Well, it's time to take down that Festivus pole and resume normal life-living activities. "Wait, how many more days off do we get? What's this for again? Christmas? Okay, I guess."
The holiday season is upon us and with the NHL schedule finishing off yesterday until Thursday's restart, you can chew on this week's Newsletter a little longer. Hopefully, it's not as dry as your turkey this week, but it very well could be. I better add some gravy to it.
Bobrovsky set a new season-high in points this week, finishing with 12 points in four starts. A shutout against the Golden Knights on Monday, followed by a win against the Devils on Thursday, a win against the Flyers on Saturday and then he capped it off with another shutout against the Devils on Sunday. 4 wins, 2 shutouts for 12 points.
This is the first 12-point week since Week Five of the 2017 season and the 13th week of its kind, since the hockey pool website was setup in the 2007 season. In that 2007 season, back when it was only the selection sheet pool, was the only time we saw a 13-point week, which has been the recorded record. We have never seen a 13-point week in the draft in that long.
For Kristy & Don, this big week has certainly kept their money hopes alive, as they made up some ground this week, thanks to Bobrovsky and company. The duo have been getting some great performances, including the Columbus goalie, who is now up to 16 wins and 36 points in 27 appearances, good enough for 44th overall in hockey pool scoring, 3rd among all goalies.
Boston goalie Jaroslav Halak has probably been the bargain pick of the year, again leading all players on her team this week with 9 points and has been just instrumental in her team's success, earning all kinds of minutes in the Bruins' crease. Halak's teammate David Pastrnak has been no slouch either, finishing the week with 8 points, and Nashville's Roman Josi had a good week as well, finishing with 5 points. Both Nathan MacKinnon of the Avalanche and Carey Price of the Canadiens each had 4 points, rounding out the top performers of her week.
Maybe the most notable statistic for Stacey's week was that her team had five active players on her roster without a point. That's getting the top guys to really carry the load, when you're up in the Mover & Shaker with only nine players scoring for you.
We'll certainly have more on her team's climb in the standings shortly, but what I can say here is that things are going very well for her side the overall scheme of things.
Jesse's team finished with a weekly-low of 16 points in Week Twelve, no tie-breakers necessary this week. It ties the season-high for points in the Basement Dweller nod and it's the highest ranked team at the end of a week with a nod at 13th place. When you're in the top half of the standings, running into a dweller week is very disheartening, because it means you've likely dropped a lot of points between your team and the money sides.
Gabriel Landeskog of the Avalanche led the way for his team with 3 points, but five players didn't register a point in the week, same as our Mover & Shaker, but as you can see, his team leaders were not nearly as productive.
The gap to the money is now 49 points, which isn't at all impossible at this point of the year, especially with one more player swap to go. With only one injury today and a day-to-day one at that, he may not be able to do a whole lot with his team when the next swap is to come around in January.
A team is going to need a solid Mover & Shaker week from the top 10 to crack into this group in the top five, especially since 10th place, Steve's team, is 34 points back of 5th.
Clayton's team finished with 3 points in the week, so Derek's team only made up 1 point on the mini-game race, so the lead now stands at 20 points, 53-33.
Wes' team led the way in the week with 2 goals in the shootout this week, bringing his overall total up to 3 goals this week. A 200% gain, which looks great on paper. Jeremy, Grant, Mike and John P., our mini-game leaders, didn't score goals in the week, but they still lead with 6 goals each.
Stuart's team posted 3 clutch tallies in Week Twelve, which brings his season total to 26 goals and has a 5-tally lead over both Benson and Clayton's team. Mike's team is also still hanging around with 20 tallies and Tony is at 19, so there is still plenty of movement possible in this game.
Stuart's team still leads the pool in penalty minutes, with 257 minutes and that's to be expected. Have you seen those Greenley boys over the holidays? Absolute mayhem.
Between Devan Dubnyk of the Wild and Carter Hutton of the Sabres, Wes could not seem to catch a break in Week Twelve and he saw his pair of goalies fail to win one game in Week Twelve and that means his team has been eliminated from the game. On the plus side, it didn't really cost him any money back, but still, it would have been a good title to have.
We haven't seen an elimination since the Week Eight Newsletter, but with a holiday-shortened week ahead of us, there is a chance that Stacey M., Troy and/or Jeremy could also take a fall and the race could be shortened greatly, well before the All-Star break.
Both Neil and Stuart led the week with a combined +11 rating in the week and Neil's team has been fairly solid in this stat, leading the pool with a total rating of +60 this season. Neil's team has only seen two weeks this season that had a combined rating of less than even. That's a pretty solid effort through the year.
STATISTICALLY SPEAKING
For a week that had 55 NHL games on the schedule, it was an exceptionally disappointing week for scoring. In total, we only managed to collect 631 points, 111 points less than last week, which had four less games in the week. It looks like a lot of players were already on holiday, as we got closer and closer to the break.
We had a pretty good participation rate for our skaters, 17.62 skater games in each of the 55 games this week, but with all the back-to-back games we saw, the pool goalies didn't get nearly all the minutes, which isn't a big surprise.
Next week, there is only 32 games next week, starting on Thursday. The NHL will have to pack them all into four nights, so it will be busy and our goalies might have the same kind of participation.
NEWS AND NOTES
For Clayton's team, Karlsson's lack of dominant offense has been a disappointment so far and tacking on this suspension certainly doesn't curry any favour. Already having missed one game and missing one more isn't too bad, but it adds to a somewhat disappointing year, so far.
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