Week Eighteen Waiver Draft (Jan 28)

The spirit of the PIM pool is alive and well with Wes' team, as he has written off the regular season and decided to goon it right up.  Wes did indeed swap out Panthers forward Radim Vrbata, only to take the best goon available, another Panthers forward, Michael Haley.  Wes will go into Week Eighteen on Tuesday night with an 18-minute lead over Brenda & Seward and looks to expand on it, when players go live on Monday, February 5th.

Neil was awfully tired of seeing defenseman Dennis Seidenberg in the healthy scratch column, obviously, so he opted to drop the Islanders defender for a Lightning blueliner, Dan Girardi, trying to ride the coat tails of a pretty potent offense, even if Girardi is more of a shot-blocker.  Girardi does have 12 points in 47 games, so it isn't a terrible idea.

Troy did well to go off the board and look for those players that were injured earlier in the year, only to come back under the radar.  He scooped up Nashville defenseman Ryan Ellis, who has only played in nine games this year, but has already picked up 5 points, hence the reason why he wasn't on the top 200 player available list.  A very solid move, dropping Adam Pelech of the Islanders to scoop him up.

Mike went the route through San Jose to help improve his hockey pool team in the early days of this Waiver Draft, dropping an ill-performing Nick Bonino in Nashville and adding forward Kevin Labanc of the Sharks, who has been doing quite well, emerging virtually out of nowhere.  Labanc's scoring rate has been impressive this year, 0.6 points per game, given that most of us probably haven't heard of him yet.

With the constant carousel of defensemen in and out of the Blackhawks lineup, Brian has had enough and he dropped Connor Murphy with his first move of the second swap, opting to add a stable body in the Dallas Stars lineup, Dan Hamhuis.  Hamhuis isn't quite the point-getter that he used to be, but he has played in most games for the Stars and that's certainly a good start.

It appears that Cam has lost interest in the pool, opting to pass in the Waiver Draft to work on things in real life.  I mean, who wants to skip out on fantasy sports to deal with real life, right?  More players for us then, I suppose!

Long Island sophomore forward Anthony Beauvillier has been playing on one of the top two lines for the Islanders and he's been cashing in over the last few weeks, as his team has been starting to heat up of late.  This appears to be a pretty shrewd pickup for Chris, who may or may not have been looking for a rookie instead, to play in the non-existent rookie rookie pool, especially since he dropped Los Angeles rookie Adrian Kempe to pick him up.

Jeremy made a late night selection, opting for Red Wings forward Andreas Athanasiou, who was surprisingly not taken in the Week Nine Waiver Draft (if you ask me!), dumping Coyotes forward Tobias Rieder, who has disappointed him greatly.  Jeremy figures that this move will be what sparks his team to make up the 46 points to the money in the last segment of the season.

Finally, Derek B. had his pick in for a while, waiting on Jeremy's late night swap, and he did it with the smooth confidence of not knowing who his pick was and he figured that's what made it into a brilliant pick that didn't need any fixing later.  Derek dropped out injured Islanders defenseman Calvin de Haan and picked up Golden Knights defenseman Brad Hunt to fill the void.  Hunt has a pretty good scoring rate, when he's in the Vegas lineup, but how many games will he play?

Now, we move onto Dale C.'s pick and we'll probably sort through a few more selections here on All-Star Sunday, I have the feeling that it will move quite well and we might even be done the opening round before Week Eighteen even begins.  What a concept!