Welcome to Fantasy Hockey Life, presented by fan Tracks. Here's Kiss, your
source of information and analysis to help you win your fantasy hockey league. Block
off hot a step hit on staylock blocks. Here's your host, Jesse Sovier
and Victor Nuno Mantasy Hockey Live. I am indeed Jesse Severe joining you,
well, sort of joining you with Victor Nunio VP ring side. He's not
actually here right now, but he is in spirit, and I'll explain in
just a moment. You see, this is the time of year that Victor
and I are on different schedules, and so today we've decided to bring you
a remix, shall we call it, of something that we did last year,
and it was all about salary caps. Last year, at about this
time, we did a three episode run where we talked about how to play
salary caps and how to set them up and then some strategy and valuations.
And what we decided to do this year is to put those out again in
this time when we are not going to be recording. We're really gearing up
right now to do all the team previews which we will start releasing in May.
And so what I've done is I've gone back and I have. I've
edited them down and done some new things with them, and I'm going to
have a little coda to add on. So it's a little bit different from
the way it was presented last year. But it'll be in two episodes this
week and next week. I hope you will enjoy it. A couple things
to mention, because we always mention them in this part of the show are
You can join Discord and that is free. Email us Fantasy hockeylifetgmail dot com
or hit us up on x at Fanhockey Life at Victor Newno. Twelve.
You can join our Patreon. There's all kinds of stuff there. Victor's always
got something cooking in the patreon, and you should if you want to believe.
That's Patreon dot com slash Fantasy Hockey Life. That's the start. Apologies
the breaks between the different parts of the episode. Obviously everything has been re
edited, so they're a little bit more abrupt than one normally would expect from
the production value of the show. Nonetheless, I think you will enjoy this
upcoming discussion on salary. Pap Athlete is about the level redraft. It's easy.
You are doing things on one dimension two dimensions. It is predicting production
for the upcoming year acquiring those players. You're done, You're good. We
are a Dynasty podcast. But whether you're in Keeper, which is junior Fantasy
or Dynasty, you are trying to predict production for players. You're predicting age
and how they are going to age, the trajectory of their career. In
addition to the age, their potential for a context change. Will this guy
get traded in the future. You're trying to basically have to think about how
your player is in the present and in the future. Maybe if you're in
a keeper, you're valuing slightly how their value is going to be with respect
to the rest of the league. But salary Dynasty to me is level three.
You're doing all those things, the production, the age, the trajectory,
the potential for context change with their longevity, their value, and the
manageability of a contract. All right, you need to think about not only
are they good, but are they good for what you're going to acquire them
for the assets you have to put for them in a league, because you
are always going to have to allocate an asset for every player that you have,
and your assets in a cap league are limited. They're not just added
dimensions. They interact with one another. So as we get started with it,
if you're not familiar with KAP leagues, I hope we will sell you.
But Victor is going to talk about some of the basic terms to do
unless you have something else to say about why cap leagues are especially worth doing.
Victor, Yeah, I mentioned most of it in the intro, and
it's next level, as you said. Anyone who if you've been playing Fantasy
for a while, maybe this isn't my twenty team close to real salary cap
a lot of the similar rules of the NHL Super Deep rosters that maybe isn't
the first Fantasy experience you want, But maybe some of you have had success
with Redraft or even with Keeper and Dynasties, and you're looking to level up.
As Jesse said, this would this is the next level to me,
and I love it, Like you said, like three D chess, it's
like you're playing or you're doing next level stuff, and so this is what
we're hoping to bring to you. And yeah, get some terms out of
the way, because there's definitely a lot more terms, a lot more things
to know, a lot more things to think about in cap leagues. It's
not so simple as just guy gets point, I want guy, but it's
a little bit it's a little bit more tricky, so talk about some of
these things. The first thing you have to decide and know about is how
you want to structure. There's a couple of options. There's AAV, which
is annual average value AAV, and these are things that you look at if
you've never looked at cap friendly or what rock have you been hiding under?
But also these are good references for you to look at because it's good to
know just what your favorite teams are, what constraints they have, and also
it'll list these terms. You can look at the cap or the salary of
AAV or also capit and Caphit is the amount paid on the contract divided by
the number of years. So if a player has a fifty million dollar contract
for five years, then their cap hit is going to be consistent. It's
going to be ten million per year. There's going to be no variation on
that. But the annual average value could be different. It could be paid
slightly differently each year. And you hear about this all the time where you
have some players or some team teams who tend to get rid of contracts when
the actual dollar amount is more than the cap hit because they don't want to
actually pay the dollars. And then teams that have lots of money don't care
about that because they'll just go ahead and pay that. You can set up
leagues based on lots of different things caphit, AAV. You could also use
total salary or base salary. I've never really seen those, but a lot
of those things are options. And the thing is that the AAV may vary.
There's a little bit of extra maneuvering with the AAV. Just like in
real life teams can move contracts, so fantasy teams could move contracts based on
I don't want the actual amount of money to go up, but I think
it makes it also a little bit more complicated, unnecessarily. So I like
caphit because the cap hit is just the exact amount paid divided by the number
of years, and so it's consistent that if you have a certain player that
with a cap hit, that's going to stay the same. So if you
like Dylan Markin as an example, I just have to be looking at the
Red Wings page right now. He's coming off a six point one million dollar
cap hit, and he's going to an eight point seven dollars million dollar cap
hit, and that is going to be consistent over the life of that contract.
So you know that if you take on that eight point seven million dollar
contract that he has coming up over the next eight years, then that's going
to stay the same that whole time, and it's not going to go up
and down. So I think that's just a little bit more predictable, it's
a little bit easier. So those are the options. I don't know about
you, Jesse, but I'm definitely a cap hit van. Do you prefer
one versus the other? Yeah, I think that makes a perfect sense in
a way to do it. Amount of contract if you're doing the NHL generated
salaries, and I'm going to get into that a little bit, but I
agree with you there, Victor. The other thing retention salary retentions, and
so you've probably heard about this with players who get traded and a team will
retain some of the contracts, usually to competitive teams that don't have a lot
of salary cap maneuverability. One of the teams that's not in it or rebuilding
will retain money and so you can choose to do this fantasy leagues as well.
