Week Nineteen Newsletter

Well, look at this!  We have a Week Eighteen Waiver Draft pick-up and a rookie as our Player of the Week... the New York Islanders rookie forward, Anders Lee, who picked up 7 points in action during Week Nineteen.

Lee was actually a Week Nine drop by Tony, but was picked up again by Dale B. in the most recent player swap.  It took a while for the 24-year old forward to get going this year, but after he was dropped, he has played exceptionally well, topping it off with a great week.

Lee opened up the week with an assist against the Oilers on Tuesday, added a couple of goals against the Maple Leafs, including the winner and then he capped the week off with 4 assists against the Blue Jackets.  Lee was the only player that hit the 7-point mark, picking up 2 goals and 5 assists in three games.

This brings his season totals up to 18 goals and 10 assists in 50 games on Long Island, which ranks him 177th overall in pool scoring.  Lee also ranks 9th in rookie pool scoring and is establishing himself as a name to explore a little bit further, when we go back to the draft in September.

A big debut week for Dale B. and his new prize, as he opened up for a big week and helped him go up the standings, moving up from 11th to 7th.

The Waiver Draft has been good for Brian, as a slow start to his first season in the draft pool may have slowed his season, but he has moved up from 22nd in Week Three, now up to 11th after Week Nineteen.

Brian found himself with the best week after the second Waiver Draft, picking up a pool-best 37 points.  His point total gave him an immediate boost in the standings, going from 16th to 11th, in one of the tightest spots in the standings, where only a few points was enough to move over each team ahead of him.

Brian's expert luck in the Waiver Draft came in the crease, where he had picked up most of his points.  His Week Nine pick-up was Devan Dubnyk, who moved to Minnesota after his activation, while his Week Eighteen pick-up was Cam Talbot, who now leads the Rangers, who took the reins when Henrik Lundqvist was hurt, after the selection was made.  Both goalies finished with 6 points, leading the way.  Valterri Filppula and John Tavares each picked up 4 points, helped the cause as well.  Only two players on his roster finished with zeroes, which is a good start to the third segment.

Looking ahead, Brian is only 4 points out of the top 10 and 40 points out of the money.  If he continues to put together some weeks like this, that number could drastically go down and his team will make the race more interesting.

The Waiver Draft didn't help every team, rather there is always going to be some teams that are still running in the basement.  This week, there were two teams running for the name of Basement Dweller, as Wilton and Wyllie go head-to-head with 13 points.

Out of the 13 points, Wyllie's team had 5 goals, while Wilton barely scraped together 3 goals, making him the title holder for the dubious distinction.

Wilton has been enjoying a good season from Johnny Gaudreau of the Flames, who led the way in the week, picking up 3 points, while three players had a pair of points and four players had a single.  His goaltenders had one start between them and no wins.

His team peaked in Week Twelve, finishing in 6th place, but now, he's down to 16th place, dropping from 13th the week before.

TROPHY TALK

Let's talk races, shall we?  The gap between 1st and 2nd is now up to 74 points, 2nd to 3rd remains at 30 points, while the gap from 3rd to 4th is now only 1 point.  3rd to 5th is now 10 points, 3rd to 6th is now 22 points.  Kristy & Don, Grant S., Wes, Clayton, Cam and Dale C. are your top six, in that order.

What about the race for the Olli?  Wyllie assumed the lead this week, dropping below Allan by a single point, while Ryan shot up the charts with a big week and now sits 6 points clear.

The second Waiver Draft was supposed to help teams that are in the running for the Jordan, but Allan, our glorious leader in this race, didn't really help his cause, picking up a player in the minors out of a protest and now his lead in the race is 21 games and is getting larger every week.

Did you notice the third segment standings on the main page?  Well, since this is the first week, we won't go into much detail, but Brian leads the way.

WINNING EVERY WEEK

It didn't take long for our two teams to resolve their status for Week Nineteen, as Brenda & Seward won on Monday night with Ben Scrivens and then on Tuesday, Kristy & Don won with Pekka Rinne and the imaginary contest continues on to Week Twenty.

Week Twenty does start with some intrigue, as there is a mighty good chance that Brenda & Seward will not be able to make it out of the week alive, since they were already without Henrik Lundqvist last week and for a couple more weeks still and now they have lost Scrivens to a hamstring injury, which makes his status for Week Twenty very questionable.

Kristy & Don are only operating now on one goalie as well, being without Frederik Andersen in Anaheim, but with one healthy goalie, one that plays on the best team in the NHL, they should remain somewhat confident that they can pick up their win and move on.

ROOKIE SCORING

The rookie scoring race is getting interesting, especially since Dale B. went out and picked up a couple more rookies at the Week Eighteen Waiver Draft and he now carries three down the stretch run and is now chasing down the leaders.  This week, his group of freshmen picked up 12 points, more than some teams have had all year from the freshmen.

