Welcome to Fantasy Hockey Life, presented by Fan Tracks. Here's Kiss Books,
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 Solviera and Victor Nuno Fantasy Hockey Life. Welcome back once again. This
is Jesse Severe, joined in spirit though not in voice by Victor Nuno.
Because as we did last week playing the Hits, this week, Victor and
I are deep in our bunkers preparing for the thirty two team previews. I
think I think we might record half of them in the month of May.
It's going to be flat out nuts what we're going to be doing here in
the coming weeks, which means right now we are rerunning a series in probably
the low time of the year for fantasy dynasty fantasy hockey purposes that deals with
salary cap leagues. Victor and I are in a number of salary cap leagues
I am I've started since we recorded this. These episodes were from last year
a four sport league, three sports of which have a salary component called the
Diesel, as a part of my other podcast, Dynasty Sports Life, and
we thought that these insights are pretty well evergreen, and so I've created something
of a remix. This is kind of a slimmed down version of what we
created last year, but it's Victor and I. The first episode was really
about the basics of salary cap leagues, how to design a salary cap league,
the types of choices you should make when you do it. This episode
is more about the strategy of playing in a salary cap league in the kinds
of things. And hopefully you will enjoy this even if you heard it the
first time. These are helpful reminders. We don't have all the answers,
but maybe these will engage you with the questions. Remember you can talk salarycaps
or everything else at our discord, Fantasy Hockey Life Discord. Just contact us
Fantasy Hockeylife at gmail dot com, or hit Victor or myself up on x
at. Fanhockey Life is me at Victor Nuno twelve is Victor. We also
have a Patreon Patreon dot com fantasy slash Fantasy Hockey Life. We got a
website Fantasy Hockeylife dot com. There are all kinds of cool things that you
can here described various points. I don't know them off the top of my
head. But join in and you will find cool things there. All right,
enough of the introductory talk. Let's get to salary talking. Let you
tell people about the about the startup tract. Definitely one of the most fun
parts the setup draft. A lot of people this is like the best part
and it's fun. But also you could totally screw this up, so you
want to do it right. You don't want to you don't want to regret
it later, and nobody is. Nobody enjoys it when somebody is all,
I'm bailing, and you can give some whatever reason, but the real reason
is that you messed up your draft and now your team sucks, and you
don't want to do that to your league. You don't want to do that
to yourself. So you really have to figure out how you're going to assess
players. And in salary cap leagues, it's been said a million times,
but it's true. It is all about value per dollar. Whether it's points
or categories, it's value per dollar. It doesn't matter how much production the
player has, it's relative to how much they cost against your cap. So
in the end, yes, you do need production, but you have to
keep in mind that you're constrained by the cap, and so you can't just
have wasteful production that is costing you way too much in a points league.
So you'll have to calculate this, and it's pretty easy. You can take
their points from the previous season projected points. I love Fantasy hockey geek.
I've used it for years. It gives you projected you can have it from
in the offseason. You can have it based on the previous year, the
previous couple of years, whatever you want, and then you divide that projected
production by the cappit if you using cappit or av whatever. So it's very
easy to get that value per dollar. It might give you some really weird
number because you're dividing by a small smallish number by a very large number where
you can just multiplay it by a thousand or ten thousand or a million whatever,
And then it gives you a nice, easy to reference integer and you
can just look at the relative value of each player, and that makes it
clean. It makes it easy. It's not just looking at how many Fantasy
points that player has, but you're dividing it by a very easy number to
look at. And then now it normalizes incentzes it for everybody, and you
can much more easily compare apples to apples in a categories league. This is
a bit trickier, but I'll tell you what I do, and I feel
like this has really helped me because before I found it really difficult. As
I was saying, how do you in the previous episode, how do you
compare someone's hit some blocks to someone's shots and special teams points. It's a
little bit it's a little bit tricky, but what I do is I use
Fantasy Hockey Geek, which gives you a relative value score. They call it
the Fantasy Hockey or FGV or something like that, doesn't matter. It gives
you the relative value and then you can divide that by the dollar amount that
what that value is on Fantasy Hockey Gek is basically all of that player's basically
average standard deviation from the average and each category added up. And so the
higher the number, the better. The farther they are from they are from
average in each relative category. So if you have somebody who's Fantasy Hockey Geek
value is eighty and another player is forty, that's a massive increase. But
it's also a little bit hard because it isn't. It doesn't separate players sometimes
enough. It depends on your league and how many stats you have, because
for some leagues it might separate you very well and others it might not.
So I go a step further and I use a calculation that I use to
what I think is better better give the relative scarcity and value for each stat
that I just call the multiplier. So what I do is basically take that
value and help and I multiply it by a decimal that adds up to one,
And basically that's giving a little bit more value to those things that I
think are scarce, like special teams. Points are harder to acquire than hits.
They're not as many players that get them, they don't happen as frequently,
So that's something that I would prioritize. Same I would say with goals,
right, a little bit harder to get than even assists, right,
And then players who shoot a lot, it's a little bit harder to get
those players who shoot a lot as supposed to those who maybe hit a lot
or block a lot. So you can assign this multiplier and it helps you
get a little bit more granular with how much you're separating each player by so
that I think can help. So once you do any of those things,
there's lots of different ways that you can assign value, but you need to
boil it down to value per dollar, and then when you get to that
point, you need to hide the player's name and just look at the worth
per dollar, because sometimes we can get very carried away with, oh,
I want this player on my team. He's very good, whether he's fun
to watch or whether he's exciting or whatever, or whether in your other leagues
he's a strong producer. And that may be the case, but if the
cost is just too much, then you have to be very careful of that.
You got to decide who the best players are. Also, you can't
miss out on stars. But would you pass on Connor McDavid just because the
cap hit and go for say like an Andre Kuzmenko instead. Probably not in
later rounds you might, I think in general, in the first few rounds
you need to get some of those stars, and the stars that are on
decent contracts are going to be the best value. But you have to have
some of those. But you also can't have too many of those stars take
up too much of your cap and Also, stars that are on elcs are
great, and a lot of people will talk about how, oh, yeah,
you need all these guys on elcs, and you do to some extent,
But you also have to remember that the stars that are on un two
level contracts elc's, they're going to get paid pretty soon. And if they're
already producing like Gangbusters on their ELC, they're going to be getting paid a
ton on their actual contracts, So you have to be careful of that.
Some of the recent examples of really good contracts or guys like Nathan McKinnon,
David Pasternak, they were the darlings of these cap leagues for so long because
you're getting amazing production at very reasonable cost. Crosby is another one who has
had a reasonable contract for a very long time. In fact, all the
Boston guys had really good contracts in their prime, right You had your Posturenox,
your Marsians, your Bergeron. They all had really good contracts. Now
Pasta is getting paid, So those are all things to think about. One
of the best examples right now is Ryan NuGen Hopkins RNH, who has a
contract of five point one two five million for six more seasons. He's a
star in the league, and he's getting paid reasonable and for as long as
that, as long as he's on that top power play. He doesn't always
play it with the top stars in that league, but he's he's out there
for the top power play and he's putting up tons of power play points,
which is often really hard to get in one hundred points. Over one hundred
points not too shabby. And even if you hadn't predicted that, you just
had to know that with the power play time, he's getting a lot of
good production and that contract is reasonable five million, and even if he's a
little bit older, not such a huge risk. And I think the other
thing is cost control is huge. But you don't, like I said,
with the ELC, like that value per dollar of guys that are on their
ELCS are incredible, but also not gonna last forever. Just think about a
couple of years ago when Caprisov was winning the call Their Trophy and putting up
point per game season making like nine hundred and twenty five thousand. That was
incredible, But you knew he was going to get paid, and you knew
that was going to go up a lot, and it did, and so
you had to be prepared for that. Don't just assume that he's gonna stay
there forever. So the cost controlled assets, the ones that are onlike reason
contracts for five six years between four and six million, those are key.