You can have and I would definitely recommend having this as an option because
it's a fun thing to do. It increases the number of options of ways
that you can make trades, and so you can retain either a percent or
a certain dollar amount. The NHL rules, it's important to know you cannot
have retentions take up more than fifteen percent of the team's salary cap. So
of all the cap a team has, retentions can't make up more than fifteen
percent of that. And the other thing is that you can't have more than
three retentions per year. So in most of the leagues I plan, we
try to do something similar, and I think that if you don't, you
could be in for some trouble because if you give unlimited number of retentions,
you could end up with someone just getting bogged down with having so much money
tied up in retentions it can't even afford any players, and then they're just
like there's no team to field and they're completely tanking, and that might be
a little bit uncompetitive. And the other thing is that it is an absolutely
massive advantage to have a retained salary player. So this is something that it
helps. It helps make the league a little bit more fun if done right,
and you can get massive value on these retained contracts, and so this
is why I think it's really fun. As an example, in Jessein and
iis league that we co managed, we had Bohorvat on his previous contract retained.
We had Alex Ovechkin at half retained, Patrick Kine at half retained.
Who else? We have Copatar at half retained. So if you think about
this Solovechkin with a pretty high salary, he's worth it because he's still a
good player at nine point five million, But then think about him at nine
four point seven five million. All of a sudden, that value per dollar
is astronomically higher. So you can teams want these retained salaries because it's a
massive advantage to have the value of that player be so much less. And
also the teams that are retaining they can get pretty good value too because they're
taking on this contract. And this is where it gets a little tricky,
because I think sometimes maybe teams don't necessarily know how to value that and they
might undersell the amount of cap hit that they're eating because you generally have to
do and I would recommend that when you do these retentions, you do it
for the life of the contract. So if you're going to retain on a
trade, you do it for the number of years left for a dollar for
a certain dollar amount, no more than fifty percent for the lifetime of the
contract. If you do anything else in that, it gets very confusing.
Oh, just retained for this year but not the following year. That's just
confusing, right, And it's just not The NHL doesn't allow that either,
So trying to mimic the rules, I think the NHL has not figured everything
out obviously, but has some pretty good rules in place to avoid too complicated
a situation. The other thing is that you can trade a player who's already
been retained on but any team that has already retained money, they're on the
hook no matter what that other team does. So as an example, you
could trade a player who has a big contract and retain, and then that
team could trade that retent that player and retain again. But let's say the
last player decides, you know what, I don't want this player. I'm
just going to buy them out or whatever. The other teams that retain,
they're on the hook for that salary no matter what. They can't change it.
So you have to keep that in your rules or be aware of that,
because otherwise, I guess you could say everyone is just off the hook.
But to me, that kind of loses the bite or loses the whole
point of why are we retaining in the first place. The last thing is
the buyouts, and so I just mentioned that there are some leagues that don't
use buyouts at all. So basically it's a salary cap league. But you
can move money amount around however you want, so you can add drop players
whenever, and as long as the salary cap in that specific moment that you
have your team doesn't go over a certain amount, then you're fine. But
if you have let's say, when Nathan McKinnon was injured or whomever, what
maybe OV goes day to day and you say, I just want to add
Tyler Sagan for a couple of days or whatever. Some of these guys are
free agents because they have such huge contracts, or like Jeff Skinner, then
you can add them and if they stop presing, you can just drop them
for free. In some leagues, so that's something that's an option that you
can think about. In my opinion, that's not as interesting because it's basically
the same kind of league with just the added caveat that you might want to
think about the salary, but it doesn't have the same roster building sort of
effect or challenge that you have with a buyout. And I like that better
because you have to build for the future and you have to keep all these
things in mind. And if you have the league like most of the leagues
that I play in now, I did have one league like the previous like
I mentioned, without requiring any buyout, he could just free drop somebody.
And I don't know, I didn't like that. It seemed too easy.
I don't want to say too easy per se, because obviously each league still
has its complexity, and it's not like I won that league every year or
anything like that. But I just like the complexity of having to think more
about there should be some bite to do I add this guy or not.
You should have to think about it. And they have a big contract.
Do I want to be on the hook for the next five, four,
eight years of this guy? You should have to really make that decision,
just like a team does when they sign somebody. When you add somebody,
it's like signing them. Okay, I'm gonna I'm going to keep them on
my team for the next X number of years. And so that's why I
think the buyout is important and that's why I would recommend using it. It
just makes it more interesting and then you can decide on Like the NHL limits
the number of buyouts you can have, I believe is seven, and so
that's what a lot of my leagues have. You can't have more than a
certain number in each year. So because if you just have unlimited number of
buyouts, then it also doesn't really have too much of a bite. The
NHL uses a formula, and so if you want it to be just like
the NHL, you could go on there and you could say, Okay,
I want to buy out this player, what is that going to cost me?
And cap friendly puck Pedia they will do a calculation for you and they'll
tell you how much it costs per year and maybe familiar with this when your
team has done it that to me. We actually thought about using that in
a couple of leagues, but it just got too confusing and so we ended
up going with a simple percent. So initially in some of my leagues we
did twenty five percent, but that was too easy, so we've up to
it to fifty percent, and that seems more reasonable. There should be a
little bit of pain if you add a player and decide you want to drop
them. There should be a little bit of a consequence for that, and
that makes it more of a roster building league and not a streaming league,
which is what we want, at least what I want in a lot of
these leagues. So fifty percent I think is good for the length of the
deal. So if add Jeff Skinner and he's doing well and then he slows
down, you're on the hook for that whole contract. And if you want
to drop him, then you have to buy him out at four point five
million for the next four years. Right. That would be the buyout penalty
for nine million dollar contracts. So that's that's the thing. And then you
have to think about that, like, I don't want to just willy nilly
add guys and then drop them, because if you have a limit number of
buyouts, you want to make sure you have enough of those for when you
really need it. Jesse, Yeah, and what this sums up to Victor.
