Week Twenty-Three Newsletter

It's the evening edition of the Newsletter this week, as there has been no sign of an economic downturn in our quoting process at work.  Usually, I'd be able to pound out a quick piece with some work done over the weekend, but that just wasn't the case this time.  This may end up being somewhat abbreviated as well.



How about a little change to the format of the Player of the Week?  Yeah?  Good?

It's pretty easy to tell that this week's winner is Boston's Tuukka Rask, who managed to take top spot with an 8-point week in Week Twenty-Three, alone atop of the pile in weekly scoring.

Rask played in all four games for the Bruins in the week, picking up a record of 3-1-0 with a shutout to earn his 8 points.  This brings his season total up to 64 points this year, good enough for 24th overall in pool scoring, which by our pool membership, would have been good enough to make him the top pick in the 2nd round of the draft.

This year, however, Dale B. took him in the 1st round of the draft, 12th overall, so he hasn't quite put up the numbers that would make him worth his draft position yet, but he would only need 6 points to be in a tie for 12th overall, so that isn't too bad bang for the buck.

Maybe it should come as no surprise that the holder of the Player of the Week was also the Mover & Shaker of the week as well, as Dale B. did pull out a pretty good week out of a mediocre scoring week, in the overall sense.

Dale's team used the 34 points gained in the week to also move up from 9th to 5th, in an increasingly tight middle section of the pool.  Dale's team also now sits 7 points out of 4th place and 18 points out of 3rd place, so there is plenty of room to move for his side in the last four weeks of the season.

Besides Rask, who led his team (and everybody's players) with 8 points, he also received some good help from Detroit's Henrik Zetterberg (6 points), Columbus' Scott Hartnell (5 points) and two more kicked in with 3 points a piece, as well.

Dale's previous peak position this season was 7th place, which he had hit back in Week Nineteen, but he has been hanging around and his players have been doing enough to keep him in the conversation.  This is also his third Mover & Shaker nod this season, picking up mentions in Week Eight and Week Sixteen.

Just when he thought he was stringing enough points to finally distance himself from the absolute bottom of the pool, Ryan's team finds a way to claw back into the Olli bobblehead race, thanks to a dismal 10-point week.

Ryan's position hasn't changed in the last five weeks, stuck in 21st place, but now his team is only 2 points clear of 22nd and 3 points clear of last.  The Olli race has gotten interesting again.

Riley Sheahan of the Red Wings was his only horse this week, picking up 4 of his team's 10 points, as there was no help from his goaltending, 2 points from his defense and 4 points from the rest of his forwards.  Can his team stay out of the absolute basement?

TROPHY TALK

The lead is now down to 74 points, which means that Grant S. needs an average of 19 points more than Kristy & Don to take the crown this year.

Grant's lead on Wes for 2nd place grew in the week, it is now 23 points.  Wes needs 6 points more a week or so to bump himself up a prize bracket.

Finally, for 3rd place, Clayton shaved Wes' lead down to 10 points, 3 more points a week would do the deed, which makes for a simply excellent race to the finish.  Dale B. and Brian are also in the mix, both needing 5 and 6 points more a week for a safe, round number to move into 3rd place.  Hold on to your hats!

We've had a look at the Olli already, so one quick look at the Jordan... yeah, it's still Allan's.  Allan only gained games played on Wes, who nearly has 80 more games than Allan.  There won't be much change there either.

WINNING EVERY WEEK

Kristy & Don are the champs here as well and their team keeps racking up the wins, as their streak continues.

ROOKIE SCORING

Wilton's team made a dent in Dale B.'s rookie dominance of late, with a weekly score of 5-2, the lead is now down to 5 points.  Dale's team did run into some rookie injury troubles, so that hasn't helped much.  Wilton is still running on Johnny Gaudreau's hot streak.

LIGHTING THE LAMP

The current crop of streakers is still alive, even with a low scoring week, like we just had.  Kristy & Don and Stacey M. are still 4-goal weeks and Grant K., Ryan and Stacey C. are 3-goal weeks away.  No change, nothing close to report.

CHRIS STEWART VS ERIK COLE

The race here remains at a 4-point gap, as Erik Cole leads Chris Stewart, 12-8, since the Week Eighteen Waiver Draft.  That's still $4 in Clayton's pocket, from Stuart's coin purse.