And as an example of maybe what not to do, is that if you
just went by name value and you had Austin Matthews, Mitch Marner or Timmy
Penaer and McDavid Eric Carlson all on your team, that would be an amazing
team. Right. But in a cap league, that's over fifty eight million
against your cap. And let's say, for the simplicity of math, that
you have one hundred million dollars cap. That's five players taking up fifty eight
percent of your cap. If you have a twenty man roster, that means
you have forty two million to pay the other guys, the other fifteen guys.
I know that was a lot of numbers, but that's an average of
two point eight million for the other fifteen guys on your roster. Go ahead
and look at cap Friendly and puck PDA and see how many good players you
can get for two point eight million. There are not a lot. There
are not a lot. I just have Minnesota's page open right now, you
could get a Gustaf night Quist or an Oscar Sumquist for two point eight million.
Is that what you want to fill out your roster? Is that going
to make you competitive? Because oftentimes it isn't just the frosting on the cake
that you need all the other stuff too. You need the actual the eggs
and flour and all that to keep the hold it together. You need the
meat and potatoes guys to give you the other stats as well and to give
you that production. So you have to be careful that your stars don't take
up too much of your cap. And those guys I mentioned Matthews, Marner
Paner, and McDavid Carlson are not necessarily equal, right because Matthews, with
the goals and the shots and even some of the blocks that he put in
this year, was pretty not terrible value based on his contract. But a
guy like Paneren, who just gives you assists and doesn't shoot and doesn't block
and doesn't do other things, his value per dollar is pretty terrible. McDavid
and Carlson are both amazing, and we could have a reasonable debate about whether
they're worth it value per dollar. I think in a lot of leagues they
may actually not be just based on how expensive they are, But if you
can get other guys on reasonable contracts, then it's not so bad. Then
if you can be smart and get other guys at value, then it can
be okay to have some of those top stars because in the end, production
is production, and so I would say, and maybe you have a different
take on this, Jesse, but I would say, getting maybe two to
three of those guys that are really good no matter what the cost is okay
as long as you can be really smart and strategic about other guys on good
trunk contracts. But you can't have more than that because then it just becomes
too difficult. As I mentioned in my example, two point eight million dollar
guys, and then if you get one guy that's six or seven million,
now you're down two and like just over two million, two point two two
point three million for the rest of the guys, and that's just there's no
way, there's no way to build a competitive team with that kind of constraint.
So the other thing is the fantasy driven versus NHL driven salaries. The
principles don't really change, but you're working with different data. As Jesse said,
in the fantasy driven leagues, you have some influence over the salaries,
but that can be harder to keep it all straight. So you just have
to go with, Okay, what is the price set by the league for
this guy, and is that a value per dollar? Is still good and
it can get inflated in weird ways, but as long as you track it
and think about it that way, it's okay. It's okay. But I
do think that can be harder to keep it all straight because then you're like,
Okay, in this league, he's worth this much and the production and
so as long as you have a calculation to keep it all straight, you
just have to manually input all those salaries and then use that for your calculation.
But other than that, all the principles still apply. You don't want
too many guys that are too expensive based on the value per dollar, and
you want those guys that are value. Maybe somebody doesn't have the name value
but is really incredible based on their actual production, and so that's the kind
of guy you want. Doesn't hie the name, and you get your grid
value. Just think about someone like Andrew maiji Pani last year, who had
a ton of goals and wasn't getting paid that much? Okay, someone like
that is okay, it doesn't matter what the name is. As long as
they're producing, then great. But what do you think, Jesse, Yeah,
for sure, I'm going to get to some of these concepts from a
different direction in the second half of this episode. But I think this idea
of generating basically dollar per you know, a dollar per point you know is
ultimately what you're trying to determine in terms of the value. So using evaluation
system, covering up the names, divide contract by dollar, and you are
going to have a good start to this. What I would say is there
is an artificial limit on NHL salaries because of the NHL salary cap and I
think there are maximum salaries in the NHL, right, So Connor McDavid has
a capit of twelve point five million dollars and our Timmy penherans a million less
than that. Then you just start to go gradually down the ten million,
the nine million, all that type of stuff. I think McDavid, if
it was a totally free market, would be getting a lot more given what
he could do. There's an artificial limit up there, and what that means
is that some of the guys at the top are going to be values for
that. I bet when you divideed out you were going to see that Connor
McDavid and Austin Matthews are value for the dollar, but John Tavares and our
Timmy Peneren are not for the stats they are going to give you for fantasy.
So you're right on point, Victor, in terms of what is going
to create value in here. Whether you use Fantasy Hockey Geek, which I
believe is our colleague in the Daber Hockey universe, the dabber verse, that
is a good resource to use. I of course I always love to talk
about my homebrew projections in valuations. But whatever you're going to do there,
that is a great methodology that you're suggesting their, Victor, I got some
thoughts on this idea of the roster construction you're figuring out how to do your
draft. Victor has said, how are you going to evaluate these players to
decide how to draft? The other side of it is what your roster is
going to look like in the end that you're planning toward. Like Victor said,
there are problems with just getting all the top scoring players because of the
salary element. I highly recommend and I know Victor and I both do a
version of this is building a spreadsheet to track your stuff. It is critical
to me to have a way to track it, even outside of fan tracks,
just my team. The problem. You can let fan tracks gauge everything
else, but I want to be able to manipulate my data to mark things
up. There are ways to do that in fan tracks. I like to
have my own sheet. I'm not trying to turn into a self help or
I'm just telling you that a special especially as you handle multiple dynasty teams,
things like salary rosters, you're gonna want to have a way to do it.
It's tracking your team throughout the year. I think in cooking they got
something called a mes impla is a French thing which is where you set up
all your like your food. You set up all your stuff in one place
before you start to cook. You have your ingredients set out, you have
your knives and such, and then after everything is set up, that's when
you do the cooking. You don't just go and like randomly pull stuff in
throughout. That's how the real chefs do it, and that is how I
am going to set up because I'm going to have my stuff in one place.
I have a Google sheet that has all my off season rosters, my
draft picks, a list of all my leagues that I'm in with, the
future draft dates, the buy ins whether I paid in, and I have
pages. Because what you ultimately want to do with what you set up is
you can download a fantrack's roster, paste it into a certain sheet, and
then have links to the sheet where you manipulate everything. You don't want to
have to download a sheet and then start over every time you want to be
able to download a sheet and it links in to what you have. Same
principles applying a lot of places. So I know not everybody's a spreadsheet person,
but I'm just saying there are a lot of things you can automate to
try to track and to try to strategize how you're building this roster, just
as a starting point, because you have to keep track of all these buyouts
and retentions, etc. That you've done. You can keep notes on what
your rival manager's done in the past. Anyway, this is a little bit
of an aside roster construction, but in terms of building your roster, obviously
If you're in a cap league, you're going to want to consider your budget.
I am an advocate for having at least some level of budget between your
different positions, especially in categories. You need to think about that. What
are you going to pay for in your league? Are you just grabbing value
where value happens, or are you trying to balance your roster across positions.
