Welcome to the 2018/2019 Hockey Draft Pool

We're ready to flip another page on the calendar over and that will finally bring us to October and we all know what that means... hockey season is starting!

Thanks to all that made it out for another great hockey pool draft on Saturday, a third straight year of 25 teams competing for that glorious trophy... and some cash, too.  Don't forget about the cash.  I will be working on the payout for prizes here in the next couple of days, first I want to be sure that the website is rolling for when the season starts on Wednesday and then we'll have the big money announcement shortly there afterwards.

Some new faces joined the pool this year, welcome to Jesse and Chelsea... and a hearty welcome back to John P. and Scott, John returns after a two year absence and Scott missed out on last year's pool, by way our a brief stint out in Ontario.  There were rumours that a few more people would have come to join, but that wasn't to be, but a return to 25 teams is just fine by me.

The mini-games are back and we have two new ones and a returning game this year, all of which should make things a whole lot of fun.

First, the returning game and it will be the rookies taking centre stage again in the pool.  We had 20 rookies taken during the draft and they are spread out over 15 of the 25 teams, four of those teams have multiple rookies, Clayton leading the way with three freshmen (Pettersson, Donato & Cholowski).

Next up on the list is the shootout goals, which is a brand new mini-game and I'm still working on how that will be presented on the website this year, but it is an interesting stat, which has no bearing on the overall scoring, since shootout goals don't count in the player stats, but they still decide wins and losses in the league, so there you go.

Talk about deciding wins and losses, game-winning goals, usually a playoff pool staple, will now be kept track of in the regular season and teams will be hoping for those clutch goals in-game for some mini-game points.  Last year, if this was a mini-game, our pool champion Stuart, would have won it with 52 game winners and that was 7 goals better than his nearest competitor.  I'm sure this will prove to be an interesting game.

Alright, that should do it for the welcome post... I better get back to figuring out how to track the shootout goals for everyone.  Good luck to all and have a fun hockey season!