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HFLeafs WJC Pool, Year 2

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weems said:
That pick should be interesting :laugh:
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Do I go for a backup on one of the big teams and grab a Swiss or Germany/Austria victory, or do I go for a starter on one of the rough teams and hope they a) play the worst team in their division to actually get a victory or b) pull an upset on the elite team(s) in their division. (Not asking for advice, just whats going through my head lol)

f***ing brutal lmao.
 
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Morgs said:
Couldn't believe he was available lol. I double checked my sheet and the whole thread to make sure.
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For me, I just don't see Sweden doing that well, and they haven't done well in any of the other international competitions.

For Grans specifically, I don't think he is getting PP time, which is only going to suck more for his production. He will get a good amount of time playing with Edvinsson, but I don't see Edvinsson doing that well in this tournament. He did not look the best in the U18's and it is only going to get tougher for him.
 
Oh dear. Some dmen on my list going off the board this round, and they were the ones I wanted most, but that was to be expected as we near the finish. I did this last year too. I just feel the way the pool is set, if you don't get a top 5ish dman really early, might as well wait it out. Grab one mid-range guy and then two that are essentially punts. I did that last year with Niemela being my one decent dman, yet he happened to lead my team in points lol.

The way I see it. The top 6 on the big 5 teams are all worth it, if not more of the forwards, then a couple here and there on every other team. So we are already looking at 40ish viable forwards for 60 positions, 67%. Whereas there are maybe 15 viable dmen for 30 spots, 50%. I could very well be talking out of my ass and diminishing how many good dmen there are lol, but I think having the forward depth is where you want to load up, as well as goalie.
 
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SeaOfBlue said:
For me, I just don't see Sweden doing that well, and they haven't done well in any of the other international competitions.

For Grans specifically, I don't think he is getting PP time, which is only going to suck more for his production. He will get a good amount of time playing with Edvinsson, but I don't see Edvinsson doing that well in this tournament. He did not look the best in the U18's and it is only going to get tougher for him.
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Idk man. I think this Sweden team will be fine. 2/~5 best forwards at the tournament. Edvinsson has had a massive season this year in the in the SHL crushing 1st pair minutes. .5 PPG with almost 0 PP time all season. He's so much better than the player he was last season. Wouldn't be surprised at all seeing him pick up solid points 5v5 and playing on the PP with Eklund, Holtz, Olausson, Lysell, etc. Not to mention they have arguably the best goalie in the tournament.

Grans playing top-pair on at worst a team that should easily blow-out two games should result in a few points. Not to mention he's got 8 points in 16 AHL games this season, good for a 16.89 NHLe. The only defenseman ahead of that mark in their respective leagues are (in order): Owen Power, Topi Niemela, Simon Edvinsson, Jake Sanderson, Lukas Cormier, Joel Nystrom, and Luke Hughes. Of those guys only Power, Niemela, Edvinsson, and Grans are assumed as top-pairing guys. Lots of scoring defenseman on Sweden and he's likely to get PP2 minutes (or Nystrom) based on what I've read. I kept passing up on him because if Sweden does suck, I'd be stuck with their top-pair, but getting him at 78 seems insane lol.
 
Maplebeasts said:
There's still good defensemen left? I'm trying to find one and I can't settle on anyone lol.
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I meant Knazko lol. Apparently he's on Slovakia's PP1 over Nemec right now. Was gonna take him over a goalie, but now that the rest of the defenseman most likely suck, I'm gonna be the first one of the three guys left to choose a goalie, is what I meant.
 
Maplebeasts said:
Marco Kasper I guess? Hopefully him and Senna Peters can make a good enough line to beat the Germans and score a goal or two against the Czechs. @Morgs
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I grabbed him in my other pool. He's also potentially got the relegation game vs. most likely the Swiss. Could be a low-key awesome pick imo.
 
Maplebeasts said:
I hope so. With the team he's on I'm not expecting many points against anyone other than those two teams.
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Yeah with him you're almost hoping he puts up massive numbers against the German's and Czech's and Austria manages to lose enough for him to play the Swiss. Glad you're part of the team.

I'm a big fan of his though. He's no Rossi, but I love his game.
 
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Morgs said:
Yeah with him you're almost hoping he puts up massive numbers against the German's and Czech's and Austria manages to lose enough for him to play the Swiss. Glad you're part of the team.

I'm a big fan of his though. He's no Rossi, but I love his game.
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He's great. I'm a lot higher on him than most. The game against the Germans is pretty well going to be him vs. Elias.
 
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Judas Tavares said:
Oh dear. Some dmen on my list going off the board this round, and they were the ones I wanted most, but that was to be expected as we near the finish. I did this last year too. I just feel the way the pool is set, if you don't get a top 5ish dman really early, might as well wait it out. Grab one mid-range guy and then two that are essentially punts. I did that last year with Niemela being my one decent dman, yet he happened to lead my team in points lol.

