Selecting a goalie like Carey Price and looking out for another goalie later on is just one way to attack the goalie position on Draft Day
Much like running backs or starting pitchers, goaltending situations can bring fantasy sports owners to spectacular highs or soul crushing lows that even an album by The National couldn’t depict properly. Just ask owners who rode Andrew Hammond, a guy with no minor league track record whatsoever, to the fantasy playoffs last year about the former. Goalie situations can be unpredictable week-to-week and can turn on a dime. However, so much fluctuation has been seen in recent years at the position that statisticians are simply saying “goaltending is voodoo.” When the stat guys can’t see it coming, do we as fantasy players have hope?
Sure it’s voodoo, but no need to pack your sage oil and show up to your draft dressed like Papa Shango (though that might help in the mental warfare game). There are ways you can make your goalie squad selections pay dividends on draft day. Today we’ll talk about different approaches to drafting your goalies.
Know Your League
Where to draft a goalie depends on your league format, but a few approaches will have universal application. For starters, in a 10-team standard league, most teams will start two goalies. Factor in backups, and that’s 30 goalies off the board. If you play in a daily league, then the competition becomes a cage fight for backup goalies who are in platoons. The goalie hoarders come out in full force in these leagues and make guys like Karri Ramo quite relevant.
In either format, the goalie luck comes up snake eyes for you. Resulting in the need for you to either be a waiver wire hawk or Billy Beane your way into a trade for the most in-demand position in fantasy hockey. Good luck with that. Also remember, everyone else in your league is well aware of how hard it is to get two good goalies, so often goalies will go above their projections. It’s up to you if you want to get in on the inevitable goalie run or hold pat and stick to your plan.
Goalie Tiers Go Deeper
Always remember that goalies score the most points overall. The 10th highest scoring goalie in standard Yahoo leagues in 2014 was Keri Lehtonen with 331 points. The highest scoring forward was Alex Ovechkin with 229. So if goalies are always going to score more than everyone else, you may consider not going all in on goalies early since you can still find a lot of points later on.
Goalie Drafting Strategies
The King and the Serf
People who play in two-quarterback fantasy football leagues know this strategy as the “stud and stream.” This means you spend a high pick on one goalie, say a Carey Price or Braden Holtby, and then wait until later to find value. Since your top guy will stabilize your team, it’s not overly risky, but finding value late is not easy. In 2013 drafts, Ben Bishop was going in the last few rounds and turned out to be a top seven goalie. In 2014, John Gibson was the late pick du-jour, and that didn’t exactly pan out.
You have to be prepared for the worst case scenario of your late round guy not working out and may have to grab your No. 3 goalie earlier than normal. This strategy will then cause you to cluster your picks on goalies late, at a time when you could be taking fliers on high upside rookie forwards or defensemen. Ask anyone who grabbed Johnny Gaudreau late last year how they’d feel if they had picked Alex Stalock hoping he’d take over the SJ job instead (no, not a personal example at all…).
Pocket Aces
Spend two of your first three or four picks on goalies. As long as your guys don’t get hurt, you’ll have it made in the crease. However, you must decide if it’s going to be worth passing over high-end forward talent to grab two goalies. I tend to think it is not. Here’s an example from a 2014 draft. It’s just like baseball in that if you want an ace you have you pay the price. Note how the goalie run starts in Rounds 2 and 3:
Notice how Bobrovsky goes before Pavelski? To put it simply – would you have rather had the eighth highest scoring forward or the 16th highest scoring goalie with your third pick? You know who went three rounds later in this draft? Holtby, the second highest scoring goalie. So again, that’s proof that you may not need to spend a high pick on a goalie, which leads us to our next strategy.
Middle Out
This is where you focus on forwards and maybe a high-end defenseman in the first few rounds, then grab your two starting goalies in Rounds 6-10. Again as noted above, this can totally work. Ask yourself this question honestly – aside from Price is there one goalie you feel 100% confident in drafting in the first two rounds? MAYBE Tuukka Rask? An aging Henrik? Holtby is about the only other goalie I draft that early, and even then it’d only be if I had one of the last picks. So then why not wait?
Let your opponents grab an injury prone Pekka Rinne or Devan “Due for Regression” Dubnyk in the third and fourth round. Meanwhile, you’re scooping up Filip Forsberg or Gabriel Landeskog, who will likely be undervalued due to his slow start last year. Old, reliable Roberto Luongo will be there along with Martin Jones in Rounds 7-9. That’s a solid twosome if you couple it with a strong crop of forwards and D early on.
Throw it at the Wall, See What Sticks
This one is for the gamblers out there. Sometimes in fantasy a position gets “punted” in favor of depth at other positions. You see this a lot with second basemen in baseball or tight ends in football. In those sports, you can work around it, but in hockey it is a far riskier play. You’re saying you won’t even think about a goalie until the rounds hit the double digits. Could you grab Ryan Miller and Antti Niemi hoping they find a time machine? Maybe grab Robin Lehner and Jake Allen and gamble that they both emerge as high-end options? To answer that I turn to a classic Chris Rock bit, “You can drive a car with your feet if you want to, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.”
Josh Kruk is a correspondent at FantasyPros. To read more from Josh, check out his archive or follow him on Twitter @j_kruk.