Dale only trails three teams, Wilton, Mike and Grant S., where one more week of such high scoring would put him in the lead, thanks to having three active rookies.  This could be a short race in the third segment.

LIGHTING THE LAMP

All of the teams that had a living streak kept it alive, although Wilton didn't keep his alive until really late on Sunday, scoring his 3rd goal from Tampa's Nikita Kucherov.

Kristy & Don and Stacey M. are still alive in the 4-goal race, while the other four teams are still alive in the 3-goal race as well.  We were so close to dropping a team, but it seems less likely that we will down the stretch.

CHRIS STEWART VS ERIK COLE

How was the first week in the local side bet?  Stuart's Chris Stewart had an assist in a couple games, while Clayton, who is betting on Erik Cole, saw a goal and an assist for an early lead for a dollar going one way.  Still eight more weeks to go, could the final tally be $9?

ROUND 7 IN THE DRAFT

Pick #	Round	Pool	Player	NHL	POS	Points
158	7	Brenda Farrell	Andrew Ladd	WPG	F	46
155	7	Mike Somerville	Jiri Hudler	CAL	F	45
142	7	Brian Towers	Valtteri Filppula	TAM	F	41
156	7	Benson Greenley	Radim Vrbata	VAN	F	40
161	7	Scott Gilmore	Roman Josi	NAS	D	40
154	7	Wes Moroz	Brandon Saad	CHI	F	39
147	7	Kristy & Don	John Carlson	WAS	D	38
152	7	Grant Saskiw	Tyler Bozak	TOR	F	36
150	7	Dale Bradley	T.J. Brodie	CAL	D	33
145	7	Derek Wyllie	Mats Zuccarello	NYR	F	32
146	7	Clayton Corley	Brad Richards	CHI	F	30
149	7	Leo Macht	Brent Seabrook	CHI	D	27
148	7	Tony Dourado	Jakob Silfverberg	ANA	F	24
153	7	Stacey McDonald	Tomas Hertl	SAN	F	22
143	7	Troy Berkley	Jason Garrison	TAM	D	21
139	7	Stuart Greenley	Mikael Granlund	MIN	F	20
144	7	Ryan Miller	Zdeno Chara	BOS	D	13
151	7	Stacey Campbell	Viktor Fasth	EDM	G	12
160	7	Dale Corley	Ray Emery	PHI	G	8
157	7	Allan Scott	Travis Zajac	NJD	F	8
141	7	Grant Kanwischer	Evgeni Nabokov	TAM	G	7
159	7	Derek Wilton	Chris Stewart	BUF	F	4
140	7	Cam Wagner	Carter Hutton	NAS	G	0

Remarkably, only five players were dropped from the 7th round in the draft and they are all located at the bottom of the ranks.  Two of those players were also picked up again in the later Waiver Draft.  It's a pretty active round and the class of talent in this round is actually quite good.  Everyone seemed to be on their game here, minus a few unlucky teams.

STATISTICALLY SPEAKING

Things are quite good after the Waiver Draft, skater games collected were up, goalie minutes collected are up and points are therefore up.  558 points were picked up in 46 NHL games, as the pool averaged over 12.1 points per scheduled game, numbers we haven't seen since Week Thirteen.

NEWS AND NOTES

Further to the Tyler Seguin injury post from yesterday, Dimitri Kulikov of the Panthers was offered an in-person hearing for supplemental discipline for his submarine hit on the Stars leading scorer. Kulikov reportedly waived the right and will have his hearing today and we'll find out how much time he'll miss, on top of the game against the Blues on Sunday afternoon.

I believe that this is going to be the third incident where a pool player takes out his pool teammate, where Ryan gets dinged twice on this incident.  He has lost Seguin for upwards of six weeks and it will be interesting to see how many Kulikov gets.

The Montreal Canadiens announced on Sunday that veteran defenseman Sergei Gonchar would not be accompanying the team to Detroit to start the week on Monday night.  Gonchar has been dealing with an upper-body injury and we're still awaiting to hear what the timeline will be for his return.  He will be on the list as out day-to-day for right now and his status for Thursday, home to the Panthers, is still questionable.

Looks like this will be a missed game for Wes, who needs to keep all his games, who is fighting for 3rd place.  He'll wait on bated breath on Gonchar's status going forward.

In the loss to the Flames on Saturday night, the Canucks also lost defenseman Alex Edler to an upper-body injury. As of Monday morning, the team has still not released any details on the injury, but they have made a recall, just before they play against the Minnesota Wild on Monday night, suggesting that Edler may not be ready to go.  He'll be on the list as day-to-day, until the Canucks update us all further.

Stacey C. also had a pretty good week last week and he now sits 10 points out of the top 10, down in 14th place.  Another good week for him and he'll be in the mix for a better spot in the standings.

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