C   Ryan Getzlaf
07 D   Shea Weber
08 C/L Logan Couture
09 D   Dion Phaneuf
10 C   Patrice Bergeron
11 C/R David Backes
12 G   Devan Dubnyk
13 G   Cam Ward
14 L   Gabriel Landeskog
15 C   Mikko Koivu
16 D   John Carlson
17 D   Brent Seabrook
18 C/L Jordan Staal

The only F drafted who doesn't take faceoffs is Landeskog - and honestly, he's the only guy I second guessed. Each of the other ten forwards are in the top 25 total. I also have 1st, 2nd and 5th best d-men, points-wise. No other team has more than TWO forwards who were in the top 25 last year, or more than two d-men ranked in the top ten.

Most of the top ranked C in this points system are also the best C in the league, so it was obvious I wasn't going to get ALL of them. But it astonishes me that I was able to get SO MANY of them! I also managed to snag the top-rated d-man [Weber] in round seven. He was the fifth d-man taken, after Subban, Karlsson, Letang, and for some reason Ryan Suter.

The one weakness on the club is in net. All three guys are workhorses, but all are inconsistent [Price, Ward] or on teams with awful defenses [Dubnyk, Ward]. They should all get enough work that it will mask their shortcomings, and since GAA/SV% aren't calculated in the league, it shouldn't be much of an issue.

There were precisely two guys in the draft that I wanted and didn't get: Brent Burns [a D-eligible first line RW], and Evander Kane [ranked in the 50s by Yahoo, but higher in this scoring system]. I will try and trade for both of them.

I'm supremely confident that I'm going to absolutely slaughter this league, and I will be trash-talking throughout the season on the board, coming off like a complete jackass. I plan to rub it in at every opportunity.

Let the games commence.