[Cliffsnotes]

Congratulations to our Playoff and Regular Season Champion, The Porkchop Express.

Not only did they win the All Of the Money, they won All of The Games. Yep, that's right, they won every week they played this year.

Putting a bow on this year:

Sharky won the pool of non playoff teams and earns pick #1 next year. OVCH won the pool of First Round Losers, and earns Pick #5. BVA wins the final week of Second Round losers, and earns Pick #9.

The full draft order is as follows:

1. Sharky
2. MmmmBaker
3. MDW
4. Lance
5. OVCH
6. Jenn (formerly OTF)
7. Hodgey
8. Dallas
9. BVA
10. JD
11. Solly
12. CHOP

A shoutout to Solly, who accomplished a couple of firsts, (a) finished ahead of his wife in the final standings, and (b) defeated yours truly in the playoffs.

I will follow up soonish and get the draft board updated, and begin the offseason process.

If you have any thoughts or requests on rule changes, please bring them up in this thread.

EDIT: Draft Board is updated.

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ccEmArLYhsdb_vVbIUTX-MA4Nhb8OH_GRyjxUYrrxgU/edit#gid=16137253

[The JS]

Yay hockey!

1. Please update my name in the draft order. Never a “y”. Never. #TakeWarning

2. You are correct, that was the first time my husband has ever finished ahead of me in fantasy sports. I think it should probably come with an asterisk though.

3. I know I’m the new kid, but can we please consider changing the tiebreaker rules? I honestly don’t care if he wins or loses since he doesn’t give me any of the money, but I think it’s kinda crappy that Solly lost based on home ice advantage. I get winning as much as possible is ideal, but it’s somewhat easier to swallow losing if it’s based on actual player performance. Just my two cents.

[The Jewish Cunthead]

To piggyback on that, the home team shouldn’t win EACH tied category.

Example: You’re up 6-4-3 but because your opponent is the home team, they would flip all three ties and win 7-6. Is that fair? You won more categories that week but lost the matchup.

[Cliffsnotes]

The original reason for the tiebreaker was to give the regular season more meaning than just playoff seeding. In this particular case, I think it worked correctly that the First Place team in the regular season had an advantage over the Seventh Place team in the regular season.

In this particular case, had the category tiebreaker been eliminated, the final score would have been 6-6-1. The current tiebreaker is head to head, so Solly would have lost the Championship under that scoring format too. IF we changed the home ice tiebreaker from a "category tiebreaker" to a "final score" tiebreaker, he would lose that one, too.

BVA brought up a fair point on facebook, that a tiebreaker deciding a 6-6-1 matchup is one thing, but changing the outcome of a 6-4-3 score to a 6-7 loss is a different story. I understand this, but I still like the fact that the regular season means something. If you want to win a playoff game on the road, you need to do it decisively, as home team will generally get the breaks from the referees to the bounces off the boards, etc. Case in point: Check out the First Round Matchup between Hodgey and myself. This is exactly what happened. Hodgey won 6 categories, I won 4, and there were 3 ties. I won because of a higher seed/home ice advantage.

Along the same discussion, we could eliminate "Shutouts" as this is the category that most often ends in a tie.

I just checked the first three weeks of the regular season. There were 15 of 18 matches that had Shutouts end in a tie. There were four other ties in those 18 matches. One each for Goals, Blocks, Hits, and Wins.

Another thing we could do is make the playoffs a two-week matchup. This would give the superior team a better chance to avoid a fluky bad week (or bad day). However, this would move us away from a 22 week regular season, and perhaps down to four playoff teams. In the case of four playoff teams, you really have to earn your way into the playoffs.

Anyways, lets see if we get more people to speak up and we can vote on a rule change as needed.

[DevSop]

It's fantasy hockey, there is no such thing as "home team"

In a 6-6-1 case, if we want to default to "home team=better regular season", I'm for that.

in a 6-4-3 case, the "home team" LOST. This isn't a case where it was a pure tie, the home team lost more categories than they won. Yes, they tied in a few, but they still lost more.

