Draft Experiment: Defense Update 1

Defense Emphasis Draft – Update 1

This is the first update in the draft experiment series, for the Defense Emphasis draft. If you’re unfamiliar with the premise, go back and read the original post: the great draft experiment.

This draft is the one I’m personally most interested in: the defense emphasis draft. Take a look at the original post here: defense emphasis. Essentially the strategy was to take strong D-men early and often and see if they can help a team out as much or more than really strong forwards and/or goalies would.

Click on the image to view its full size (opens in separate window).

The roster for this team isn’t that great, if you really think about it. The crop of D is obviously pretty good with Boyle, Rafalski, and Green. The big missing piece here, though, is Sergei Gonchar, who I used a second round pick on. That is a big loss to take, but there’s not much you can do about it. Hopefully, I will be able to grab Gonchar again (had to drop him) and stash him on my recently freed up IR spot (previously occupied by Cam Ward). As mentioned in the forward emphasis update, Gonchar could still be very useful if he returns closer to the 4 month mark in the 4-6 month absence, which isn’t that far off from now.

D group aside, this team is being carried by a kid named Crosby. He is really producing big time for this team. Another guy who is doing his fair share is Simon Gagne, who I stole with a pretty late draft pick. The rest of the crew is doing their job, for the most part, and this team is in good shape, in terms of utilization of games allotted vs. max games (next graphic down).

Easily the biggest hole, though, is in net. This seems to be a theme for every draft experiment team other than the goalie emphasized draft, naturally. Which further reiterates the point that goalies truly are that valuable.

The problem with the goalies for this team is that none of them all consistent full-time starting goalies, or studs, if you will. Huet splits time with Khabibulin, and Cam Ward started the season with a lot of inconsistency and is JUST now coming off IR. I also have both Vokoun and Anderson but that’s essentially two roster spots for one full goalie and that is bad for long term game utilization per roster spot. You never really want platooning goalies; they are a pain to deal with.

This defense emphasized team has had to endure 7 total adds so far. Not too bad, all things considered. As mentioned already, Gonchar had to be dropped immediately which is obviously a big loss. Joni Pitkanen has been an an okay plug-in replacement in Gonchar’s absence, but Pitkanen himself has missed some time, as well. You can’t really replace someone like Gonchar anyway, he’s a top 3 fantasy D-man when healthy. With the way the Penguins are rolling offensively, Malkin and Crosby being the top 2 NHL point-getters, it is crazy to think about how many more points they (and Gonchar) would have if Sergei was in the lineup.

Brad Boyes was a notable addition to this team a short while ago after another owner dropped him. Boyes’ +/- rating is absolutely atrocious at -19 overall. His team worst -3 rating vs. the Caps the other night sure as hell doesn’t help his cause. When I picked him up, his +/- was already terrible but I figured I could absorb it and make use of his point production as a beneficial trade-off. If you refer to the image of the standings at the top of the page, you’ll see that this team is #2 in the +/- category, by a small gap, so you can see the reasoning here.

Ironically, this team isn’t doing that poorly in the goalie stats department. The team ranks 3rd in SV% and also 3rd in GAA, which is pretty decent. Middle of the pack in shutouts is a plus. The weakest area is wins but that has a lot to do with the game utilization as seen in the picture above. As with some of the other draft experiment teams, I was purposely benching my goalies early on in the season for various reasons. Cam Ward had a rather poor start and has suffered a couple injuries which caused him to miss time and set me back in the rate of goalie games used. Huet isn’t a true full-time starter so that also causes the rate to slide down. Both Vokoun and Anderson were free agent pickups and they happen to split games for the same team so that’s even worse in terms of trying to catch up because you are never 100% sure who will start and sometimes you miss out on them. Not to mention, wins are tough to come by on a weaker team like the Panthers. Originally, Martin Gerber was drafted but was dropped quite a while ago because Auld simply took over by force in Ottawa. Gerber recently started his first game in over a month just a few days ago.

As seen from the standings graphic at the top of the post, this defense emphasized team is in 4th place right now. Just like the forward emphasized team, this team was also in 1st place just a few weeks back and has since slid down the standings a bit. There is a silver lining, however. The second place team is WAY over the rate of good max game management at this point. They will surely run out several weeks before the last game of the season if they keep it up, which is highly likely. The other two teams are more controlled in their player management but my team is still in better shape because I am not that far back in some key categories and yet I still have games in hand on all three teams that are ahead of me. This should make for an interesting scenario as the season rolls on.

Check out the original post: The Great Draft Experiment and also the main page with links to all the teams: http://saucerpass.com/draft-experiment.