These are the important concepts because these are features you want to put in.
It's an old and I would attribute it, but I'm guessing that it
would be apocryphal any quote I give to you and attributed to somebody who doesn't
belong to But restraints create creativity. There's a reason that Shakespeare's sonnets are considered
so good, and that's because he had to write them in the weird,
constrained way of a sonnet. These are the restraints you're putting around your lead.
These are the rules that you're putting in place that keep the salary system
interesting. Do they sound complex, sure, but that's because this is the
way the NHL plays. So we want to use some things that are realistic
to real life, but also make sure that they are fun and they allow
for strategies we'll talk about. The Victor already alluded to a lot of the
ways that you can use these to your advantage. But just just GMBM or
George McClelland out in Vegas, people are going to push the rules. You
got to have limits to the way you do salaries. You can't just throw
mark stone on the il all year I'm sorry, Mark, I know you're
really hurt, but sometimes Nikita Kucharav you can just leave Nikita Kucherrov on your
You got to look for the holes and you got to play around them.
And Victor has done a great job introducing some of the basic terms that you're
going to need to know to set up your leak and the way your league
is going to go, how much fun it's going to be, how competitive
going to be, is going to require that savvy decisions have been made.
Victor is very smart in this. You hear about the way he talked with
a group of managers and they designed rules together that made a successful leak.
To me, there's really two basic types of salary leaks. One of them
is fantasy driven salaries. The other is NHL driven salaries. A lot of
what you've heard so far in terms of the stuff that Victor's talking about is
about the NHL driven salaries. And I'm going to give you an example of
one league. In each category of fantasy driven salaries, you can set a
cap and forget it. It is something that happens at the auction bidding and
the numbers that you assigned to people in terms of contracts have nothing to do
with reality. Necessarily, you need to make sure that your cap is amenable
to the decisions people are going to be able to make your league. If
you're using as simple, all contracts go up by X dollars per year,
which is a keeper theory. You get so and so on three dollars in
the first year you picked up Tage Thompson for three dollars in your salary cap.
Next year he goes up to six dollars. Next year he goes up
to nine. That's one of the basic ways that people will do keepers and
contracts to make sure that you don't get a value forever in a fantasy driven
thing. If you're getting contracts in a system that's too permissive, like Victor
talked about, if you let people do things that are too permissive, you're
going to lose the challenge of making mistakes. You got to allow a system
that allows people to make a certain level of mistakes, or you're going to
have teams that don't figure out what they're doing and or screwed very quickly in
the history of the league. On the other hand, if you make things
too easy to get out of, you can encourage reckless behavior and teams just
going all over doing crazy things and benefiting from it in the end because there's
no consequences. So that is some basic concepts, and now we'll talk specifically.
I'm in there's not just one way to do the salary cap. I'm
in three different dynasties right now that have a CAP component, and I'm just
going to talk about them all in how they work just a little bit differently,
and give them as three examples. There's the NHL initiated, Fantasy initiated,
and then there's a hybrid to be honest. The first one is Victor
what Victor and I call our common league, where we co manage a team,
and that has some simplicity to it. Fan tracks will load your salaries,
by the way, that's an advantage of fan tracks is fan tracks will
load the NHL salaries in there. I think, I don't know how much
you have to modify those, Victor, or how much it just comes in
ahead Victor. Yeah, they do a great job. As you might imagine,
it's tricky and guys, salaries get updated now and then, so there
are times whereas commission you might have to go in and change things. But
by and large, I would say ninety five plus percent of the heavy lifting
is done by fan tracks. And then you might have to update something,
and so oftentimes they'll do a big sweep of updates, and if you just
wait, it'll get updated, and there's a button you can push it says
update salaries or refreshed sataries or whatever the term is, and it'll just do
it for you. So this isn't usually a huge deal during the season because
a lot of these don't get changed during the season. Some guys sign here
and there, but it doesn't take effect usually until the next year. But
over the summer and especially in that signing window of August September, there's a
lot of changes that happen. And if you just wait until closer to the
season and refresher salaries, it's fine. But I would say fan tracks pretty
much takes care of all of it, and it's so much easier than trying
to do this yourself. I hope a bunch of people just breathe a sigh
of relief, thinking, ain't no friggin way I'm scouring cap friendly and try
to keep track of everybody's stuff every day. No way, logistical nightmare.
Fantracks will do a lot of that for you and in force those salary caps
that throw up airs if people exceed them. Okay, so simplicity, we're
talking about the pluses to this type of using the real team salaries. It
signings and the narrative around them play a role in your planning. When you
see a horrible contract, when just an abdicator signs something crazy with the Detroit
Red Wings, that has implications to your leak. The NHL news has implications
to your league, the free agency season and all that. It'll flash on
your Twitter screen that is going to impact your league. That is cool.