And it wouldn't effect the finals, but it absolutely would have effected the round before that because Hodgey beat you 6-4-3, but lost because of 3 ties.

Eliminating shutouts might help, but in that case, in a 6-5-1 game, the "home team" should still lose. And this only matters in the playoffs. I'm fine with keeping ties to the home team in the regular season. I've checked it off and on and it mostly balances out. You might have a bad stretch where as the home team, there are no ties that go your way and as the away team there are a bunch of ties that go against you, but on the whole it will average out.

Playoffs are an entirely different matter and that "home team/better regular season" should only matter in the case of a true tie.

This years playoffs also had screwy weeks because of the change from the Olympics where 1 regular season week definitely felt like it went on for like 17 days and another felt like it was 11 and that shortened the finals to 5 days basically. I think in a normal season, a week is more than enough time if it's a full week and not the final week, or if we can count the final 2 weeks of the regular season for the finals - that'll work as long as we're not making every playoff week 2 weeks.

Also, on that note...do we need 8 of 12 teams making the playoffs? If we cut that down to 6, it won't change the timing but maybe it'll impact the trade deadline as less teams involved means possibly more trading and building for next year.

[Road Warrior Shark]

My Random thoughts....



Does the regular season record really mean something because you get extra wins are because of a random home ice assignment during a particular week? That's the part of your point that doesn't make sense to me.

a Regular season is about seeding for the post season. Your advantage is playing the lesser seed.

If a referee gives the higher seeded team a better call in the playoffs based on home ice, that's a shitty ref that needs to be fired. This shouldn't affect fantasy wins. We don't draft based on who is more likely to get a call, we're drafting for stats and only stats.

Category Ties should be ties, no matter when or where. If a postseason matchup ties overall, have a system to break said tie.

Absolutely get rid of the shutouts. Penalty minutes seems like a stupid category as well. That doesn't seem like something you should want on your team, but what do I know?

[The Jewish Cunthead]

#SharkyPostsHockey

[Cliffsnotes]

May 9, 2022 11:44:10 GMT -5 DevSop said:

in a 6-4-3 case, the "home team" LOST. This isn't a case where it was a pure tie, the home team lost more categories than they won. Yes, they tied in a few, but they still lost more.

Hodgey won 6 of 13 categories. He won a plurality of the categories, but he did not win the majority of the categories. And so the home field (home ice?) advantage played a deciding role.

If you want to be the man, you have to beat the man. You can't win the title on a disqualification. Gotta Pin or Submit the champ.

At the end of the day, Fantasy hockey is a pretty big crapshoot for a one week playoff at the end of the season. I think something that swings the pendulum slightly to rewarding the better roster is needed. Under the current system, and given what we have to work with, I like the home ice advantage.

I'd be happy to move to a two-week playoff matchup, because I think that an underdog roster would *really* need to earn the victory, but I think there would be too many unintended consequences if we change the regular season and playoff teams too much.

May 9, 2022 11:44:10 GMT -5 DevSop said:

Also, on that note...do we need 8 of 12 teams making the playoffs? If we cut that down to 6, it won't change the timing but maybe it'll impact the trade deadline as less teams involved means possibly more trading and building for next year.

A few things on this...

The 8 team playoff was established well before I joined.

The last few years, the teams in the 5-9 range of the standings weren't really interested in making trades to improve their team. Some of the teams in the 7-9 range were already giving up and looking to next year.

I would love to cut it to a top four, however.... you will see more owners stop paying attention to the league by Thanksgiving. And then the final stretch is decided because two teams are fighting for a playoff spot, and one of them is playing a guy who hasn't adjusted his roster in two months.

In a normal, non-Olympics, non-Covid year, we have had a 22 week regular season, a 3 week playoff season, and ignored the final week of the NHL season. 22 weeks works well, as each team plays the other 11 teams exactly twice.

