You’re lounging around with your guy friends when, surely enough, the topic of their fantasy sports teams comes up. This topic is one that is always up in the air, as fantasy sports are a major thing for hockey, basketball, football, and just about any sport that comes to mind. My girlfriends and I got fed up with being confused by the fantasy sports world, so we took it upon ourselves to investigate.
Last year, we decided to take part of the hockey fantasy league during playoffs. It was a spontaneous decision, but super fun and helped us to educate ourselves more about the players and team specifics. The winner got all-you–can-eat sushi, so that was an added bonus… annnnnnnd the losers had to give Ezra a little show with a naked mile (unfortunately, I didn’t win). Because we did not all know all the fine details of every player and team, we each chose one of our hockey-obsessed guy friends to help us draft players for our fantasy teams.
This is how it went down:
After discussing with our selected mentor, we made a list of our picks. We chose 9 forwards, 4 defense players, 2 goalies, and one “duster” (a not-so-good player, so you could have a chuckle if they scored a goal). In case you didn’t get your first pick, we also made a list of backups
We began the process by randomly generating a list of our names to figure out in what order we were picking. We decided to go with a “snake style drafting”, which means that for the first round, we went in the regular consecutive order, but for the second round, we inversed the order (i.e. 1-5, 5-1) and it would continue like this until we all had our players picked.
After we had our teams picked, we had to sign up on the fantasy pool app and input our teams. This step isn’t absolutely necessary, but it’s a lot easier to wake up at 7 am (doesn’t sound appealing, but it was like Christmas every morning) and see the score rather than trying to add it up yourself every day.
Each league gets to choose their point system as they would like it. The way we did it was that goals were worth 1 point, and if the goalie’s team won, it was worth 2 points. If the goalie’s team got a shut-out, that was worth 3 points. Assists were worth 1 point.
It really works the way you want it to, You can make whatever rules you want, such as losing points for penalties, but we decided to only gain points.
After the draft, it was as easy as watching the games and cheering for your players, and checking how many points you have gained by the next morning!
A few tips and strategies we found from participating were:
– Choose players from both the East and the West to make sure you’re not left without players in the finals
– Make sure all of your players aren’t from one team
– Also make sure you don’t have too many players from various teams
– The goal is to have the most players by the time of the finals, because there’s a higher chance of getting more points
I hope this helped anyone who was as clueless as I was on this topic. Get a group of your girlfriends together and join the fantasy world this year! Happy playing!