If you start and you get a bunch of center eligibles who are all your
stars, and then you don't have anybody in the other categories, you could
have some trouble. What Victor said about the dangers of just getting the stars
and damn the torpedoes from there is refined further at this step. The risk
is these lines are arbitrary. It could cost you value opportunities. If I
say twenty five percent of my roster goes to defenseman, and I have that
percentage already allocated or already filled up, and then a three point five million
dollar Brandon Montour drops in my lap. Should I not make a play for
him? Because he was like at least in certain leagues, In certain points
leagues I was in, he was the top ranked defenseman in the whole NHL
over the last thirty days of the year, So there's certain value to picking
a guy like that up. But this should be a familiar concept to anybody
who's ever been in an auction league and ever thought about how they're going to
do this. But I would suggest as competition advances, as you're playing better
and better players, if you haven't played in salary cap and you're going to
start playing some experienced players in salary cap, the players who have some level
of discipline around their budget, especially category leagues, are going to have the
advantage over people who just draft whatever looks good. You're an adult, probably
you're listening to the show. You probably have a credit card. You probably
understand the basic concept of having a budget and following it, but you need
to keep things in mind. What can you quote afford unquote within a cap?
When do you have to stop? It also allows for unique strategies.
I can think of our friends over at the kikupful again, additional dabber colleagues.
The Tier one auction you get to listen to that broadcast sometimes and they
get to do the Tier one up and the auction up in Tier one.
And there have been past examples of people who in that points league have pursued
very interesting strategies, like basically the zero goalie strategy. But you can do
that. You can decide to budget almost zero to your goalies or two dollars
your goalies out of your budget and try to overwhelm in some of the other
categories if you think that you can get better efficient see further down there.
You have a lot more efficiency if you decide, and it's not a punt,
it's a let's set the budget down there, and if I can get
a good goalie for if I have a five dollars budget for my goalies,
I can get a good goalie for four, then great, then I'll get
it. But that is the max I want to pay over there, because
I want to pay in other positions. Stars and scrubs is something I love
to do in auction. I absolutely love to do it in a redraft auction
versus the balanced portfolio that other people do. There's the never ending dilemma that
comes up all the time. But is it different in a cap league.
Yes, it's very different. Stars and scrubs and balanced portfolio and Victor was
getting to this too, are very different in terms of your draft between a
cap league that is a dynasty and a cap league that is a one year
deal. First of all, if you're used to the auction format, you
think it's going to flow easily to a cap format. There's a world of
difference between leagues where the budget is just used to draft your team at the
beginning of the year and a league where the salary figures are enforced throughout the
year and future years. Okay, if you have a two hundred and sixty
dollars budget and you have to put your team together, but then throughout the
year you can trade for players that are way higher expense than it. Maybe
you end up with a team that, had you drafted all those players in
the auction would have been worth four hundred dollars because of the trades you made
for more expensive players or waiverbids that you made for more expensive players who were
auctioned more expensively. That's all cool if you're doing a redraft and that's the
way you're doing it, But in a salary cap league, you're not just
going to be able to take people on willie nilly. You can have some
level of that, but that to me means that stars and scrubs is a
problem. I love it in a redraft auction because I feel like the upper
tier players are so much more valuable than the average player that I'm capturing value
there even by over paying for them. And my experience, especially in moderately
shallow leagues, it's not the kokouple is a little too hardcore for it to
work every year, although I got some success out of it even in the
higher tiers a couple of times. My experience in my little bootstrap rookie scribbles
have told me that the most valuable thing is standard deviation's of value over replacement.
And then the object of the season, after you get those superstar players
to build around, is to stream the scrubs mercilessly and build yourself up over
the scrub replacements who turn into breakouts. Keep filling those gaps, keep building
up the troughs. But as Victor said, you can't do it in salary.
You can't live on Oscar sunfisted alone. Man cannot live on sun twist
alone. I'm pretty sure that's in the good book somewhere. But in shallow
leagues maybe you can do some kind of a thing. But if you start
out with Matthews Vassilevski and Brady Kachuck. You're gonna have trouble getting everything else
together. You're not going to be so the balanced portfolio does end up working
out, and that's good because that makes you a little bit more like a
real NHL team, or at least most of the real NHL teams. These
breakouts that you get also don't come free. You can grab Carter for Hagi
off the wire. He starts out real cheap, but in a dynasty salary,
in a couple of years, he's not going to be free anymore.
So that's another problem with the stars and scrubs is it's going to burn out
on you. And if you have too much of your salary, too much
of your budget committed to a couple of players, it just ain't going to
happen. The contracts are not all going to be minimums, and streaming takes
on a different note. That's the thing with salary cap. Streaming becomes a
very different type of thing. There's not very much streaming, and like Victor
said, it could be very limited by these buyout things and how much you
can even drop players during the season, because if you drop a player and
there's a consequence to that, then you're really it's screwed. You can't just
drop a player and pick up another player and call it good if you have
to retain some cap hit from the players that you drop. So if you
get frustrated by streaming leagues, you may find an advantage to this. On
the other hand, if you love streaming, that is going to be a
complication to playing in a cap league, you probably aren't going to be able
to do it like you're used to now. Like in in Victor and My
Common team, one of the things that we had is we had a lot
of minor league players who we can flex into positions who were relatively inexpensive,
and then we could move them up and down. So our streaming really came
from our bench, and it really came from our minor system. And there
were ways, there were loopholes for players that you could drop from your minor
league system that you wouldn't be paying for the same way. So that was
very helpful, but it is limiting at that point. So yeah, overall,
I would recommend a budget, I would recommend a balanced portfolio, and
I would echo everything Victor said about throw out your perceptions of who's a first
round player, who's a second round player, who's a third round player.
Divide production by cost. The higher players than that are the players you want,
and frankly, frankly, the most valuable player in some of these leagues,
you want to start with a couple of Connor McDavid's, Like there are
multiple Connor mcdavids, but you want a couple of ten polls to build around.
But almost the most valuable commodity in a salary cap league is a borderline
star producer on a cheap contract. The entry level contracts. Victor talked about
the players who are having that mid career breakout that maybe were not expected.
Those folks come up how huge, and especially in a Fantasy generated league.
I felt like in those leagues, in the red rock of Fantasy generated salary
league, the most value commodity in leagues where league salaries are set by bidding
is the one dollar player who's locked up over time, who produces way above
a one dollar level, because that added to your roster not only provides the
production, but it provides a gap for you to take on more superstar.
So it does in scrubs, it's very possible, and Fantasy generated regardless,
but it is in a salary cap but planal salary cap league, it's you've
almost got to have a balanced portfolio. If somebody set up your league,
if somebody set it up where you have way too much cap for what you
actually are going to have on your rosters, it's a very different thing.
Reactions to any of what I'm talking about, Victor, No, you made
some really excellent points in there, for sure, And like you said that,
I think if you're used to a league where you're just streaming every week,
then this is going to be a difficult adjustment for you, because I
don't think that's really going to be the case. There are some leagues that
I mentioned don't have buyouts that are just keep the cap under for that amount
of time. Some of them are weekly starts and you can just you can
stream that way, but most of these leagues are constructed that as Jesse said,
the streaming comes from your bench or from your miners, right, It's
like you're streaming in from the farm and then flexing guys up and down.
A lot of these also have games played limits, and so you're doing a
lot of that type of streaming, but not so much from the wire,
because that's just a little bit, a little bit more complicated. It's a
little bit not as ideal, and there isn't as much there, especially if
you have buyouts, like you're not going to be able to do that,
and so for some people maybe that's not as much fun. It depends on
what you think about. For me, it's more fun to think about the
puzzle of putting together a good team with the constraints of the budget and all
the other things that we talked about, and then you can just sit back
and watch your team perform and then you can make some minor tweaks here there,
but you don't have to stream. You can't really stream every week and
grab some players when they're hot and hold on for a while, maybe buy
them out later. But it's a different kind of it's more of a long
view type of thing, which I enjoy, and it's definitely a bit different.
But it's also, as Jesse said, you have to really think about
this when you construct your roster, and those cost control assets are absolutely huge.
And we'll talk about this a little bit more in the third part,
managing your budget, so we'll definitely get to that. But yeah, I
thought you did a great job of breaking it all down, and I'm too.
