Check out the latest article from Dobber at dobberhockey.com

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The Reporters’ shouldn’t join a fantasy league any time soon.

It’s no secret that more often than not, when a player with any semblance of offensive ability gets traded he makes a quick impact on the scoresheet. Usually, this impact fizzles out within a matter of a few games, although in many cases the numbers that he continues to produce is still an improvement on what he was doing in his former city.

We are seeing that now more than any time I can remember, with Alexei Ponikarovsky, Denis Grebeshkov, Teddy Purcell, Peter Mueller, Wojtek Wolski, Scott Walker, Lee Stempniak and Luca Caputi all posting points in their first games with their new team. But two of those cases in particular have caught my attention as they have :
a) a ton of potential and
b) are likely available in most rotisserie leagues and even some keeper leagues.


I remember on Wednesday hearing the news that Jeff Halpern had been traded to Los Angeles and thinking that was a pretty nice depth pickup for the Kings. The talking heads on the various networks spent the next 20 minutes talking about the merits of having Mr. Halpern in the lineup before it was finally disclosed – as an afterthought – that Teddy Purcell went the other way in the deal.

When you’re picking out dark horses in this business, you tend to get very excited over news that gives a six-point player a slim chance at becoming a 75-point player. So even though the odds are small that Purcell pans out, I became quite excited about this deal more than any other. I remember Dave Hodge on TSN going around the table with the other journalists having an informal fantasy hockey discussion about the traded players and which one would get the most points going forward that people would least expect. All I’m thinking is “Teddy Purcell. Teddy Purcell”, but I’m also thinking – he won’t even get a mention.

Sure enough, as Damian Cox, Steve Simmons and Michael Farber bounced around obvious names like Joe Corvo and Wojtek Wolski, I am reminded once again about why the hockey experts would get pummeled pretty badly in a fantasy league.

Here are the facts. Vincent Lecavalier has had a plethora of wingers this season. Often Alex Tanguay is there, and so is Steve Downie. However, nothing has worked consistently the way Martin St. Louis has clicked with Steven Stamkos. It goes without saying that a skilled winger that joins the team will be plunked on Lecavalier’s line for a tryout. There are two possible results from this. One, the player fails and ends up with four or five points in 15 games to go with some healthy scratches. Two, the player succeeds, in which case you see 15 to 17 points in 20 games.

There is probably no grey area, it’s going to be one or the other. If Purcell fails, it should not surprise given the more established names that have tried and fallen short. If he succeeds, however, he is the dark horse that leads all deadline-deal players in scoring. So far he has three points in two games and has indeed been playing with Lecavalier and Ryan Malone. Looking at that, the odds of success just inched upwards from “slim” to “not too bad”…

The other case that made my ears perk up was Peter Mueller to Colorado. Here is a player who I have been notoriously high on in terms of his upside, and yet he has regressed since his concussion during the 2008-09 campaign. It’s a recipe for doom – you take one slumping player, throw in a new coach who wasn’t around for the concussion that caused the slump, add several visits to the press box and stir thoroughly for 60 games. Voila! You have waiver fodder.

Now in Colorado, Mueller has left his post-concussion woes behind him and is flourishing under a coach who seems to take young players and make them NHL stars three years before their time. How Joe Sacco does it, I’ll never know. But he’s saved some of that pixie dust that he sprinkled on Chris Stewart, T.J. Galiardi, Matt Duchene, Ryan O’Reilly, Brandon Yip and Ryan Wilson and he dropped it over Mueller’s head. Mueller has four points in three games with his new team and is clicking nicely with Duchene.

The outlook for Mr. Mueller has gone from dismal to very promising in an awful hurry and I think he’ll be a 60-point player next campaign. Pretty bold, considering we’ve only seen three games. But if the Avs can do next season what they did this one, and not regress as a team, than Mueller will absolutely be a big part of that.

This is the seventh and final installment in Armchair Pool's seven part series on how to manage a hockey pool. For a summary of the entire series, see the blog post entitled "How to organize a hockey pool. A seven part series".

So your pool is almost over and you are currently out of the prize money. You go through the motions each night. You check your scores, do some optimistic math, but deep down you know that a 60 point gap can not be closed in 3 weeks.

Your team may be done, but don't let your sour attitude bring down the pool. Poolies return to pools that are fun, so if you want your friends to sign up again next year, buck up and finish your pool in style.

Here is a checklist that will keep all of your poolies happy right to the end.

1. Update your trophy
Don't have a trophy? Well get one! You don't have to break the bank. Glue a hockey puck and a Chris Pronger bobblehead to a traffic cone and name your trophy "The Pylon". Or stick a Todd Bertuzzi hockey card on a piece of driftwood and name it "The Floater". You get the idea. Then just make sure there is some way of attaching poolies names and winning year to the trophy and present it at the end of the year.

2. Hand out the prize money
Bragging rights and the trophy are the most important prize. However, the prize money is a close second. So make sure you hand out the appropriate prize money in a timely fashion. No one likes the guy who never gets around to paying people back. Likewise, a pool administrator who takes all summer to hand out the prize money is not popular. Martin - I don't want to hear it. The cheque's in the mail buddy.

