Can a really strong goalie duo offset offensive weakness?

This team was drafted with a goalie emphasis in mind and then following up with a good balance of players, with consideration for position and relative quality. I started strong with 2 top goalies and then filled out from there, essentially.

As you can see from the draft results image, I had 9th pick overall (out of 12). It snaked around and my 2nd pick was also relatively high and I was able to grab up Nabby and Lundy, both top 5 goalies, in my opinion, and this totally sets me up in net. Although this is the “goalie emphasis” draft/team, that doesn’t mean I would be drafting more goalies than I needed and then going into other positions. Quite the contrary, I know that in Yahoo! public roto leagues that there are max games stipulations: 82 per position. Due to this, a draft strategy should take this heavily into consideration and make sure they have covered all their bases at the starting positions before going into their bench. You need to have a good set of starters because depth on your bench means less in a roto league with max games than it would in an H2H league with daily transactions.

Now, as this is a very similar strategy to how I would normally draft, in that I would try to grab a couple strong goalies early and then start going into wingers, I was already familiar with who I may want to grab and who may be available in each respective round. Both of these players should have very strong years, especially Vanek who should have a nice bounce back year and may be able to hit the PPG mark with the linemates he’s likely going to have in Roy and Pominville, in addition to getting back over 40 goals. I decided to go with Perry and Vanek, a right wing and left wing, respectively, because I know I can hold off on centers and still get some decent ones later. From what I have seen in previous drafts, some really good centers fall to late in the draft in publics; I mean really late. So, I gambled a bit because of this fact and I held off on grabbing any top centers and decided to focus on wings and D.

In the 5th round I saw that a lot of the top D were getting snapped up already so I had to take Boyle here. Then I grabbed another RW in Hemsky with the turn around pick in the 6th because RWs were also getting thin quicker than LWs seemed to be. In the 7th I snagged Scotty Niedermayer, who probably fell a few rounds because of his career uncertainty the past couple years, but I anticipate if he plays the full year with the Ducks that he’ll get back to form. Then I rounded out my starting LW with Alexander Semin with the next pick.

Now we’re getting right in the middle of the draft and I needed to start looking for a C. However, in round 9 I saw that Timonen was the last good D before a pretty big dropoff in talent, so I felt inclined to grab him and hold off on taking a center for just a few more picks. I think it worked out because I was still able to get Langkow in the 10th round. A serviceable center for sure this season, playing with Iginla. A good value pick, in my estimation. After Langkow came an even bigger value pick with Gagne with pick #129; I was only able to snag him here because Yahoo! had him ranked so low due to his injury and missed time. A recent update to the rankings has since nullified this opportunity, with Gagne now possessing an O-Rank of 54. I hope all you early drafters took advantage of this situation, like I did.

Now with the draft winding down I could focus on getting good value for my players with my later picks. With my 12th pick I grabbed Plekanec, which at the time I felt was a really good value. However, since then, the Habs’ center situation has changed with Lang coming in, which may make my Plekanec less valuable at least for this year. I’ll be keeping an eye on that situation, for sure.

My next two rounds consisted of a couple much maligned Blackhawks in Havlat and Khabibulin. Havlat was ranked pretty low, similar to Gagne, because of his injuries. At this stage of the draft, I felt I could gamble on him and if he turns out to have any type of decent season then it’s good value. As for Khabibulin, I still think he’s a decent goalie and he may steal some starts from Huet and who knows, he may even bring up a platoon scenario in Chicago if all goes well for him. With my last picks I had to round out my D and I went with Kuba who should have a hand in running Ottawa’s PP1 unit, at least until they bring in someone better and as for Johnson, he’s only going into his sophomore year but he does have the talent so I took a flyer on him with my last pick to see if he can live up to the hype this soon.

The point of this specific draft was to immediately grab a couple top notch goalies and then round out the rest of the team with positional picks. All in all, that was done for the first several rounds. You really can’t go wrong with Nabokov and Lundqvist anchoring your goalie stats for the entire year. I fully anticipate leading almost every goalie stat category by year’s end in this particular league, with ease. As for the offense, I did grab some very good wingers but my center situation is undoubtedly weak, especially compared to other teams. However, the good thing is–and I planned for this–the waiver wire is rife with decent centers because of how plentiful they are. If there are any players catching on fire, I can always grab them out of free agency and play them for a few games until they cool off, at the forward positions. This is something that traditionally isn’t as easy to do with goalies because they’re so few and far between.

Hopefully, the strong goalies will have such a good impact on my overall categories, especially with the ratio the way it is (read more about how to set up your league). If I can dominate the goalie categories like I anticipate, that means being a bit less strong some of the offense shouldn’t hurt as badly, in theory. The way I figure it, goalie categories are MUCH harder to make up ground on because of the way a lot of them are set up. The key ones like SV% and GAA are averaged categories, rather than simple accumulation. That means if your goalies are not consistently performing well, you have almost no chance of doing well there. However, for just about all the offense/skater categories, you can still do decently at them even if you’re not stacked up front. Still, on the skater front, even though I missed out on the really high scoring guys because I skipped over them with my first two picks, I did manage to grab some pretty good players who can put up some points over the course of the season. Roto is a long term game so only time will tell if this strategy is actually the best.

Check out the initial post: The Great Draft Experiment in case you missed it. It has some basic info on the premise of the entire experiment, as well as some intros to each team and strategy combination used in the drafts.

Stay tuned for updates on this and the other teams/drafts throughout the year. I will most likely be making a post about each team/draft tandem every month or so as the season progresses and doing a comparison in terms of position in the standings and performance with respect to each other.