I'm a fan of the Stars and scrubs to a point. I think
it's more of the stars and the intermediary guys because like in a lot of
leagues, you would want like stars and scrubs are okay because the wire you
can stream, there's a lot of more flexibility with that, but it isn't
usually as much with these kind of leagues. So you want, as I
mentioned, a couple of stars, and then you want just your cost controlled
assets. You want your good players, maybe not amazing players, but guys
that fill in the categories at are relatively reasonable cost per dollar. That's the
rest of the puzzle to fill in. And then you have your miners eligible
guys that are an entry level contracts. And generally a lot of the quote
unquote streaming can come from there because you can get a guy who was a
nobody and all of a sudden he's playing NHL games and putting up shots,
hits, blocks, whatever, and so then you grab that guy and you
flex him in for as long as he's relevant or gets close to the game's
played limit, and then you can jettison him to the curb because once he's
making two or three million, it's not really the same value and it's not
worth it anymore. You can find a new guy that's making league minimum on
an ELC. So that's more of where that part comes in. I would
say a great job. Yes see. Yeah, it does add a whole
different level to the way you need to build your roster because you can't just
bring everybody in. Now we are down to playing the games. Let's say
the season is started and you are trying to figure out how to maneuver every
single day. So victor give people some ideas on the strategies that they should
use to effectively manage a salary cap team. Definitely, this is definitely different
than your other league, so you want to approach it that way. I
think the biggest thing is your budget, and you mentioned this many of you
maybe are adults. Adulting is hard sometimes and managing your budget is sometimes difficult.
Just remember that this money has to last you all year. You can't
just say, oh, I have all this money and then run to the
candy and video game store and all at once and spend it all or I
guess blow it on Amazon buying a bunch of things that you want to treat
yourself with. Be careful. Cap space is a weapon, use it accordingly.
Don't just blow cap on some guy because you're like, Oh, I
guess I need a right winger. I'll just add Phil Kessel, which is
like terrible because he's so expensive right now or at least has been. So
Don't be like some gms that just seem to sign a warm body and not
really think about it too much. There's a solution to that. If you
feel like you need a player, instead of signing somebody or adding somebody who
has a bit of term, if you really need that, the easiest thing
to do is add a minors eligible player that you can flex up and someone
who you can easily drop. There's no reason to invest long term in somebody
that you might eventually have to buy out or is definitely not worth it on
a value per dollar basis. Don't take on a contract unless it's useful to
you. So a lot of people will take on some sort of cap dump
for what seems like peanuts. Maybe you've seen an NHL team do this and
you're like, wow, why are they doing that? And maybe that's the
relative value in the NHL. Who knows what goes on in those GM meetings.
But don't take on something unless it's worth it to you. What is
it that you need. If you need a prospect of denman, get that.
If you feel like you need a first round pick, don't do it
unless you get that. When some people are maybe a little bit unreasonable in
their request for some of these things. But the bottom line is, don't
do it unless you think it's valuable for you. There is no reason to
take on that contract and fill up your cap if you don't think it's something
that's going to be valuable to you. More people are just like, Oh,
I'm just gonna I'm gonna do this guy favor and take on this this
long contract for pennies, And that's that's not worth it. If you can
retain salary, do it. It's super valuable. If you get the right
return. Maybe you can add someone like Jesse reference that Sergey Bobovski is available
in one league. Hey, if you can add him, retain half the
salary and send him to a competitive team, you might get a really hefty
return, Especially like in some leagues there are it's really hard to get a
hold of goalies and someone with a high cap hit like that might be available
and totally unattractive at ten million to some teams, but at half that,
all of a sudden, now you're speaking their language, and now they might
be able to give you a really nice asset for that. So a five
million dollars Sergey Lebrowski, all of a sudden is a lot more enticing.
And maybe they'll give you a prospect of somebody who isn't going to help them
anytime soon. Maybe think of Kevin Korchinski or Franknazar. I don't know why
I'm thinking of black Hawk prospects right now. Something that is a ways away,
it's not going to help that team anytime soon, but it's something that
you would really like as a maybe rebuilding team. Get a hefty return,
especially if you are committing retention dollars for multiple years, you better get a
really nice return. If you're retaining, say on a one year, that
probably isn't worth a whole lot. And but this is definitely where something you
should ask us, or ask the crowd to ask us in the discord.
Is this a reasonable return for this amount of retention? And it definitely should
increase in value the longer the term is that you're retaining for, and obviously
the higher the dollar amount. Hopefully that makes sense. What exactly that is
worth, of course, is going to vary by individual and by team.
You have to think about that. But ask us if you're questioning, I
personally do not retain money for long, for more than a year unless I'm
getting something really good for it, and hence I don't have a lot of
retentions on my books. You also have to remember that retention spot is super
valuable if you can, like most of the league's I'm in, you can
only retain on three contracts. I don't want to do it for just some
dinky old second round pick. That's not worth it. What is that going
to give me? Not a whole lot. So you have to be really
strategic with what you decide to fill up your retention spots for. But hey,
if I'm getting a first round pick, elite prospect and maybe another prospect
or too, then that might be worth it to hold in that spot.
That's something you have to think about. The Other thing is if you have
guys on injured reserve, don't just go adding more people to your team.
And put yourself in a bind when they get healthy, because eventually those players
may get healthy and now all of a sudden, you might be over the
cap, or you might have to use one of your buyouts. You don't
want to put yourself in that situation where you have to make a move down
the road. This happens often with teams, especially highly competitive teams. They
don't want to miss out on activity or don't want to lose a week.
So you just you say, oh, I have the cap, I'm going
to add this player now, but you have to be careful that down the
road that player may get healthy and all of a sudden you have to make
a decision that you didn't you wouldn't have otherwise had to make. You have
to buy somebody out or trade someone, especially if you're beyond the trade that
on now you really limit your options. You're either going to have an illegal
roster for being over the cap, or you're going to have to buy someone
out that you didn't want to buy out, or drop somebody. That's going
to be difficult. As Jesse mentioned, I we keep a sheet for our
team's Mine looks basically like a cap friendly page, except it's on a Google
sheet, and I can move things around very nimbly and easily, and I
can look at because I think you need to look at. Not just it's
helpful to see at the bottom of the page on fan tracks what your salary
is and what you know how much your team is relative to the cap,
but you also want to know not just right now, but what is it
going to be next year? What is it going to be if I make
this trade, What is it going to be if I move these players around.
You want to be able to adjust things and see what would this look
like. If you have one of these like Google sheets, where you can
move things around and see a year or two or three in the future,
it gives you an idea of where your cap is going to be. And
I think it's I think it's essential for these types of leagues because otherwise you
really have no idea. I don't know that you could do all that in
your head. If you can, great, but most people can't. So
you really want to have to do that. And if you want an example
of a sheet like that, I'd be happy to share with you. Just
hit me up in the discord. But that's it's really key. You have
to keep this all straight, you have to see where you are because this
is going to impact your decisions. Do I make this ad, do I
make this trade? Do I move this player? Do I add this player?
And as Jesse mentioned, not only for the players currently what they're making,
but what are some of my star players going to be making in the
future. What I have to be thinking about that in terms of what is
going to be, where's my cap situation going to be? And for some
of my in one of my teams that I'll be referencing, been a little
bit of a rebuilding state, and so I have a lot of really great
young players on my team, but all these players are going to be getting
paid, and so I have to have a little bit of an idea what
is going on and what is the sort of projected cap years from now,
so that I don't get myself into too much trouble. I have a bunch
of stars on the future, stars hopefully on this team, guys like ekland
Ni's Urshashenko. I have Peterka, I have Thomas Harley, Christian Cairou,
Olin Zellweger, Lucasto Style. So I have a lot of really good prospects
which is great, but you have to remember that in two three years these
players are going to be making probably five six, seven eight million, and
then where is that going to put you in terms of your cap? So
you have to be careful having too many long term contracts like I have Specinkov,
Nachushkin, meyro Heiskin In, Jack Hughes. So you have to be
careful. Okay, I'm not committing too much cap to these players or certain
players three four years from now when all my other stars are going to be
making money. So you have to have a little bit of a long view.
