Yahoo! Fantasy Hockey is Up

So, as you can see from the title, one of the major fantasy hockey sites on the web is now live. I think it went up just a few hours ago. There are only a couple hundred leagues as I write this. I have already joined a couple leagues and am the only one in them as of now but I’ll bet they’ll fill up by this time tomorrow.

As of right now I can not see any easily noticeable major changes in terms of the system and interface itself in Yahoo! hockey. It looks almost exactly the same to what it was last year. In fact the main banner still says “HOCKEY ’07″ so I’m sure they’re still working stuff out and I hope to see some cool new updates and such.

Taking a quick look at the default Yahoo! O-Ranks right now they look to be a bit off but honestly that’s expected at this point. The highest ranked player is Ovechkin, which isn’t surprising at all. I’m quite pleased to have him in my main keeper league. He’s an all around stud obviously. After Ovechkin, the top 10 right now are as follows: Malkin, Datsyuk, Zetterberg, Heatley, Phaneuf, Getzlaf, Spezza, Lecavalier and Gaborik. Sidney Crosby is notably NOT in the top 10 which is honestly baffling to me. I’m guessing it was because he was injured last season but I still think they’ll update the ranks before most people start drafting. You cannot have Sidney Crosby at rank 12; that is crazy talk, as far as I’m concerned.

Their ranks are based on default Yahoo! public league settings so it’s a bit awkward that they don’t have any goalies ranked even in the top 15 O-Rank wise especially since their categories are so heavily goalie based, with a ratio of 6:4 offense to goalie. The top ranked goalie is Lundqvist at 18 at this moment. However, it did just launch today and in fact they are still updating as we speak, I’m sure. Guys like Martin Brodeur and Daniel Alfredsson aren’t even in the system right now, so you know they’re still doing things behind the scenes.

For me personally, though, Yahoo! launching officially signals the beginning of fantasy hockey for the 2008-2009 season because they’re such a huge and commonly used service by so many people who play fantasy hockey. I always have a bunch of teams on Yahoo! and the service is free so even though they have their shortcomings, I definitely keep my complaints to a minimum. We’ll all be updating on Yahoo! related fantasy activities as the pre-season grows closer.

The fantasy hockey season is upon us, people. Let’s get to work!
 
 

UPDATE: As of right now (10:45am EST) Yahoo! Fantasy Hockey is offline again. I’ve been perusing some hockey forums and it seems that one of the Yahoo! staff accidentally launched 2008 fantasy hockey. Yeah, sounds kind of weird but I think it’s plausible considering what’s going on. After I registered a couple teams, it didn’t list my teams on the main fantasy sports page for my account. Also, there wasn’t even an actual link to fantasy hockey on the main page either. Personally, I had gone directly to the hockey page in the first place, bypassing the main fantasy page so this did not affect me.

Also, there were several more key players missing from the system other than the ones I previous listed and some other odd things going on, especially with the rankings and whatnot. There was also some missing functionality that I noticed later as I went through the options. So it looks like we’ll have to wait a little bit longer for them to actually start up this season. I do know they will launch really soon, as it’s almost the end of August already. Also, this could be a good thing going forward. It looks like they will be doing some updates so hopefully the bugs and such are worked out before they officially launch.