Seven ideas for fantasy hockey that are long overdue
It seems like for the past 10-20 years, fantasy hockey has stagnated and gotten very comfortable with what it’s become. That’s all fine and dandy, especially if you’re just looking for something simple involving points, but considering how much the game has grown, especially in terms of analyzing the game and the kind of data that can be tracked, it feels like a missed opportunity to not start giving more options for fantasy hockey nerds, right?
I could go all day on the kinds of things fantasy hockey could do to continuously improve and create the ultimate experience for fans, but for now, I’ll keep it simple. I came up with seven ideas that could be added to fantasy hockey to give more options to fans, add (and take away) value in player types and positions that you couldn’t otherwise without powering them up too much, and also paint a more accurate picture of a player’s value in today’s game.
Even strength points
Isn’t it weird that we have power play points and shorthanded points as additions to total points for categories, but nothing for even strength points? Considering that even strength points have more overall value when it comes to player evaluation, it would make more sense to give people the option to give those types of points more value instead of having to give the other categories a negative point total to make that happen. It also makes for an interesting way to somewhat nerf anyone who has Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, since they do rely on the power play a decent amount for their production.
Primary assists
A majority of non-category leagues will have a points system that gives you more points for a goal than an assist, and it makes sense. With the ability for two assists to be given to a goal, that mostly doubles the occurrence of assists, and therefore devalues them a little bit. Sometimes it means that a mediocre player just has to exist on the ice with an elite talent to get a point. But, it does undervalue the importance of that last pass that connects for the goal, as sometimes it’s the biggest reason the goal happens in the first place.
That’s why it’s insane that primary and secondary assists haven’t been separated in fantasy leagues yet. Whether you want to make it so that primary assists are more valuable than secondary assists or just eliminate secondary assists entirely and make primary assists as valuable as goals, it would provide leagues with more opportunities to increase value to actual playmakers. It’s well known in the analytics community that secondary assists are more luck and noise than anything else, so why not give leagues opportunities to get rid of that noise to bring more value to assists again?
Allow separate points for minor penalties, major penalties, and misconducts
I’ve played in a few leagues where you lose points when your player gets a penalty (because let’s be honest, leagues that give points for penalties either really love to reward bad players or are overly nostalgic towards the glory days of fighting), and in theory, it makes sense. After all, when a player takes a penalty in a game, it hurts their team by putting them on the penalty kill, so it makes some sense to punish players for it, especially if you’re a league that wants to have hits and stuff but not reward dirty players.
The issue with this is that all penalty minutes get treated equally when they really shouldn’t. If your player loses a fight, or worse, gets kicked out of the game and wracks up 20-30 penalty minutes, that drastically shifts a weekly matchup by heavily rewarding or punishing a player for something that doesn’t actually have an impact on the on-ice play (don’t get me started on how this cost me my season once). If you had the ability to choose which types of penalties you gain (or lose) points for, it would give you the ability to have the impact be more focused on penalties that hinder teams on the ice, as opposed to the random misconducts that are just given out at the referee’s discretion.
Penalties drawn
Speaking of penalties, if you’re going to punish players for taking penalties, you should be able to balance it out by rewarding them for drawing penalties as well. If you make the points equal depending on the penalty, it allows you to achieve the initial goal of punishing the dirty players, while rewarding players who may take the odd penalty and draw some just as much, and it gives those Lady Byng players a way to stand out in leagues as well. Even if you can’t be provided the ability to separate each type of penalty, adding in drawn penalties could in theory balance out the fighting majors and misconducts that have no impact on the actual game because they’d also be drawing one from the player they’re getting involved with. Feels like a really easy one to include in the modern fantasy hockey landscape.
Weighted saves
Now I’m getting into more analytical territory, so bear with me here. The common complaint with using saves and save percentage to evaluate goalies is that it means a dump in from center ice that happens to hit the goalie’s pad has as much value as an insane cross-crease save that should have been a tap-in goal. Thankfully, we’ve been given more insight to the weighted danger of shots and shot attempts, particularly with expected goals, and that’s given us the ability to have a better idea as to what goalies face a tougher workload in terms of scoring chances.
So why is that kind of data not applied to fantasy hockey? Suddenly you’re rewarded more for having a goalie that is actually carrying his own weight in the game as opposed to a Martin Brodeur-type that’s stopping a bunch of easy shots and getting the easy win behind an elite defensive team. It adds a nice twist to the fantasy goalie market as well, giving a bit more value to how good goalies on bad teams like Jake Allen or Lukas Dostal have been this season, while also giving an extra separation to those elite-tier goalies like Andrei Vasilevskiy, Igor Shesterkin, and Ilya Sorokin who do it behind good defensive teams anyways. It might even give the San Jose Sharks a somewhat valuable fantasy asset in Mackenzie Blackwood.
Other advanced stats
While we’re talking about more analytical stuff, why aren’t analytics more integrated into fantasy hockey? If we have goalies getting extra credit for more high-danger saves, players should get more credit for creating more high-danger shots as well. It still rewards the volume shooters because it adds up, but it allows the players who know how to generate high-danger chances more to get that extra edge, although you do run into the issue of players like pre-2021 Brady Tkachuk, who got a ton of high-danger chances due to always being in front of the net but never finished those chances. But it does reward you for having players that are generally good at generating chances and scoring like Auston Matthews, as opposed to a player that’s riding a high shooting percentage like Andrei Kuzmenko last season.
Analytics also provide more unique ways to incorporate defensive ability into fantasy. A quick skim through most leagues, and the only stats that are anywhere close to rewarding defensive play are faceoffs (which don’t actually provide much defensive value despite the obsession over them on broadcasts), blocked shots (which has some defensive value, but if a player has a ton of blocked shots it usually means they’re bad enough to get hemmed in their own zone a lot), and plus-minus (which if your fantasy league still uses, it means your commissioner may actually be a dinosaur that survived the meteor).
So why not incorporate stats that better represent two-way and defensive play, like shot attempt and expected goal share/differential, or even preventing zone entries against, generating zone exits out of your zone, and zone entries into the offensive zone? Some of the data will be harder to acquire than others, but it may be the solution to the continuous problem of not being able to extract full fantasy value out of defensemen outside of the guys running point on the top power play unit.
Dynamic lineup changes
OK, if you think I’ve already crossed a line for what should be in a fantasy league, this one turns tradition on it’s head. One of the constants of fantasy hockey is setting your lineup for the night, and that’s it, you’re done. Whoever you benched doesn’t get you points, and whoever is in your lineup will. But what about those times where a last minute injury causes you to scramble to make a lineup add, and you’re a minute too late, or maybe you don’t even get notified of the injury to begin with!
What if there was an option to change your lineups whenever you want. You can switch around who’s on your bench and who isn’t, and even make adds and drops to your team, even if the player is in the game. The only caveat is that you only gain/lose points while they’re in the lineup. So, you can’t just throw in one player because he has a hat trick already and get those points, you’d have to either gamble on it beforehand after he scored one goal, or hope he scores more after getting the hat trick.
It would add an interesting layer to fantasy hockey, especially for the diehards that check their teams multiple times a day, and create whole new opportunities to strategize. There’d have to be a way to limit how often you could do it, or restrict you from swapping a player out once the game is over, so that you don’t have someone running a lineup of players in East Coast games and then swap them out for players in West Coast games, but maybe that’s also a way to get around the fact that the NHL loves to schedule 15 games one day and then two the next.
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