Otherwise you're just going to get to that time and you're going to realize,
ooh, I'm in trouble and you're going to have to trade a star
that you didn't want to have to do. And so you don't want to
put yourself in that position. You have to consider all your tools at your
disposal. I would say some of these are rookie ads, buyouts, taking
on money, retentions, these are the things that you have to think about.
And so for rookies, if ads are limited, be judicious. In
my recent That League, I was talking about the twenty team cap deep roster.
I finished nineteenth, and I really wanted Badard. I have been rebuilding,
or I've been building this team from the ground up. I wanted to
be I wanted to be competitive in years four and five, which are coming
up here, and I wanted to make sure that I positioned myself with enough
actual NHL players to win Badard this season, because in this league, you
don't just get it through a lottery. You have to win the consolation bracket,
which is challenging if you have a team of non NHL players, especially
since my goalies decided to be absent on this team, because I have Matt
Murray, Cal Peterson, Spencer Night, and I was thinking one of those
guys is going to play some games. Actually Matt Murray did play a few
games, but Peterson's and the miners, and Spencer Night is away from the
team. And then I have Lucas deir Style who played some games. So
anyways, you have to position yourself. But I anyways, in terms of
the ads you have, there's limited number of ads, but I made fifteen
in the playoffs. There's thirty ads. I made half of my ads in
the playoffs alone, and it's a good thing. I waited and didn't make
a bunch of silly ads throughout the season because I needed all fifteen of those
to make it happen. I'll talk more about that in a minute. Buyouts
these are also a weapon. Don't get lazy, hit the ad button and
then oops, I'm gonna buy this guy out. Now you need these?
You might need these later. You never know. If your league doesn't have
a buyout lead a limit, then it might be a clown league. Sorry,
but you need to have a limit on your buyouts otherwise there's just no
point. It's basically just no. It's like the same as not having buyouts
if you have an unlimited number. So you have to have a limit.
Know what your limit is. Use them very judiciously, really think about it.
In fact, you might want to ask us if you're questioning like should
I buy this guy out? Should I risk it? Whatever the case may
be. If you're a rebuilding team, you can take on assets in addition
to contracts to buy out. So last season, Jesse and I got into
trouble with too many players with the games played over the games played limit.
So we had all these guys that were great while they're on their elcs,
but then all of a sudden, they're over there the games played limit and
now there we can't put them in the minors, and they're really just not
worth it. So we had to pay. And we decided that instead of
just like paying for one of them, we wanted the flexibility to be able
to flex guys up and down. So we had to pay our buddy Blair
Simon Edvonson to take five of our players we didn't want. That was a
huge price to pay. I'm pretty sure in a year or two we're going
to really miss having him, but Simon Edmondson, that is. But we
needed to do that. We needed to do that to have the flexibility to
move guys up and down to add other players and not be constrained by that
limit. So don't make that kind of mistake or you're going to have to
pay for it. So that was just not noticing and not being on top
of it. Now we have a timer where we go in and check and
make sure that guys are not over and then we make sure we drop them
before because unfortunately, that's one feature that I would love to see fan tracks
to add. But based on your league's games play limit, if they could
send you some kind of alert like, hey, this guy's about to get
to your games played limit, you should do something about that. Perhaps that
would be a nice feature, but it doesn't have that, so you have
to go in and check each time. And when you're in as many leagues
as I am, you have so many to check that you can lose tracks
sometimes. But anyways, if that happens, if somebody has a bunch of
these players beyond our games played limit, you can take advantage of that.
You can take advantage of that and say, hey, you have these guys
that maybe you're not using. Let's go ahead and let's talk a trade maybe,
and you can take advantage of them. Taking on money can be very
lucrative, but don't take on bad contracts just to do it. You have
to have a plan in place when you're going to compete. You don't want
to be saddled with dead money when you could have got a good asset for
it or for you don't want to be in your competitive window having all this
dead money. So if you're going to take on a bad contract for somebody,
it has to be worth it, and it has you really want to
make sure this doesn't overlap with your competitive window, because that is that is
going to be tricky unless you can get such great value that it doesn't matter.
But it's hard to imagine that. If you're competitive, you're not going
to need all of that cap space to really push yourself to the to the
limit. So really the taking on dead money should only be if you're retooling
or restructuring or rebuilding. Otherwise I would be careful about that. And retentions
for others is a really good way to make your roster more flexible. Imagine
Connor McDavid costing six million instead of twelve point five million. That's insane.
Retentions, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, make the value per dollar
skyrocket. There's nothing better than having a star on a retained contract. It's
basically like a cheat code for these cap leagues. It's fantastic if you can
do it right. I think it's important to keep in mind that everybody has
a slightly different valuation on these players, and so you may pay what you
think is a reasonable price, but your competitor thinks they're getting a steal.
Great, everybody wins like as long as that's the case, and generally in
these cap dynasties. It can be a win because some as I mentioned that
for that time that Jesse and I sent simoon Edvanson, that buyout costs that
team five of their buyouts. Most of them were single year or maybe another
year or two. But they weren't like huge contracts. It wasn't a whole
lot of money. It was just roster inflexibility that it cost them mainly.
But it didn't matter because they're rebuilding team, so that was a win for
them. It was a win for us. So it can be a win.
You just want to make sure that it is a win for you and
that you're taking on this money and getting appropriate value. So shoot us a
message if you're considering that. And I think the one of the last things
here is making sure your position for the playoffs. You never know when you're
gonna need buyouts or ads in the playoffs or cap space. So this twenty
team dynasty that I was talking about, I was really gunning for Berdard.
I had thirty ads in the season I had made. I made twelve twelve
of the sixteen ads in the playoffs, six of seven buyouts, not to
mention taking on cap and we ended up ended up adding Tyler Bertuzzi, which
is who was at four point seventy five million ending this year, Logan O'Connor
a million ending in twenty twenty five, Oli Mata two point twenty five million
ending in twenty twenty three, Ryan Paling, who's league minimum ending this year,
in cal Clutterbuck ending one point seventy five ending in twenty twenty four.
I needed every single one of those players production to eke out the win against
our buddy Greg literally one hits by two. And if I hadn't added cal
Clutterbuck on the last day, even though I'm saddled with one point seventy five
million for another year, I wouldn't have won. So you never know where
you're in need every single one of those moves to put yourself over the top.
So you want to make yourself as fluid and flexible at the very end
if you if I hadn't left myself both cap space and moves, it wouldn't
have worked. It wouldn't have worked. You really want to make sure you're
leaving flexibility for when you need it most. And the last thing I would
say is that when you're out of it, don't just check out this is
the time to really put the screws to the other teams. So when you're
rebuilding, or if you're not competing, or say you thought you were going
to be competitive and it turns out you're in the middle, flip the switch.