It's not just manager driven. It's really it links into the NHL news more
than the other way. It's probably actually easier to track. As we said,
the system will generate some salary for you. That actually adds simplicity over
generating your own salaries, which we'll talk about a bit. Probably external records,
you don't have to keep quite as many of them. You can look
up the value, as Victor said, without even opening your league by going
to cat friendly in such things, and as bad of a decision as we
believe, NHL gms sometimes make or at least decisions that pay players beyond their
fantasy value. NHL agents generally do poll players toward being fairly paid, which
can be a check on super teams in the league. If you're playing in
a league where somebody got Tage Thompson for a minimum contract and they're going to
get to ride that out for years and years. Oh yeah, he was
a fantastic value at one point four million these last I think couple of years,
and he's going up not a lot in seven point one four million for
the next while, but that's still probably going to be excellent value compared to
some of these guys that are nine and a half ten whatever million, like
your Mark stonez of the world. Yeah, so it's a value. It's
a value. But what you'll find in it, we'll talk about the salaries
that are entirely based on decisions that managers make. Sometimes there'll be steals that
are just beyond steals, and you will have people who can just run up
the score based on that. If you use real NHL contracts, things at
least somewhat gravitate toward the middle. They'll still be values, they'll still be
overpays. But somebody out there is trying to get these players paid for real,
and that makes your league a little bit more constrained, a little bit
more normal. It incentivizes prospect hunting too. This is another thing I love
about it, because when veterans are more expensive, just like NHL teams,
those pre are players who can produce our goal. We love things that make
prospects more valuable because we love that side of the game. And let's face
it, a lot of times in our dynasty leagues, a lot of those
guys were just coming up and struggling and marginal. They're okay, but they're
not producing the long term, boring veterans. That's frustrating. But now the
guys who are just coming up, Quentin Buyfield has some value in your league
already, and so on and so forth. So I like it because it
benefits with prospects. It also incentivizes creative use of the things like to buy
out the retention. We'll talk more about the use of that. Victor has
already referenced that startup draft is different from what most managers have ever played.
It's a weird thing to be in a startup draft where all real NHL salaries
are involved, because it's going to completely throw the player valuations, and we'll
talk more about how to value the players. Victor's got some good ideas on
that. But you might not see the guys going near the top who you
expect to go near the top of the draft and not going to look like
one you've ever seen, because guys like Tate Thompson are going to be elevated
beyond what they even produce, and other guys who normally would be drafted high,
I don't know. Maybe andre Vasilevski would drop because he's been paid like
crazy in Tampa Bay. So there's going to be different things in the way
you rank internally, and I think that makes it fun. The old super
trade where a star gets traded to a team for picks and prospects, and
it just it's almost vetoable because you're like, oh my gosh, this guy
traded nothing for right now, it's all these picks, it's these guys who
are way far away, and there goes Steven Stampcos to this team, and
what the heck. It's a lot harder to pull that off in a context
where you have a cap and the retentions and things offer some ways to make
that flexible, but it's not as completely wide open as it is in just
a dynasty league minus sides too. Using the NHL generated salaries. The skill
of the league managers is beholden to the whims of the real ANSHL gms.
You might have a player who you love and has been great and is the
core of your team, and then suddenly somebody pays them crazy money, and
now they've gone from one of your biggest assets to one of your biggest deficits.
Your results may vary. You might like that as a feature in your
league, you might hate it. But regardless, should skill be reflected in
predicting who will be on good contracts in the future. Is predicting the mind
of the lowest scale the NHLGM that you think is least in sync with our
fantasy value. Should you be relying on them to predict the future of your
team? Maybe not. Maybe some people don't like that, but it does
put a Even though it is a little bit more of a random thing than
the skill of the manager, it probably isn't a bad thing to introduce a
little randomness from time to time. Having fantasy playable players on horrible contracts stuck
in free agency is a shame to me. This is why you must set
up your cap correctly. You have to have the correct amount in our common
league that we're talking about. Last time, I look, Sergei Bobrovski of
Guinea, Malcolm Jamie, Ben Durydoudi and Jeff Skinner are on waivers. Is
that ideal? I don't think it's ideal to have producing players like that on
waivers. But the truth is the bank for the buck is not there.
The competitive teams are full. They can't afford to take more guys on like
this. These contracts are too long. But them's the breaks. First it
was Carrie Price, but now it's Jamie Binn, who would have been a
very valuable player in fantasy this year, but nobody can afford to take them
into their cap. So again, your results may vary. That might be
good, that might be bad. If you have a deep enough league with
a cap that is set differently, those players are probably on teams. Again,
this is a relatively it's like a twelve team league victor, it's not
as many teams. I'm not critiquing the league at all. It's incredibly fun,
but just be aware that is something that can happen. There's players who
are very productive who might not even be stomachable on a team. Very simple
as the ways to do with salary structure is the NHL salaries. There's still
a serious complexity to the NHL's salary structures. This is still complexity. Yes,
and our league is twelve teams, there's still serious complexity to this.
If you identify an under the radar talent, your payoff is limited. Like
I said before, I said it's good that Taje. Thompson isn't an out
of control value, but maybe you see it the opposite way that you should
get the benefit if you identify a guy like this and you pick him up.
This is the flip side. Another disadvantage. You're gonna have to watch
in a lot of auto play videos on cap friendly. I'm sorry, cap
Friendly, I love you, but stupid AutoPlay videos on that site. You'll
have to deal with what happens when a player is signed to a contract during
or just before a season and throws your team into disarray. You might have
been planning a certain way and then the last minute somebody gets this huge extension
and now you're like, oh shoot, now I got to completely replan.
You can't really play in your offseason necessarily. You have to leave yourself a
lot of flexibility because nhlgms are going to make signings based on their cap sheets,
on yours, and so one other thing. It's not an advantage,
it's not a disadvantage. Just the thing. You'll have to figure out how
and whether free agency will happen because you'll have this off season period where you'll
have expiring contracts. Some guys are going to go on the free agent wire.
In the NHL, managers negotiate with agents, players decide where they're signing.