The way I see it. The top 6 on the big 5 teams are all worth it, if not more of the forwards, then a couple here and there on every other team. So we are already looking at 40ish viable forwards for 60 positions, 67%. Whereas there are maybe 15 viable dmen for 30 spots, 50%. I could very well be talking out of my ass and diminishing how many good dmen there are lol, but I think having the forward depth is where you want to load up, as well as goalie.
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I'm not sure if anyone has an issue talking about this prior to the end of the draft, but here's the way I see it, essentially this season:

In regards to F, 60 need to be taken in the draft. Let's say 12 on each team (even though there is obviously more) with 8 teams being eligible means there are realistically 96 F available. Let's assume 14F from Canada get taken because that happened this year and last year, so that leaves 84F for 46 spots. Pretty close to 55% of the non-Canada guys remaining will be picked. It should be fair to assume that each of the other big-5 teams have at minimum 6 good enough F to be picked. That's an easy 24 F that you can pick and choose from. USA is always deep at F, so you can add 2-4 (lets say 3). Sweden/Russia/Finland will probably have another 1-3 each (lets say 2), so let's assume when you add up all the Big-5 F, you get ~47F that will be drafted. There are also the top-line players from the second tier teams (Slovakia, CR), so lets assume 6 guys from there. We're at 53 guys that should essentially be taken in every pool. That only leaves 7F that are needed to be taken from essentially 45 guys left . You could realistically even assume that normally Germany (Stutzle/Peterka) or even Austria(Rossi) have guys who are top-50 picks. The top-end F win this tournament (from what I've seen), but there's so much depth that you can realistically grab a 1st line F from a team like CZE in the last round. It's what I did in C4G's draft, picking a guy who I believe will be playing top-6 and top-PP with the last pick of the draft even though I didn't have him ranked, hoping I'd grab someone else.

With defenseman though it's a completely different animal. I think you're right in that there are essentially 5 (Power, Niemela, Edvinsson, Sanderson, Shakir) that are guaranteed to be the top-pair/top-PP guys on the team. If you can't grab them, the gap between them and the second tier (Hughes, Jiricek, Nemec, Zellweger, etc) is close, but it's where you could see a massive difference in consistency and opportunity. Sometimes you get a Niemela-like performance, sometimes you get nothing. It's also far less likely a team will play more than 6/7 defenseman, so unlike with F, we're only going to be taking 6 (maybe 7) Canadian defenseman. If we need 30 defenseman though the pool is so, so much smaller. Take 6 from Canada, 4 from each of the other big-5 countries and you have 22 defenseman. That leaves people either finding top-pairing/top-PP guys on the lower scoring 2nd tier teams (Nemec/Jiricek), grabbing a defenseman on the third tier teams, or grabbing a bottom-pair guy on the non-Canada teams. Each of those guys are capable of putting up a point or two, but the gap for defenseman to me goes

Tier 1 (big-5 teams top-4 [preferrably 1st pair]/1st PP) ~5 guys
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Tier 2 (big 5 teams top-4/2nd PP, or 2nd tier team 1st pair/1st PP) ~7 guys
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-
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Tier 3 (big-5 top-4/no PP, any remaining Canadian top-6 defenseman, 2nd tier team 2nd PP) ~14 guys
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-
-
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Tier 4 (big-5 bottom-pair guys [or Canada 7/8], 2nd tier top-4 no PP, top-pair, top-PP 3rd tier teams) ~17 guys.

The issue is that identifying the difference between tier 2 and 3 is almost impossible because of the lack of coverage for any team besides Canada & USA. It's likely even that at the beginning of the draft it's sometimes difficult to see the difference between tier 1 and 2, like in C4G's, Hughes went before I took Sanderson, who is the top-pair and top-PP guy for USA. You also want to stay as far away from tier-4 as possible as it has the least chance of putting up any points of all players besides a non-top5 team starting goalie. Unfortunately in this draft I'm probably going to have to grab a tier-4 guy + I grabbed Finland's backup. Could be a death blow.

In other words, there are approximately 53/60 F that should be taken in every draft (88%), and there are approximately 26/30 for defenseman (87%). I just think it's harder to identify which defenseman make up the 87%, or even the top 40%.

What's funny is I actually ranked 57 forwards and 26 defenseman for this tournament. Almost exactly what the "assumed" numbers dictate.

(sorry for the long post)
 
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Judas Tavares said:
Oh dear. Some dmen on my list going off the board this round, and they were the ones I wanted most, but that was to be expected as we near the finish. I did this last year too. I just feel the way the pool is set, if you don't get a top 5ish dman really early, might as well wait it out. Grab one mid-range guy and then two that are essentially punts. I did that last year with Niemela being my one decent dman, yet he happened to lead my team in points lol.

The way I see it. The top 6 on the big 5 teams are all worth it, if not more of the forwards, then a couple here and there on every other team. So we are already looking at 40ish viable forwards for 60 positions, 67%. Whereas there are maybe 15 viable dmen for 30 spots, 50%. I could very well be talking out of my ass and diminishing how many good dmen there are lol, but I think having the forward depth is where you want to load up, as well as goalie.
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I feel like you should have tried to take a d-man earlier then because I feel the same way about the forwards lol Everybody jumped on goalies early, I figured defensemen would be the same way.

Everybody waiting until their last two-three picks for defensmen basically leaves me with 4 4th line / extra forwards.

anyways:

F - Sami Paivarinta

@stickty111
 
It's also a difficult draft in the sense we have no real idea of line combos/PP units for some countries.

I havent heard one thing about Russia's potential lineup and you got guys like Guenther/Stankoven who innitially looked like they might be top 6 players who would get powerplay time that are possibly now either on the 4th line or even not making the top 12.

Alot of just throwing darts and hoping for the best :laugh:
 
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