Take on bad contracts, get assets, get picks, get prospects,
get players who have passed their games play limit. This is a huge untapped,
huge untapped field that can be very fruitful. The guys who have just
gone over and a lot of teams are like, oh, you're not miners
eligible anymore, I don't want you. That may be true for a lot
of players, but some can really work out. Some guys this year who
have who fit that Bill Casey Middlestat who's maybe turning into an NHL or after
all, Dylan Cousins who flipped the switch this year and looks amazing, Morgan
Frost, Cody Glass, dam Steel, etcetera, etcetera. There's a whole
lot of these guys who are beyond the games played limit. Maybe their contract
initially looks like a bit much for the value, but there's still guys who
have some runway. They probably haven't hit their two hundred games played threshold that
Doabber always talks about, or four hundred for bigger players. So you can
take some risks on guys like that. You can take some risks on some
guys that maybe still have some upside and are being dumped because they're beyond that
games played limit or whatever, or they're just about to hit it. That's
the kind of asset you want to collect, and you can be patient with
them, give them another year or so, and then see what happens.
But those are some strategies that I would say that can really help push you
over the top. Jesse, what do you think about those ideas? I
love it, Victor, and I want to add something to this. And
it's going to sound like I'm contradicting Victor, but I'm doing exactly the opposite,
and that is, don't be afraid to use your cap room. I've
seen so many dynasty leagues in the cap leagues where people are like, oh,
I'm not competing this year, I'm only going to use half my cap.
I want to be conservative with this money. You're not the cheap owner
of a pro franchise who you don't get to keep the money. Okay,
I've seen leagues where actually you do pay dollars out of your pocket for each
move or each contract that you have somebody on. And to me, that's
insane because I don't know. I just think that's insane. But I don't
be afraid to use it. Weaponize your cap space, but be aware of
the context of your league. If eight of the teams are at fifty percent
of their cap, your cap space is not worth as much as it would
otherwise be. If I think Victor plays in highly competitive leagues where everybody is
bumping up against the cap, and by the way, that partly means that
the cap was well designed if not many teams are retaining cap space, but
look at the environment of your league, and again, do what you need
to do as a rebuilding team. That even means look at and Victor said
this as well, I think, look at when you are going to be
competitive. If I have a team, I my Red Rock team three years
ago, I identify twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three as the years that
I could be competitive. Actually, twenty twenty three was the year I thought
I'd be competitive, and I did. I got to the finals this year,
and last year I was a year ahead of schedule, So I was
making all my plans for that. I was willing to take on contract for
the years before the year I was going to be competitive, but I wanted
to make sure I did not have that going against maybe year I was competitive,
and I do things in that league. Like you talk about the things
that the uncompetitive team should be doing in terms of gameplay, it should be
things like identifying players you can pick up for minimum just what Victor's saying,
Casey Middlestat, Dylan Cousins, people who were cheap at one point because they
were not looked at as having any value. You're scrounging for those guys,
and if you have fantasy generated contracts, you can be wise to sign them
for long term contracts if you could lock them into a price. Because what's
the downside. The downside is you end up taking a cap hit based on
a very small contract that you signed them to. What's the upside. The
upside is you captured immense value for a minimum level contract. Maybe somebody who
on the market would be worth ten percent of your cap that you you actually
got fero point two percent of your cap, which is a thing I've done
in that league. A couple of times and a thing that they the most
successful teams in that league have done more than that. Yeah, I would
just advise you look at the context of your league. But like Victor said,
the successful teams are the ones who know what to do with every piece
of their salary cap. And that goes for the winning teams as well as
the losing teams. You don't get a prize in most leagues that I've seen
for getting to the end of the season and fifty percent of your cap was
empty. And also look at things like expiring contracts and the value that those
things can have in these leagues. If you have an expiring contract this year,
I'm gonna be There are leagues where if it takes me up to the
ceiling of the salary cap and I'm a rebuilding team and you're willing to send
me a first round pick along with a guy who's out for the year on
injury and his contract's going to expire at the end of the year, that
is a slam dunk win for me, and it's a slam dunk win for
both of us because you are going to have the space to acquire a player.
On the other hand, I can take that on at no consequence if
that contract is going to expire after this year, if I already know I'm
not competing and I don't have a better use for that cap space, so
you can't take it with you. So many things in life, Victor,
you can't take it with you. Yeah, I think there's having the money
left to get Clutterbuck at the end, and just enough money means that Victor
efficiently used his cap He used every piece of it. He used every piece
of the buffalo all season long. And if you go to the end and
if you've capped yourself out, that's a bad thing. But if you left
yourself a lot on the table, that's like getting to the end of an
auction and you spent two thirds of your budget. To me, there's no
point to it. You leave yourself flexibility you're realistically going to use, and
if you're a rebuilding team, you use all of that open space and you
get something, You extract something out of it. Let's take a break.
We're gonna come back and take some listener questions. Here's Ryan O'Reilly, the
shot Eyes, cars Alriley represent One Top Shell or Minds. The cookies we
solicited questions from the listeners on their thoughts on salary kap leagues. We've captured
a few of them here today. I will, I guess read a couple
of them off and we can discuss whether we have answers to these or whether
they bring up a point that we maybe haven't. So the first one is
from Steven Love to know more how you think young players coming off ELC examples
Cage and Cousins coming off cheap deals. So that adds close to twelve million
in new costs next year? Do they knock out other core players like Crosby,
Chrider, Connor, Evander, Cainan Matthews. Fyi'm replacing their cheap costs
with the combat of Byfield, Ecklund and ROSSI. So I guess this is
somebody who was thinking about planning for those elcs coming off and what you can
do to alleviate that crunch. Maybe you get another question out of that victory.
Maybe it's just an observation by Steven, what do you think? I
think this comes to the age old question of what is the new value per
dollar? Here? Is really what it all boils down to, and we
don't We're not necessarily going to know, but Tage and Cousins, I think
we do know what their new contracts are, but we might not for the
ELC guys, and so that and that's gonna be a little bit tricky.
Yeah, I think that Tage is one of these guys that's really interesting because
even though he's like incredible, he's also a bit frustrating at times. And
I'm gonna we'll definitely talk about him in the team previews because even though he's
had an incredible breakout and he's scoring ridiculous number of points, almost one hundred
points, he shoots a fair amount, but he also has is a little
bit inconsistent in terms of the production. There's a lot of in points leagues.
There can be some goose eggs there with minimal hits, minimal shots and
stuff like that, but overall the production is huge and so as long as
he fills it out in your league, he's probably going to be still worth
it in a value per dollar kind of a sense. Is because the points
are so high. I think Cousins is going to be a little bit trickier
because that's going to be a little bit lower. I would say the harder
thing to evaluate is the ELC guys, and there's there's places where you can
find contract projections, but basically you just have to look at what is similar
production for guys that are that and where they were drafted for what they're going
to make, and try to follow the news and figure out are they because
because what you'd really like is for these guys to take a bridge deal.
A bridge deal is good extends, there are a failure, but it kind
of bridges before they have to sign that really big contract. And so for
all of these guys by Phil Eckland, ROSSI haven't really broken into the NHL
too much. I guess Byfield more than the other two, but his contract
might be a little bit bigger. But you hope from the king's perspective,
you would hope to sign Buyfield for six five or six million dollar long term
contract. But from a cap league perspective, you'd hope he signs for a
half of that bridge deal for two or three years. And if they do
that, then obviously the value per dollar is much more. I can't imagine
that Eckland and Rossi don't sign bridge deals because I don't think they have enough
evidence to support a long term deal. So anyways that's going to be.
That's the hard thing is trying to guess what they're going to be. But
if they signed the Bridge deal, there should be more better value per dollar.
I think with these other guys that you mentioned, like Kyle Connor stands
out to me as different from the rest because his contract is fairly high for
what he does, which is basically just points and shots. He doesn't his
perferal value is very low, whereas the other guys have a fairly high perferal
value. So you have to look at the overall costs and evolving or not
evolving hockey and Hockey Viz and some of these other platforms. They will actually
project like the downward trend of some of these stars, and see where the
production is going. And so it's useful to look and think about that.