If we keep 8 playoff teams (or go to 6 playoff teams), we could go to a 19 week regular season, and 3 two-week playoff matches.

Or we could do a 21 week regular season, and 2 two-week playoff matches.

[Cliffsnotes]

May 9, 2022 11:52:09 GMT -5 Road Warrior Shark said:

My Random thoughts....

If a referee gives the higher seeded team a better call in the playoffs based on home ice, that's a shitty ref that needs to be fired.

Well, yes. I've been shouting this since around 1985. But I have given up. The NBA, NHL, and College Football / Basketball / Hockey in particular do not appear to give a fuck about consistency in officiating, or admitting to bad calls existing, or punishing referees for being terrible at their jobs. It usually takes about 10 years of being a terrible official before they do anything.

Nonetheless. There is a reason that "home ice" generally means more than "higher seed" in the playoffs.

[DevSop]

Winning a plurality is still better than winning a minority. Again, if it was 6-6-1, or 5-5-3...fine, home team wins. And I'm not sure there's a better way to fix that other than picking random categories which doesn't really work as well in hockey as it does in baseball where we have that as the tiebreaker in playoffs.

BUT, if you win 6-5-2 or 6-4-3 or any other option where the first number > second number, YOU WIN. I don't see how that's even a discussion. You're not breaking ties by giving the home team each category, you're swinging actual matchups that way.

Keeping teams interested is a crapshoot no matter how we do things. So, to me 6 is better than 8 for playoffs in a 12 team league. That also gives those first two seeds the added better regular season advantage that they only have to win 2 playoff matchups instead of 3 and that is their bonus for a good regular season. And we can get beyond this theory that they deserve yet another advantage that can swing an entire matchup their way.

I don't love 2 week playoffs in general except for the final, but if the option is all 2 week or all 1 week, I'd probably vote for all 2 weeks.


And one final note, the regular season champ is already being rewarded with actual money and, in theory, an easier road to win the final. If you want to re-seed the playoffs after every round to give them that advantage as well, I'd be for that. I am not in favor of swinging matchups to them just because they had the best regular season. If you want to do, let's just forego matchups entirely and do Roto Scoring and you'll see just how quickly people stop paying attention.

[The JS]

For what it’s worth, y’all should pray for Solly’s mental health over the next season. I’m not a stupid person but this shit has me questioning my intellect.

[The Jewish Cunthead]

May 9, 2022 13:22:44 GMT -5 The JS said:

For what it’s worth, y’all should pray for Solly’s mental health over the next season. I’m not a stupid person but this shit has me questioning my intellect.

Marrying me didn’t do that already?

[panicfan68]

My thoughts:

Tie Breakers: I am aligned with Solly, BVA, Sharky... a tied category should remain a tied category. I don't like that the home team gets to claim those categories as a win. Winning more categories than the other team should be the only consideration, regardless of "majority." The tie breaker should only come into play when there is a true tie like this year (6-6-1). I won it this year. 3 or 4 years ago I lost the finals to OVCH in the exact same scenario (we tied 6-6-1), he had the regular season head-to-head tie breaker over me. Them's the breaks.

Playoff Teams: In general I like having more teams involved as theoretically it "should" keep the owners engaged longer. But I agree that doesn't always happen and the 6th-8th seeds often check out early. I'd be good reducing to 6 teams if we put it to a vote, but I think cutting down to 4 teams is a bit too drastic.

Categories: Shutouts are fluky, I'm ok to eliminate them if we agree to. I do like our current offensive stat categories and would prefer to keep them as is (including PIM).

Schedule: Understood that this year was an anomaly, but we should do whatever we can to avoid the last week of the regular season. The finals week was crazy this year with all the studs from the playoff teams sitting out. There was one day where I think I had 6 healthy players resting all at once. That can make a huge difference especially during an already shortened week. A two week final is ok to me but not a huge priority.