In your league, You're going to have a system that these guys who
go out in free agency, how are you going to decide? Is it
going to be a draft, is it going to be what is it going
to be to get these players back on teams at the beginning of the season,
because just throwing open free agency is a choice. Victor, I'm going
to talk about the other side, the fantasy initiated salary, But any observations
you want to make just on the setup of an NHL based salary system,
Yeah, personally, I like this better. I do have a league where
we auction and it increases per year, and that's fun, and teams set
the value of players and you have a set amount of money, and so
it's dissociated pretty much completely from the NHL salary cap, and it's a little
bit easier to just follow because you have a certain number of dollars. Let's
say it's two hundred dollars, and you just you bid on the players and
everyone has to fit under your cap, and so it's a little bit easier
to think about because you're just like, Okay, if this guy, if
I want to pay Nikiriti Kutrov seventy dollars, that's a huge chunk of my
cap, and that's close to half thing, and it's easier to keep that
and all the What I like is that the teams in the league have control
over who makes what. On the other hand, I don't like how how
dissociated it is completely from the NHL in reality, because this is the league
that we're all playing in, So it does make sense to me to follow
that. And one of the points I wanted to make that you alluded to
earlier is that I do think there's a skill in kind of predicting who's gonna
get what kind of contract, you know. I think a perfect example is
like Evan Bouchard in Edmonton, whose value this year was a little bit muted
with having Tyson Barry there for part of the year and not having top power
playtime. I even mentioned this on a show or two. I almost feel
like Edmonton is purposefully diminishing his value so that when he gets paid this summer,
he doesn't get paid as much. Because he's a guy. We know
he's got a lot of skill. He is a restricted free agent. He
hasn't really gone gangbusters for most of this ELC that he's been on, partially
I think because of limited opportunity, not because of his own skill, and
when he has had the opportunity, he has shown it. So he's a
perfect guy that I would look at in a cap league and I would say,
I want this guy on my team. I don't think that Edmonton is
going to pay him as much as I think he can be worth in my
league, and I want to take that risk. It is going to be
a risk because you never know, they could walk out and hand him a
seven x seven, seven times seven million dollar contract. I seriously doubt they
would do that, but that's the risk I'd be willing to take based on
what I know about the situation. And so I think there is some value
in kind of being able to predict who's that, who's going to happen,
who that's going to happen with, and the same can happen the other way.
There are guys who maybe get overplayed, over leaned on, and then
and then get paid way too much and then their miniscule value gets diminished even
more. And I think an example of this is maybe like a Ben Scharatt,
who I just don't really think is a very good defenseman, although he
does hit and block a fair amount, but in terms of his play driving
and a lot of his analytics are really awful. And even though four point
seventy five million times four years wasn't like a massive overpaid, but I think
it's he's definitely not the best or even maybe second best or maybe even their
best defensement on that team, and the guys that are on their eocs and
Jake Wallman are doing much doing more for their team. So you can also
look at it the other way and say who's getting paid, Maybe who's gonna
get paid too much? Who's overvalued based on certain statistics, and I think
that's useful, but as you said, Jesse, it also leaves you at
the complete whim of mad men who run these NHL teams. Yeah, tools
like Evolving Hockey predicts salary signings in the off season. That can be a
fun little game. Like you said, this is another game you could do
in the off season. There is a reason to watch free agency. It's
cool. How much DOLLA really costs? The question is detrim minh Krevin nas
and my thoughts, crept site and my stole. We keep that initiated salary.
The other type of league design is the fantasy initiated salary. Victor alluded
to it. I've mentioned it. This is one where you have an opening
auction. I'm not sure if we're supposed to say auction anymore, but it
is a bidding system to bid contracts for players, and it is up to
the free market of the managers in your league who is going to acquire players.
It's highly engaging, incredibly fun to do an auction if you haven't as
long as long as you can get people from multiple content continents together for a
five hour fun fest. And it's a somewhat efficient market where players initially should
have contracts that track with their age and production expectations. In fantasy, if
you have skilled managers, you're going to get that. You're going to have
steals in this type of a system. Like I said, your results are
your mileage may vary on how much you like the idea of somebody who captures
somebody on a very inexpensive contract holds them for a long time on that and
their value can be very variable to different managers. But you can decide how
long of a term people can hold them for. Maybe it's in the other
league that I have I'm referring to now. It's called Red Rock Dynasty.
It's a basketball league, but it's on these same concepts. It's all based
on bidding. At the beginning, you can hold players for a maximum of
four years, plus you can do a up to four year extension. But
the salaries do increase a little bit every year, and so there is a
bit of a challenge. Associated You can't get somebody ultra cheap, but you
can lock in some values for longer terms. You can find rules to make
up the cost of a highly productive player. Maybe you could add some complications
to make sure that or you can allow that savy manager to continue to benefit.
That is up to you. You can make yearly contracts as easy or
as difficult as you want. There's lots of variation when you do this because
you're not beholden to the NHL AAV. If you want salaries to go up
every year in a certain way, you can. That's all up to you
in terms of how you want the dynamic to be more input your league mates
have into how long players will stay on their team at what costs, and
have the choice to overpay compared to the competitors. That is a skill as
well. There's actually more like managing real hockey clubs in the sense that at
least in the sense that the most aggressive suitor employs the player. If you
are the highest bidder, you get to have that player on your team.
You're the person who is most aggressive on them, and that it matters in
a way. It means that you're always rostering the guys you had to be
the most aggressive to get. Every player can also have a part of the
game, but Brovski Drew Dowdy. They won't be on the wire. They'll
be on somebody's team and probably on a somewhat discounted contract because their production is
likely to drop over the back part of their career, disadvantages to the fantasy
initiated salary. I said before, Fantras is going to initiate the real NHL
salaries, and it's a matter of clicking refresh to see how things are right
now. It can get complicated fast and get hard to track what's happening on
all the teams. In a graduated salary, we have a simple system of
all the contracts going up twenty percent each year, and there's one column that
says what year of the contract each guy is in, and you can extrapolate
from there. In my Red Rock Dynasty league, and so that is at
least a somewhat simple system. But if you try to make it too wild,
it can be hard. It can be hard, and I'll get to
that in a minute. There's also a super team risk. I've come to
believe that the runaway juggernaut is a problem in Dynasty. I'm worried about this.
We want dynasty because we want to be able to build a team that
is successful and great over time. The problem is if you have a disparity
and skill that's fun to a point. But if you have one manager who
can stop the other managers into submission, you might lose interest from some of
the players. It's nice to have things that bring people back to the pack,
that are more advanced than just it's somebody's career a player getting older.
