Fantasy Hockey: How To Start A Dynasty League

I had the pleasure of being invited to a start-up Fantasy hockey dynasty league. So I am going to take you through my preparation, and the things that I think are important for you to know when starting a new dynasty team. I am going to help you understand the importance of understanding the rules of your league, some tips for preparing for your draft, how to manage your salary cap during your start-up draft, and some helpful hints for managing your team afterward.

The Rules

This league has some quirks, as many dynasty leagues do. This is a 24 team points league, that has a yearly salary cap of $99,900,000. You have 22 NHL players and 28 in the minors. This is the breakdown,

Roster Size

Position           Active              Max

Center             3                      6

Left-Wing        3                      6

Right-Wing      3                      6

Forward           2

Defense          4                      10

Skater             1

Goalie              2                      4

Scoring Categories

Skaters

Goals - 4 Points

Assists - 2 Points

Power Play Points - 1 Point

Short-Handed Points - 1 Point

Shots - 0.15 Points

Hits - 0.15 Points

Blocks - 0.15 Points

Goalies

Wins - 5 Points

Shutouts - 5 Points

Saves - 0.2 Points

Losses -  -3 Points

Goals Against -  -1 Point

Overtime and Shootout Losses -  -1 Points

The Prep

Now that we have the boring rules out of the way we can start to think about how we are going to win. I always start by building a spreadsheet to understand how players stack up. With points leagues often being different you should never rely on anyone’s lists you might find unless their scoring is the same as theirs. These spreadsheets are fairly easy to make, as you can go and download the players with their category totals and then start multiplying them against your point categories, then sort from highest to lowest. In this point setup, these were the top 50 players, goalies included based on performance on the 2019-20 season. If you are doing your draft closer to the start of the season you should make use of projections for that season as well.

With the players ranked and listed by age, it is easier now to start moving them around based on preference and strategy. We will get to strategy a little bit later, but for now, let’s just talk about re-ordering. In a dynasty league, you are going to push down players who are into their 30’s. Alex Ovechkin and Patrick Kane might be top 10 players for the next year or 2, but you would probably rather have 10 years of Jack Eichel than a couple of years of them. Additionally, you will need to consider position strength. This league uses a lot of forwards, but you only use 4 defense and 2 goalies at a time. This places a premium on goalies, especially young stars like Vasilevskiy, so they should also get a bump. The last thing to think about is the contracts. As this is a cap league, you need to consider the contracts of the player when doing your own ordering. This affects the older players a bit more. For example, Carey Price is 36th ranked player based on performance, but with him being 32 and carrying around a 10.5 million cap hit for the next 6 years, or until he retires, he shouldn’t be coming off the board that early. Additionally, you might choose to push Nathan MacKinnon to the top of the rankings as he only makes 6.3 million for the next 3 years while Connor McDavid is making nearly double that for the next 6 years.

Life with a Partner

It is fairly common in dynasty leagues to have a partner. A partner isn’t going to be ideal for people who are strong willed, or for folks who are easily pushed over, but for someone who is just getting started or wants to try something new it is an approach that has some advantages. The biggest advantage in my opinion to having a partner is having someone push you on your own player values. It is easy to just make a queue of players and then pick the one you like the best, but when you have to justify your choices to a partner, it ensures that you have reasoning behind your choice, and it can help you form an argument to try and get the player you want. As you could imagine having to do this consistently can be draining, so you won’t want to consistently do this with your partner(it will likely produce undue strain on the relationship), especially in the later rounds, but early in your draft it is really important that you and your partner be on the same page, and be able to agree on your approach and your player choices. LIke all partnerships, they can be difficult, but when you can get a good one, the pay off is enormous.

Handling Salaries in an Economic Downturn

As previously noted this league uses a salary cap of $99,900,000. So what this means to you the player is that with 22 active players you essentially have $4.54 million per active roster spot, however, you need to make sure you don’t lose sight of holding some salary for adding players in season. Even in the deepest of leagues, there are always players who emerge and add value. You will want to hold back 5-10% of your overall cap to allow for this. I can’t stress enough how important it is to track both your cap and the average you have left to spend on each roster spot. This is going to allow you to have an understanding of if you need to take a low-cost rookie, or if you can afford to take on a year of a pricey veteran player who might be more useful right away.