3. Have "special" prizes
Not everyone can win, but a lot of people deserve a prize. You could give out an old doorknob to the, well, the doorknob who made the worst pick of the draft. We had someone take Ziggy Pallfy two years after he retired. He deserved the doorknob award. You could have an award for the funniest team name, the best point total in one night, the team with the most injuries, the list is endless.

4. Get together
Let's face it, hockey drafts are about drinking beer and pizza. So what better way to send off another successful pool than with beer and pizza. Get your poolies together at a pub or your favorite rec room for "Awards night". Hand out the prizes, watch some hockey and make plans for the next pool.

The Games are over. The tournament is over. And our Olympic Pools are over. Thanks to everyone who took part and helped make it a success. We appreciate the support and all of the feedback.

We had a lot of complaints about our "create team" process and we are currently in the process of fixing the issue. Come playoff time you will no longer be required to enter an email address to create a team in your pool. So come back in April and check it out.

Thanks to dobberhockey.com for running and promoting the Dobber Olympic Pool. There were over 2300 participants and in the end "thenuts" took first prize and walked off with a signed Steve Yzerman Team Canada jersey. Very cool. Congratulations also to "Ezzieking" who won 4th place and will receive free hockey pools at Armchair Pools until the 2014 games in Sochi. That's 4 years of free pools!

If you ran a box pool, check out this file. It lists all the boxes with points for all players so you can check out where you went wrong.

But don't worry if your pool performance was not that good. According to Ron Wilson, you can have the best team, but still not win the gold. Of course he is refering to the growing controversy surrounding the overtime scoring in the gold medal game. Wilson is upset that Team USA's score for artistic impression was completely ignored when totaling the game's final score. For some reason, the judges only considered Crosby's overtime goal and Team Canada walked away with the gold medal.

Anyway, it's now back to the grind. So good luck in the stretch drive of your regular season pools and we look forward to seeing you for the playoffs.

Lots of people have been asking so here's the answer.

When two teams are tied, our standings show them in places 1,2. However, there is no reason why one is #1 and the other is #2. They are truly tied and should probably be listed as 1,1. This is something we will be looking at for a future enhancement.

We have no official tiebreaker built into the pool. It is up to the pool administrator to decide on any tiebreaking rules. I have seen some pools use goals, followed by game-winning goals as the tiebreaker and I think this is a good way, but it's really up to you. You can double-click on any Olympic player in the pool standings to see their detailed statistics. You can also view player stats at http://www.iihf.com/channels10/olympics-2010/statistics.html.

If you have any questions, please post here as I am sure others will be interested in the thread.

The last game has been loaded. In case anyone missed it, Sidney Crosby was credited with the game winning goal. And no weird IIHF scoring rule was involved this time.

I hope you did better in your pool than I did in mine. My famous quote from after the draft ... "Everyone took the Canadian players too early."

Apparently, I was wrong.

If someone told me that with one game to go, Pavol Demitra would be winning the Olympic scoring race, I would have told them they were crazy.

However, this is little consolation for Demitra as the Slovaks came so close in the dying seconds, but again fell short and Finland took the bronze.

Note that I have marked both Finland and Slovakia as "eliminated" in the pool. Hard to classify the bronze medal winner as "eliminated", but it will make the Games Remaining column look more realistic. Not that it really matters - one game to go and if you picked all Russians, you aren't looking at the pool anymore anyway .... right Greg.

The semi-final games from Feb 26th have been loaded.

Only the medal games left. Both the gold medal and bronze medal game will count.

This means that if you are like me and have Mikko Koivu and Andrej Meszaros and are 11 points out of first, you still have a chance ....

Sweden is gone. Russia is gone. The Czech Republic is gone.

Games are loaded for the 24th. Check your teams and see what players you lost during the quarterfinals.

All games from Feb 23 have been loaded.

I hope you didn't pick the darkhorse teams as we're down to the expected 8. Check the "E" (for eliminated) column to see how many players you lost last night

The Canada - Russia game tomorrow should put a few poolies out of their misery.

Games from Feb 21st are now in the system.

Read 'em and weep.

All games will be included in the scoring for the Olympic pools. This includes the round-robin, the qualifying round, quarter finals, semi finals and medal games.

Games from Feb 20 have all been loaded.

Yet another quirky international scoring rule.

Patrick Elias scored in the dying seconds of the Czech Republic's Feb 19th game against Latvia. He scored into an empty net while the Czech's were shorthanded. NHL.com reports this as a EN-SH goal. Empty net, shorthanded. Makes sense to me.

However, the IIHF has not counted this goal as a short handed goal. They mark it as an ENG (empty net goal) in their boxscore and show Elias as having 0 shorthanded goals in the player statistics for the Czech Republic.

I assume this means that the IIHF does not count shorthanded goals if they are scored into an empty net - but I have not been able to find anything to confirm or disprove this theory. In the meantime, our system will match the IIHF statistics and not count this goal as shorthanded.

So if you have Elias on your team, and your pool awards points for shorthanded goals, you have something to gripe about.

If anyone has any info on EN-SH's in international play, feel free to post.

All of the games from Feb 19th have been loaded.

I am finding that the box scores from www.NHL.com and vancouver2010.com are very slow to make scoring corrections. So if you are using these as a source and you find a stat error, please check the official IIHF stats here before sending us an email.

All of the games from Feb 19th have been loaded. Nothing exceptional to report except that Finland went 4-for-5 on their power play and they are making Sweden look like the underdog for Sunday's game.