If you've got Alexander Ovechkin and Sydney Crosby both as rookies and you were running
away with the league at that time, you can't just wait and say,
what a few years, Crosby and Ovechkin will get old and then that team
will have to come back. No, they didn't get old, they just
lasted and lasted. If you were in a league where somebody had the advantage
of those players for what fifteen years, you're in trouble. The super team
risk gets muted in a salary type situation. I've also, I will warn
you one of the disadvantages to doing this bidding system. Like I said,
you're going to have to find a way to get people bidding together on a
special time. You have to find a time to do that, and you
probably are going to have to find a time every year because as contracts expire.
What we do in Red Rock is we do another session for the guys
who went under free agency and bid on them all over again. So every
year a whole bunch of players are on the wire because a whole lot of
one year contracts have been signed the previous You have to decide how many years
you were going to have a guy in a contract when you sign them,
and then expiring contracts and such become very valuable too. But to me,
the idea of a slow auction, people talk about it, every time I've
seen it, it's been an absolute cluster. It is incredibly difficult to effectively
pull off a slow auction that will reflect what happens in a live auction.
And so I don't particularly like that. I've done slow auctions. I don't
like it. You end up, really I think a live auction is almost
what you need to have, and that is logistically difficult to challenge. Okay,
a couple of other things, and then I will defer back to Victor
for some comments on this part of it. Things that think about, how
are you going to account for draft pick costs in the salary league that's like
this, there's assigned contract values, the fantasy generator and fantasy generated Okay,
are you gonna let a first round pick just be cheap forever until whatever particular
time because there's no NHL salary, So you're not using the NHL salary associated
with Connor McDavid when he's drafted. Are you going to say, if you
got the first pick in the draft, that guy's worth one dollar. No,
that's not gonna work. You're gonna have to figure out a system for
contract values and longevity of how long you can keep them for in the league.
I do Pick one is worth a certain x number of dollars, Picks
two and three slightly less, Picks four through eight slightly less, and so
forth. So you have to fit those guys under the cap, even when
they're in your minors and you have certain costs associated with them because you're gonna
be keeping them for a while, but you can't keep them at minimum contracts
or your league will be insane in about three years. Likewise, how are
you gonna deal with other players coming up from the juniors? Are you gonna
have just the standard contract? If you pick somebody up off the wire who
goes into your minor system, how are you going to deal with that when
they get called up? How are they going to transition to long term team
members in this Red rock league. If you didn't draft them, you can't
sign them to more than a one year contract in an d season ad because
the bidding is going to be like one dollar and what are you doing here?
Instead, they go back in the big auction for the following year.
How long do you want these contracts to last? Like I said, that
is critical. If you let these contracts go for fifteen years or indefinitely,
you allow teams to build a dynasty around one player. However, you allow
that player basically to never join the player pool if they're in contracts. That
could be good or bad. Think about that before you start. Contract leagues
are very high complexity. Differences in manager's skill is going to be amplified.
Some managers are going to solve this math problem before other ones do. Some
of them are going to scale out better than other ones do. Some of
them will have better strategies, and again that's good. We want the successful
managers to win, but be careful. If you create a juggernaut that runs
away with it, it's much more difficult in my mind to rebuild when teams
can not only get players, but get players at a value than it even
is in a plain old dynasty league and a plan old dynasty league. You
have the problem too. Victor thoughts on that and more things you have to
say, Yeah, I hear you about the super team, and I think
that this is the solution in many ways to the super team problem. That
it's really hard to do to stay good in a salary cap league. And
this is why it's been really hard in the NHL for teams to stay good
for so long. It just adds such an extra layer of complexity. And
before the salary cap why we saw so many dynasties, and after you really
don't teams win and then have to retool a little bit. Maybe they're competitive
for several years, but that takes a lot of work. So I really
like that. As Jesse said, I dislike the letting the teams dictate the
salary a little bit and do the auctions just because it has a lot of
disadvantages. It can get really complicated keeping track of what everyone is doing and
who has what, and how much guys are worth. It's like what And
also when you're asking for advice and stuff like that. Some of you have
probably seen this in the discord. It's like, all right, let me
explain to you my league settings, and then this is what this guy's worth,
and this is what that what do I do? And it's it's hard
to wrap your head around it because it's so different, as opposed to if
you use basically similar to NHL rules, then everyone understands a little bit more
what's going on. It's a little bit easier to keep track of. So
I think in many ways, the setting your own price, it can lead
to the issue where some guys that Jesse said, solve that problem, they
can have a massive advantage and if they know it better than anyone the ins
and outs, they can take advantage of everybody else, and that can be
a little bit un fortunate. Whereas if everyone's a little bit more clear and
it's similar to the NHL, it's a little bit easier to keep everything straight.
There are definitely there are definitely pluses and minuses to each and I think
it's just important that very clearly what's going to happen. I almost joined this
league a year ago and they had basically they wanted to start drafting, and
they hadn't really ironed out all the rules they wanted to be a salary league,
and they wanted they wanted certain things, but I said, I really
think we should have the rules clearly outlined. And people were like, nah,
let's just draft. It'll be fine. It'll be based on the NHL.
And I was like, no, I'm out. And then one of
the guys came to me a month later and was like, yeah, people
didn't iron everything out, and now everyone's arguing about this and that and this
other thing, and it's yeah, I figured that would happen because it isn't
clear unless you lay it all out exactly in black and white in a rules
document that everyone can access. There needs to be transparenty. If you want
the league to be fun and competitive, everyone needs to understand the rules from
the beginning. Because you're going to draft your team based on certain expectations.
You can't say let's draft and then decide, you know what, no buyouts.
You're stuck with your team. Like, what if you thought that was
going to be an option and then it isn't. That's totally unfair. Anyways,
just as an example and great points, Jesse, There's a couple other
things to think about when you're setting up your league. Some of the very
basic things is categories versus points. We've had this discussion a lot, and
many of you have preference in redraft keeper, same in dynasty. Do you
want to think about how do you want to think about this? How do
you want your league to be set up? Categories versus points? I think
in many ways categories are a bit easier to track. You see a goal
on TV or on your following, and you're like, oh, goal,
I have that guy. Cool. That adds to my total easy to track
assists, special teams points, whatever hits, blocks, pims. That's a
little bit easier. Goalie stats, saves wins. I'm a big fan of
even strength save percentage. By the way, which tracks allows you to have
as a category. I have that a category in many of my leagues.