If you’re going to spend up on players you are going to need to get value. You should also factor in that with the likelihood of the economy taking a downturn, you aren’t going to see teams spending a big money on players either in free agency or with extensions as the Salary Cap will start to come down. This will allow you to potentially get some advantage by looking to young players who haven’t hit restricted free agency status, and also taking a close look at the current free agency class. Players like Taylor Hall and Alex Pietrangelo likely won’t get 10 million dollar contracts, they could be pushed down to the 5-7 range, which will make them really nice values. This would also mean that even if Jack Hughes hits his full potential and is a top 10 player in the league, he isn’t likely to get an 11.5 million dollar plus contract as Connor McDavid or Auston Matthews did. Don’t take this to mean that young established stars aren’t worth it because they have big contracts, but rather appreciate that you should value players like Nathan MacKinnon who didn’t get to that big payday a bit more because they are offering you top-shelf production now, while not breaking your bank.

The Excellence of Execution

Now that you have your spreadsheet and your rankings, it is time to execute your draft. The draft strategy is going to vary based on your draft position and the folks you are drafting with. However, you should consider a couple of things.

1. The bigger the league, the more valuable a top-end goalie will be. In a 12 team league you can get away with having a top 15 goalie and then looking at waivers to add your backup, but in a 20 team league, there won’t be enough goalies for each team to have 2, there just aren’t 40 goalies of any value, so getting 2-3 offers some advantage over your competition, as you are making the pool shallow for everyone else, and you can fill in skaters later where you can find value in the depths of that portion of the player pool.
2. Much like goalies, the value of defense is much greater at the top than the bottom, especially in deeper leagues. There will only be around 30 defensemen who see power play one minutes, vs 120 forwards who see similar time on the ice. 
3. Every player doesn’t need to be a star. In deep leagues where talent is more spread out, you don’t need a team full of stars to win, and not only do you not need it, trying to get a team full of stars is going to require hitting on a lot of prospects. The point here is, that a player who gets you 20 goals, 20 assists, but shoots a lot, or provides a lot of hits, might not seem sexy, but their consistent point base from the peripheral stats matter, a lot when you objective is to score more total points than your opponent. Sure, having 5-6 players who give you 82 plus points would be optimal, but in the later rounds when other teams are shooting the moon on prospects or investing in a player who is past their primes, look at the other player who is going to get you some points each and every night for the next few years.
4. Draft picks are trade capital at best! When you go back through the last 10 NHL entry drafts the best drafts have upwards of 15 good fantasy players in them. Look at the 2007 entry draft as an example. In that draft, there are 15 players who have produced 350 points or more in the 12 years since being drafted. That is only one-third of a point per game! Of those players, only one of them has been better than a point per game for their career. When you look a little closer 3 of those players didn’t go in the first round, which means they might not get drafted in your draft either. Back to the point though, if you have a top 15 pick you should keep it, or at the very least value it, every other pick, you should be looking to move, especially after the first 30. If you can get a useful player on someone’s roster for your 2nd, 3rd, and 4th rounder, DO IT. The odds of those players being productive for you over a long period of time is very small. You might win the lottery from time to time, and get yourself a Jamie Benn with the 129th pick in your draft like the Stars did, but you shouldn’t bet on it, because you have a better chance of getting a Zach Hamill.

Finishing Strong

At this point we have covered preparation, the salary cap, top players, and some basic strategy items. The last thing you are going to need to make sure you have an idea of and are keeping an eye one is going to be the different FA periods. Hockey has 3 FA periods, NCAA free agency(consisting of players who were not drafted into the NHL, they can be signed following the conclusion of the NCAA season usually around the middle of April), European league free agency(similar to NCAA, this comes at the end of that leagues season, and the end of their contract with that leagues team. The most common league to see this occur is the KHL. Their season ends on April 30th.), and then NHL free agency(this is the time when you can drop players without taking a hit against your salary cap).

 As with any fantasy league you have two goals, have fun, and win. Dynasty leagues really add to the depth of your league, and if you’re interested in prospects and building teams they can be quite enjoyable. If you love playing season long, you should try oue out if you haven’t yet!