There's no easy formula though, You're just gonna have to try to figure out.
And this is where I would lay it all out on a spreadsheet.
I would look at projections and see, Okay, how do I think all
these are going to continue to produce as the years go on? And what
is that value per dollar going to be? And you might have to make
some tough decisions and trade or sell some stars to make room for some of
these other guys. It's something that you have to look at in context with
your whole team, and unfortunately I generally have to wait until September for all
these things because you need I need all the projections to come out and see
what I think everybody's gonna do, what the contracts, what everybody's contract is
going to be as much as possible, and then fill it into my team
sheet and then say, okay, this is if I keep this guy,
and I have on my spreadsheet, I have value per dollar and everything calculated
in there, including how long the term is, and then you have to
make some tough decisions based on that. That's what I think, Jesse.
It's not. It is simple in terms of value per dollar, but a
lot of the data that goes into it isn't always one hundred percent known or
clear for sure. And one of the keys to what you just said is
this is why you're mapping everything out in a spreadsheet. I want a spreadsheet
that shows all of my players their contract this year, their contract next year,
the contract the following year. I want to see where my contracts are
going to get into trouble and where they're going to be good because you're right,
some of these guys whose costs are going to go expensive. You need
to figure out when these moves are going to happen. And then, by
the way, it's not as simple as saying I want this guy, I
don't want that guy, so I'll keep this guy and get rid of that
guy. You probably got to send him, You probably got to trade him.
And yes, you want all the best players for all the top values,
but keep in mind everybody else has open eyes too, and they can
see where you have better and worse values and trading players, you're going to
get a better and worse return if you can outsmart the other teams in terms
of or not out smart. But if your projection and your valuation of a
player is more accurate than another team's, which is part of the essence of
playing a fantasy sport, is that you want to try to be better than
that, better than your opponents at that, then you can potentially end up
with more value. But as you need to reduce your roster, somebody's got
to take them, and it's possible you're going to have to pay resources to
move some guys whose contracts are about to become problematic. There's a concept that
they talk about on a basketball podcast I listened to called dunked On, which
is then an a theory, which is the idea that there is a tipping
point above which when the contract gets above there, the player has a negative
value instead of a positive value, and below it it's a positive value.
That's you could probably don't even need a name to describe that, because I
think people will understand it intuitively. But the truth is, once you get
a contract that goes flips into negative territory, even though it's a producing player,
it's going to bring you down relative to the league. Now you have
to figure out how to move it, and you might have to spend other
resources to do it. So just keep that in mind. I would say
that it is nice to think that I can keep my good guys, I
can deal my old guys, and I'll have young guys who come up to
take their place. Ideally that's what you want. Sometimes you might have to
deal to the young guy. Sometimes you might have to deal one young guy
with one old guy and take back a medium guy to be able to balance
things out. It's always a balancing act, and it's never as simple as
just being able to do what you want because everybody is playing the same game
as you. Victor if you ever run into that, What if you run
into situations where you've wanted to trade the Crosby's Criters Connor's Keynes of the world,
but you're just not going to get the return because everybody else knows that
they're getting older and their value per dollar is getting worse. Yeah, definitely.
And my favorite thing that I always think is so funny is that there's
some people in these leagues that are just like, Hey, I want to
trade this guy, and everyone's yeah, nobody wants him. Like, you
have to read the room a little bit. But you can't just come out
and think that you're going to be able to do the thing that you want
to do, especially if you're not willing to attach an asset, because that's
the thing is that you may have to if you want to make a move
like this, even with a name value player in a cap league. If
you're not used to it, you may realize that it's not as easy as
you think, and you may have to attach a pick or a prospect for
somebody to take on that cap, or to take on that buyout, or
to do whatever. Like. Roster flexibility is one of the most important things.
Cap flexibility and roster flexibility. And you can't just assume that you're going
to be able to do things, or you're going to be able to move
guys, that you're going to be able to do the things that you want
to do. So what I would say is the biggest thing is read the
room. See where everyone else is. Don't go asking people to take on
a Serge Lebrovski because you made a bad pick and they are only two million
dollars from the cap. They can't do that. Why would you even ask
them. That's like coming to someone with a really dumb question without doing your
homework. So do your homework. Figure out where everyone is. See which
teams could accommodate the move that you need. Figure out what they need.
Maybe they're don't have any goalie prop and you could send them a decent upside
goalie or defenseman or for whatever prospect or pick. Maybe they're light on picks
whatever. Figure out what might help them, what they might need, but
come to them with something for them. I think too many people blurt out
in general channels or whatever. This is what I want, this is what
I need, and it's great. Who's going to just give you what you
want for nothing? Like, it's not going to happen. At least it
shouldn't happen. Everybody needs to get something for their trouble, and it's better
if you can guess. You may not guess perfectly, but at least if
you come offering something that they might need. I love when people do that.
Hey, seems like you're a little light on d Are you interested in
this guy for taking on this asset. I'm not really interested in that guy,
but I appreciate that they came with some idea of what I might want,
and then I can we can further the conversation along at that point.
Right, So you want to do your homework. You want to realize that
what everyone else is doing and try to try to give them something too.
Right, it should be when I think when people come at it from a
let's try to make this a win, it's so much easier and it's less
contentious and it's more fun for everybody. So I would just suggest you try
to do that and requires doing your homework and being a little bit more prepared
than just oh crap, I'm close to the cap. I need to get
rid of somebody here. You take him? Yeah, let's say you have.
You can't fool people if they are good at the game. In a
normal dynasty, you could come to somebody and say, hey, I see
that you need a little bit to make your run here, how about I
trained you Jamie Benn for William Ecklin's not even playing this year. Man,
he's no good this year. Ben is playing like crazy. Well, he's
getting excellent points this year, and he would help you win. Jamie.
Ben's getting two more years of nine point five million dollars. He's got one
of the biggest cap pits in the league, and that cap hit has been
in albatross many times at this point. So I would tell the other guy,
why don't you send me Jamie Benn and William Ecklund and I will give
you back nothing. That's probably a fair trade. Why didn't we do that?
So it completely flips things on their heads. Let's follow the follow up
question from Steven. My Cousin's debate is to keep him or Crider Eileen Cousins,
But I could get way more for him in a trade than Crider for
similar production next year, but Cousins are more valuable a few years into his
new contract, So he's actually comparing apples to apples here Cousin. Well,
he's talking about guys who are both ends of the skill that we are talking
about here, Victor Cousins and Crider. What do you think about this comparison
in this combination of players. Yeah, I think it's nice we have two
forwards opposite ends of the time frame. But I also think this brings up
a really good point is that sometimes you just have to trade the player that's
going to give you more, and maybe it's not the one you want to
trade, maybe it's the younger player. You also have to realize your league.
Some leagues just love player teams want to collect young players and assets,
and others tend to be a little bit more wise to the fact that some
of these older vets might be better. But in cap leagues, it really
just comes down to value per dollar and how long the term is, and
so if they're older and still producing, then may be a better asset.
So I would absolutely anytime I can trade the player that's going to give me
more, as long as they're relatively similar in apples to apples kind of thing,
if possible, And yeah, you might get stuck with Okay, maybe
this player, maybe the production is similar. But that's the way you have
to think about it. I think is maybe this isn't the player I want
to trade, but I need to make a move at forward. I need
to make a move to soften my cap. I'm going to trade this one,
even though I don't love the move. Let's combine two concepts we've talked
about this people who are afraid to use their whole salary cap and people who
are trying to do what we're talking about people trying to do, which is,
let's get rid of the old guys, let's move in the young guys.