I just think it's more fair to the goalie and to the team. So
I like that. But anyways, what I like how easy it is to
follow the categories. The goal is a goal. But I do find it's
a little bit harder to boil down to what is so key in salary cap
leagues, and that is value per dollar. It's all about value per dollar.
It doesn't matter necessarily how much the player costs. It's all about how
much they produce based on how much they're being paid. And in a categories
league where every category is a bit different, you need to know how far
each category, how far each how far the player is from each category,
the average of that league, what the standard deviation is, And that's a
little bit harder to calculate. And then you have to ask yourself the question
and is a hit worth a block? Is a goal worth a win?
That is really hard to answer. It really depends. Each value has its
category, has its own value, and has a relative scarcity, and that
all makes it so much harder to track. I'm going to talk more about
this in part two. I have a way that I do it that I
think works pretty well. It's worked pretty well for me in the leagues that
I've won or been competitive, But I do think that the monitoring and keeping
track of value in the categories leagues is just a little bit harder. And
I think you can get skewed by Oh, this guy scores a lot of
goals, and so therefore he's worth a nine million dollar contract? Is he
because what else does he do? Maybe not? And so that's important to
keep in mind. In a points league, this is a bit easier because
you pick your categories that have points, right, so whatever you want that
to be, you assign. You assign the point value, and you can
you can add in so obviously goals, assist, whatever you want, whins,
saves. But what I love about points leagues too is you can also
assign little point values for fun things like a shutout. A shutout as a
category and a categories league is just insane in my opinion. It doesn't it's
so random and it sways matchups way too hard. Goalie goals you can add.
You'd never have that as a category because it never happens, but it's
a fun little extra or an assist from a goalie you can add that.
You can add hat tricks, rare events, you can add that, and
that makes it fun. But it's also easy to know. You can just
look at how many Fantasy points does a player have per year, how many
Fantasy points do they have per game on average over the course of half a
year, a month, a year, two years, three years, and
you can very easily see and then compare it to their salary. What is
this page? What is this player's value per dollar based on their fantasy points.
It's very easy to look at that and say, Okay, this guy's
worth whatever x amount, and you can just have a spreadsheet and very easily
track all these numbers and you can see who is great value and who is
not great value, and so that's I think a lot easier. It's also
a bit harder to game a category like you can in categories leagues and the
points leagues. It's hard to say I'm just gonna brute force, I'm gonna
win blocks and I'm gonna win hits or whatever, and you can't do that,
and points leaks some things to consider. I like points leagues for this
reason is that you can very easily just decide and figure out what is the
value per dollar of each player, and then just go from there and decide
the relative value of each player. So I'm a fan of that. It's
a little bit easier to track. But then I guess some of the negatives
are assigning relative value to the different points. Is it are those hits worth
a block, or is a shot worth a hit? Or how much more
is a goal worth? In a peripheral category, things are maybe a little
bit more debatable, But I think that's easier to come to an agreement on.
What do you think? Jesse agreed on that this is the eternal struggle,
and points versus cats does hit even a different level of complexity when it's
points versus cats versus dollars. Yeah, it does make it difficult, and
I'm becoming I'm coming around to just by the bye, I'm coming around to
the idea that in fan tracks, if you do a category league, you
should weight goals by two assists, two hits, black shots, one apiece,
and then maybe three categories and goalies or four categories, and goal is
basically double weighted so that you can't have somebody Tom Wilson in their way to
beating Connor McDavid because all the categories are created equal. I don't think they
are, and I don't think power play and special team points are the way
to go. I think you see the effect of a special team's points in
points. Power play deployment equals points, So why are we rewarding We're already
capturing that. So anyway, but that's just a hot take. I'm firing
off into nowhere right now. But yeah, you are right in Victor,
I got cold chills. I was triggered. I almost went into a seizure
when you talked about the idea of people trying to start a league and figure
out the rules on the fly. That is, I agree with you.
You made absolutely the right decision bailing on that league, because I've been in
that before. It's going to end up a horrible experience. Folks, slow
and steady. You need to really think hard about even what the dollar figure
is on the cap total. All right, we're talking about cap league construction
today. You can't just throw a random number up there. You got to
think about how many teams are in this league, how much do real NHL
teams caught. If you're doing a fantasy generator, it don't matter. You
can come up with different things. But if it's NHL generated salaries, you
have to be very careful on the proportion of the size of your roster.
