Where Are All The Points Available for Week Nine?

We're not far from our first Waiver Draft of the regular season, as we have another week to play after this weekend, so about nine evenings of play before we start the proceedings of the draft itself. Of course, the draft runs through Week Nine and the players that we select for replacements, don't actually become active until Week Ten.

First of all, I would like to mention how good of a job this group of 23 teams did picking apart the league, before the season has even started.  Out of the 778 players who have seen action this season, we chose 319 of them, which works out to only 44%.  Three players chosen in the October draft, haven't seen any action and are likely to be dropped at this Waiver Draft, but that's to another point.

Out of that 44% of players active, we have managed to collect 68.8% of the total pool points scored in the league, so that's a pretty good turnaround.  Now the intent will be to improve our teams to collect more points, still only using 40+% of the active players in the league during the whole year.

So, where are all the available points?  As of Saturday morning, without a full audit on the books, two NHL teams lead the way in available points, Vancouver and Columbus, each with 74 uncollected points.  Both teams only had nine players taken in the October draft, so there were definitely players available, going into the season.  Vancouver is 4th in the league in pool points to this point in the season, going into the night with 191 to their credit, while Columbus is 21st with 149.

Columbus has one of the best players in forward Nick Foligno, who has 20 points this season and was overlooked by everyone early on and the biggest reason why the team has so many points available.  The next best player on the team is defenseman David Savard, with 7 points, who may be a decent option as well, but Foligno appears to be a big prize for the bottom teams in a couple weeks.

In contrast, Vancouver's top available player is Christopher Higgins, who has 12 points, before the weekend's action, and the next best players have 9 points each.

If you're looking to pick up some players from the hottest team in the league, pool points-wise, the Tampa Bay Lightning lead the league with 225 points, 62 points of those points are from players who are available to our pool teams.  Forward Nikita Kucherov has 18 points and defenseman Anton Stralman has 10 points, so there are good options available for the opening round of the draft.

To no one's surprise, the teams that are tanking in the standings this season are the teams you may not want to choose from.  Buffalo, Florida, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Carolina are all teams that are struggling to get points, but they may tempt a little bit, as Carolina has a couple of forwards in good shape, Riley Nash and Elias Lindholm, both in double digits.

Below is a table of the top 10 and bottom 10 teams, in terms of available points right now.

Top 10	Available Points	Bottom 10	Available Points
CBJ	74	STL	20
VAN	74	PHI	27
CAR	72	LOS	39
TOR	68	WPG	41
DAL	67	COL	41
ARI	66	CHI	41
NAS	65	SAN	41
TAM	62	BOS	41
FLA	62	BUF	42
NJD	58	MTL	44