As mentioned in our recent playoff fantasy hockey services post, SportingNews.com is a good place to get in a fantasy pool. Here are some basic tips regarding choosing your initial team in a free basic league (non-pro).

Who will advance?

In SportingNews.com’s basic playoff fantasy leagues a good strategy to selecting your starting squad is to play the matchups and try to buy players from teams who you think will be advancing as far as possible; this is not as imperative if you’re in the pro leagues where you can buy trades. At the same time, you have to temper this strategy by spreading out your players across teams, just a bit, in order to hedge your bets a bit in terms of who may advance. Playoff hockey is intense and usually unpredictable, for the most part, which makes it so fun to watch. For fantasy purposes though, unpredictability is not a plus.

Spreading out your risk

If you load up on players from a single team, then you could end up with a problem in the long run. Firstly, if your hunch was correct and they end up advancing, it’s possible that they do TOO well. What is meant by this is they have a short series, potentially even a sweep. The less games played, the less opportunity there is for your players to rack up points. Ideally, you would want every single series out there to go the full seven games so as to provide the most bang for your buck in terms of points production, except maybe for the goalies.

Playing the matchups

Accordingly, you will want to choose the matchups which you feel will produce the longest series, while still attempting to pick players from the eventual winning team. Furthermore, you will want to essentially plan out the potential bracket from the get-go. That means not only playing the matchups for the first round but every round into the finals. This way, you can minimize your overall risk while attempting to maximize your potential production per round. In basic leagues you start off with 2 trades and then are given an additional 2 per week (on Wednesday nights) after play starts, starting on April 22nd. There are seven players total on the roster and starting off with so few trades forces you to make good decisions. Otherwise you are stuck waiting several days (with no production) for your next batch of trades to come in. If you are successful in varying your team affiliations, you may shoot yourself in the foot if certain teams get eliminated. If you put all your eggs in one basket, and they sweep or otherwise finish their series early, or even worse, get eliminated, then you are losing out on a lot of production over the long run. In Sporting News hockey leagues, the schedule is very important to keep track of.

Tomorrow we will be running through a few players that could be good deals in Sporting News playoff leagues.