You're going to have more players per team, probably with a higher contract than
real NHL teams do. What should the salary cap be for the whole league
and how should it increase over the years as the NHL salary goes up,
as player salaries go up. You can't just leave it the same forever because
that will be tighter and tighter as time goes on. Anyway, these are
all decisions to make. I love it. Victor never people are so anxious
to draft when you start, because people are so eager. Let's know,
No, a little codea before I get into the commercial announcements that I always
put at the end of the show. There's one thing I did want to
talk about that I've learned in the year since last year. See there's new
material in this show, and that is we started the Diesel four Sport League
last summer. I initiated it. Victor is a part of it in the
hockey side. He has a partner who deals with some of the other sports
that Victor is not quite as into and doing very well. By the way,
and the salary system we used, I really thought about a lot,
especially after recording these episodes, and I'm really proud of it. What we
do is we use real NHL salaries, real NHL term on salaries, but
we do allow buyouts. We have two buyouts a year where for the remainder
of that year you take a fifty percent hit on the salary, and then
in future years you were completely absolved of the player's salary. And then we
have also the ability we do not have contract pretensions. We've eliminated that as
part of the strategy. And let me tell you why we talked earlier about
the retentions, the fact that NHL teams do it. We obviously are looking
to replicate many of the things that are in real hockey because just like everything
else in our fantasy game, we want it to be based somewhat on the
real sport that we enjoy. Well, what I have been trying to do
because we've got eighteen managers, actually it's something in the mid twenties, because
there's lots of teams co managed by people won even by three people in our
league. And again eighteen franchises playing across four sports, and three of the
four sports have contracts or have salaries. I should say our salary cap style
leagues football is not because those football people, they truly are insane when it
comes to salaries. Don't get me started. Nobody even knows how the football
salary cap works. I'm fairly convinced. Well, what we did was I
did not want it to be a situation where we were going to have people
come in not figure out the rules, quickly be buried, quit and then
leave a team that was so horribly screwed that they have they have years of
a bad contract on their books that they can do nothing about, and effectively,
you know, they're destroyed. So and then also the possibility that somebody
would just be able to create a super team by all kinds of contract retentions,
which I think is, as I said before, something that's possible,
so without contract retentions, with the ability to get yourself out of occasionally a
contract mistake. And then the third thing is if you pick up an orphan
team, if you come in, you have a couple of weeks where you
have a complete amnesty to buy out any horrible contracts that you're franchise inherited.
Now I know Victor. I don't want to speak for him because he's not
here, but I will I will put up his straw man here because I
know at the outset didn't think that this was going to be quite as challenging
as some of the salary formats that were discussed earlier. And that's very valid
feedback. If you have an extremely advanced salary league that's going for a long
time and you want to have more and more ways to sort of use things
like the retentions to take up your performance of your teams to a higher level
and find additional ways for your teams to succeed. There is certainly something to
that, and to really put a bite, as Victor said earlier, if
you drop somebody, you're on the hook for a salary for a long time,
just like an NHL team would be in some ways. But the truth
of it is I was very worried, and we have had a couple of
instances. Well, we've had one instance where a manager dropped out of the
league and left quite a bit of damage, and the team that took him
over, I just didn't think it was fair for them not only to come
in and have to inherit a team that was not likely to be successful right
away, but also to kind of be buried for years by the last manager's
mistakes. So I like this. It limits. What the salary does in
this case, is it just eliminates the ability to build a super team,
right, And that's really what it's about. It's actually what we talked about
earlier that above the bidding style leagues and even above the even above the real
NHL salary leagues with the retentions and stuff, you have the possibility of the
super team, but having a solid salary cap based on NHL rules and with
the ability to undo some damage while still retaining to bite. Remember, if
you're holding on your own franchise, that's two buyouts a year. You get
yourself right up against that cap. And the cap has set such that a
lot of people were bumping up against that cap pretty regularly who were playing with
fairly successful teams, and there were still players like Tyler Segan, the aforementioned
who were on the wire. Anyway, it was a pretty good experiment.
If people want to hear more about how that was constructed, I can provide
those details for you. But I wanted to add that on to the end
of this episode because it's something that I've come to come to think that it
was designed in a way that pleased me. It worked out very well.
I know Victor might have a different take on that, but I think he's
learned to enjoy it as well. That poor guy plays in so many leagues
in every format. So now the commercial announcements fan tracks is the place to
play all of your fantasy sports. Yes, you know that you can have
all the different settings that you want. If you're going to play the salary
cap leagues as probably probably the place you need to be doing it, because
yes, you can push a button after we get close to the NHL season.
It might not be set up today, but when we get close to
the NHL season that will input either type of NHL salaries for you. And
there is a contract thing. There was some discussion in the Fantasy Hockey Life
discord this week, which is free, about is there a way to implement
contracts so that you can see on your screen not only what the salary is,
but how many years are left on that contract, And indeed there is.
You can input all of those there's a separate feature. Those are premium
features, right, so you do have to pay to get a league that
does those things. But there's also a free version of Fantasy Hockey on fan
tracks fan tracs. HQ fan tracks has lots of fantasy content. You can
read articles there. Our FHL crew does a great job. Content curator Kevin
Adams, he's going to be kicking into gear because there's a whole lot of
prep for the team previews. Ryan Downey, the Tidy Admiral you've heard him
on this show recently. We're going to let him rest his voice our resident
opera singer, and be ready to roll over those tidy leagues to the following
year. Jeremy v Our lead scout. Scouting reports are popping right now.
Jason's been helping with prospect ranks. Brandon, you've heard him on the show.
Website Guru Scout helping prospect ranks, helping with visualizations. That whole website
is amazing, as far as the FHL player cards. If you would like
to help build all this cool stuff that's going on, hit Victor up in
the discord email or on x You can also listen to some of Victor's stuff
on YouTube. Go check that out as a Fantasy Hockey Life YouTube. You
were brought to you by Dauber Hockey and Dauber Prospects, Victors and editor.
I'm doing a little bit of writing for Prospects. Follow Victor's work primarily and
his other prospect report that he does with Peter Harlan. Be sure to check
out Victor's articles at EP Ringside. He is part of the fantasy team there.
Cam Robinson, Mike Clifford, an all star cast of writers and a
draft seasons just around the corner, Folks. I do a solo show called
Dynasty Sports Life. I talk all the Dynasty sports sometimes multiple at the same
time. This week I found me a guy who does a Dynasty basketball podcast.
I'm so excited I've got him on. We're going to talk about some
of the players who maybe didn't have the seasons we expected this year in Dynasty
Basketball and wondering whether they're going to be able to pick it up for next
year. Follow Victor and myself on x at fan Hockey Life at Victor Newno.
Twelve, Rate and review the podcast, Apple Pod, Spotify, wherever
else you get your pods. Much appreciated when you do those cool kind of
things. Thank you for listening, even though it's a repeat. Folks.
I know you're out there watching the Stanley Cup playoffs. You're sitting there thinking
about just brewing about how those things went for you this year, thinking of
about next year. Always think about next year. That's where you come back
to your fantasy hockey life.