ROUND 3 IN THE DRAFT

Pick #	Round	Pool	Player	NHL	POS	Points
68	3	Dale Corley	Jakub Voracek	PHI	F	69
58	3	Dale Bradley	Henrik Zetterberg	DET	F	59
47	3	Stuart Greenley	Joe Thornton	SAN	F	58
60	3	Grant Saskiw	Alex Steen	STL	F	57
52	3	Ryan Miller	Logan Couture	SAN	F	56
49	3	Grant Kanwischer	Zach Parise	MIN	F	53
62	3	Wes Moroz	Jason Spezza	DAL	F	53
59	3	Stacey Campbell	Gabriel Landeskog	COL	F	47
63	3	Mike Somerville	Ryan Nugent-Hopkins	EDM	F	47
57	3	Leo Macht	Jonas Hiller	CAL	G	45
54	3	Clayton Corley	Shea Weber	NAS	D	44
65	3	Allan Scott	Kyle Okposo	NYI	F	44
51	3	Troy Berkley	Cam Ward	CAR	G	38
64	3	Benson Greenley	Alex Pietrangelo	STL	D	38
48	3	Cam Wagner	Craig Anderson	OTT	G	34
53	3	Derek Wyllie	Patrick Sharp	CHI	F	34
56	3	Tony Dourado	Victor Hedman	TAM	D	33
69	3	Scott Gilmore	Oliver Ekman-Larsson	ARI	D	33
61	3	Stacey McDonald	Ondrej Pavelec	WPG	G	30
67	3	Derek Wilton	Jhonas Enroth	DAL	G	30
66	3	Brenda Farrell	Ben Scrivens	EDM	G	27
50	3	Brian Towers	Niklas Backstrom	MIN	G	10

Looking at the bottom of the round standings, there appears to have been a little bit of goaltending panic, trying to make sure that your team picked up a starter before it was too late.  It's hard to argue with the logic, but when you're not going to get top tiered goaltending past the 2nd round, it may be best to just let them go and focus on where you're going to end up with more points.

It's hard to draw the line of where to take some of these goalies, but it is encouraged that you have a good idea of what the teams in front of them are going to do, going into the draft.  Of course, it was hard to predict the situation in both Winnipeg and Minnesota, especially since both teams are playoff bound and neither team has goalies that were expected to carry the load.

STATISTICALLY SPEAKING

This was one disappointing week.  Our worst, as a collective group, in fact.  With 51 NHL games on the schedule this past week, our 23 teams were not able to collect a total of more than 500 points.  For the first time this season, the pool averaged less than 10 points per scheduled game, finishing up with 492 points in total, which made for a 9.65 points per NHL game average.

Games played and minutes played may have been slightly down, but that didn't really make any difference.  The pool teams just didn't really dazzle us at all this past week.  Was Patrick Kane supposed to carry us as well?

NEWS AND NOTES

Carolina decided to sit forward Riley Nash from their game against the Blue Jackets. Nash has found the press box a few times already this season and with some dwindling numbers in the back end of the season, his scratches become less and less of a surprise.  Nash was off to a good start on a pretty poor Hurricanes team, but the second half of the season saw a dramatic drop off and there was just no recovery from it.

Nash was a Waiver Draft pick for Stacey M. this year and her team has only captured 9 points out of 38 games played, so he comes as a pretty fine disappointment at this point.  Nash is a -16 to his counterpart for who he was dropped for in the round, Ottawa's Mika Zibanejad.

The injury problems continue to stack up for the Penguins, as they were without Evgeni Malkin for Sunday's game against the Red Wings and then they lost the services of Patric Hornqvist in the game.  On Monday, the Penguins announced that they expect Malkin to be out of the lineup for upwards of two weeks with his upper-body injury, while Hornqvist, they expect to miss a week from a new undisclosed injury.  That's taking quite a bit out of the Penguins' lineup, so it will be interesting to see how they fare.

Malkin is now removed from Leo's projected games, which will likely remove him from the running for the third segment prize at the end of the year, while Hornqvist gets added to a ridiculous list of injuries that Allan has suffered, keeping him in the race for the Olli bobblehead and cementing his place for the Jordan.

The Rangers are officially saying it is a lower-body injury for veteran forward Martin St. Louis, but reports are suggesting that the speedy forward may have suffered a knee injury in Sunday's win against the Panthers, possibly knocking him out for upwards of two weeks. Of course, as we grow closer and closer to the playoffs, the details of injuries become fewer and further between. This is no surprise in this case.

Well, if Malkin's injury doesn't knock Leo out of the third segment race, compounding it with St. Louis' injury certainly will. Last week, the two players had 4 points combined and Malkin missed the better part of two games. This doesn't bode well for Leo at all.

Link to the Injury/News Page