Because people overcorrect for this, They overcorrect for them, not only they
might even understand the valuation. You might get to managers who understand that Sidney
Crosby is probably less valuable in Dynasty right now than Tage Thompson given their relative
contracts. But is it possible that somebody will give you Sidney Crosby and a
first round pick and some other good thing for th Thompson just to get crosby
salary off the books. And by the way, Sidney Crosby still scored ninety
three points in eighty two games this year. He is still extremely valuable,
and like Victor said, sometimes you get the thing that we're more valuable with,
so we definitely need to keep that in mind when we're doing these things.
All right, let's move on our boy. Yarno out there in Finland
had a couple of things to say. Love's salary leagues, and he's really
asking the question about salary retentions. He's been mixed on these salary retention things
and how much they should really be used in a league. His point is
it's hard to keep your team good over the years versus non salary leagues.
But the salary retention can really screw the bottom teams by taking up a bunch
of their cap by basically Arizona Coyote their situation where they've got all these unvaluable
players that they're taking on contracts and maybe they're not getting everything for it,
and it also means they're not going to get anywhere in the long term.
And again, you don't need to keep pushing those players off your roster just
so you can get down to fifty percent of your salary cap. There's no
bonus for getting to fifty percent of your salary cap instead of eighty percent of
your salary cap if it doesn't have impact on future years and you're gonna lose
already anyway, and nobody's gonna trade you guys to fit into that cap.
So I don't know victor any further concept on retention of contracts. And I
know you've talked about it a little bit, but y'arno's comments here, Yeah,
I think it can screw the bottom teams if they don't get appropriate returns
for it. I have seen some players, some fantasy GMS retain four or
five million dollars for several years and get back a modest prospect or a second
round pick. That is crazy. That is not worth it. So I
think it's a matter of educating the GMS. I would never tell the league
this is an appropriate value for this type of trade, but I think that
as a commission you might, especially if people are new to cap league,
you might say, hey, you might want to run this by some people
before you take commit yourself to a lung, because that can ruin the league.
If you get a new GM that's just wanted to wheel and deal and
take on all this cap and get nothing for it. That can create those
really strong teams at the top, and it can screw them into the basement
on the other end, and then they just leave the league and they leave
it a mess. So you want to make sure that doesn't happen. You
want to make sure that if you have some inexperienced people that you don't let
that happen. But I think that as long as that's the case, as
long as you have some people that know what they're doing, it can be
fine. That's what's great about dynasties. You can have teams in different states
of repair. You can have the competitive teams and the teams that are moving
up and trying to compete those in the middle that are going one way or
the other. But I think that's the key is you have to have competence.
Smart gms. Don't let people make mistakes that can screw the entire league.
And really, if they're new, make them listen to this episode first
before they join your league. You are absolutely right, Victor. We've talked
about how salary caps can level the playing field in terms of not creating juggernaut
teams. But with this level of complexity, I also think what you said
that at the startup you can absolutely you can have managers who come in the
league and really mess up teams more quickly than they could even a dynasty,
because at least in the other realm, you're just looking at which players are
more valuable than the others, which players are younger than the others. This
element of contracts adds a big complication that people can miss and the strategy the
actual value of a retained contract, the actual value of a draft pick before
it stabilizes, before there's a league consensus that makes economic sense, and there's
this kind of a stable market, there's going to be opportunity for exploitation and
things are going to go a little bit nuts. Next question, Victory and
I mentioned this earlier handling free agency in dynasty cap leagues, and I railed
against the idea of the slow auction, where you have free agents who are
coming out, there's a wide array of options, the quality for asks mine
is only one free agent per week, and big cap guys like line A
and Goodreaux are sitting on free agency. How do you handle a situation where
maybe you're going into the new league year and there's guys who people would want
who are sitting on waivers because they weren't on a contract at the end of
last year or their contracts expired. What do you think about this, Victor?
So, I don't think I understand this question. Can you explain it
to me a little more? So? I think there are some leagues where
you get Tage Thompson and you get his current contract, and if he signs
a new contract, you just get to keep Tate Thompson at his new contract,
or you can choose to keep him or drop him based on his new
contract, and then he goes onto waivers. There are other contracts where you
can other leagues where you can take on a player with a salary for a
certain number of years. Even in leagues where I think you use a real
cap, you might have a limit on how many years a player can remain
on a roster with a particular salary. And I don't know or particularly this
is a huge problem in fantasy of value generated leagues. Maybe in real salary
cap leagues there could be some differences here. But what do you do?
Is it just going to be waivers that decides who goes on to different teams,
or is there going to be an annual supplemental draft of some sort.
It sounds like you handle it by the guys on your team. As long
as he keeps, as long as he's you're willing to take on whatever the
NHL is going to pay him. Yeah, And most of my leagues,
it's like a it's a dynasty league. So you have the rights to that
player, you roster them, and it's usually dependent on the cap. So
like Davee. Thompson right now, Dylan Cousins, we just talked about them.
If you don't if you roster them, and you basically have a decision
to make once the new league starts, Once they play a game under their
new contract, you're committed to them for the long term. So basically the
decision made in the offseason. If you want to drop them or trade them,
then you can do that. But if you keep them and they play
a game under the new contract, you're committed to them. I know there
are also leagues that basically you know once when that player is a free agent,
you basically have like a bidding war and you can basically decide and bid
Fantasy dollars or fab budget or whatever to acquire those players. Sometimes you have
phase or RFAs or dump back into the player pool and so you only get
them for that contract. That's to me, that's a little bit more extreme.
I don't I wouldn't like that as much. That would be a little
bit harder to keep track of, but it certainly would keep the player pull
churning a little bit more if that's something that you wanted. I know.
There are also leagues like you mentioned, where you you basically get to determine
how long you sign a player for and how much, and so that offers
another layer of complexity that you have some input on, and so that can
be interesting. I don't like those personally, because it's a lot to keep
track of, and then you're stuck at the whim of other people. Other
gms in the league that might over undervalue. Some people might say I'm gonna
I'm gonna pay, I'm gonna I'm gonna roster this guy for seven years or
whatever the max is. You have to have a max. But yeah,
that's what you have to think about. And there are always opportunities there that
you can take advantage of. So guys that are maybe under undervalue. You
have to look at, okay, who's coming off right now and who has
a decent value. Those are the guys I want to bid on for sure.
Yeah, I think that whole mechanics is a big element that is a
variable for teams, whether when you sign a new contract, whether there's gonna
be a limit to contract, or whether you're just going to keep on with
the guy forever. I hope you enjoyed this second tour through salary talk.
Remind you are show is brought to you by fan tracks. You can move
leagues over to fan tracks. There's ten different sports to play right now.
They're fully in the baseball season. A lot of people are playing football.
I'll tell you what. A lot of people are watching the NFL draft this
weekend. I don't understand this, but people are going to draft some rookie
leagues, like starting Monday. That to me is just bonkers. Why you
would go that fast? Come on, guys, you have months to do
this, but some people will, so there are opportunities. Probably somebody's not
going to show for a rookie draft in some dynasty football league somewhere, so
if you're into them, this might be a time when orphans will become urgently
available. Just go looking for one. There's plenty of things. Hit me
up if that's something that you're looking for, and I can at least put
you in touch with people. Let's put it that way, and you can
already set up your fantasy hockey dynasty leagues for next year, just like I
promised. You can listen to this show and check out fan tracks HQ.
There's still hockey content dropping on there all the time. Our FHL crew is
the best and it is numerous. We are many. Kevin Adams is helping
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work him hard preparing all these show prep sheets so that we can make it
through thirty two team previews. It's quite a off season effort because our show
notes, folks, are like twenty pages long. At least Ryan Downey did
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if you're interested in being part of the Tidy Leagues this year, we
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need to get on that this afternoon and if you want to be a part
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If you haven't seen the Fantasy Hockey Life player cards, they are insane.
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Dynasty sports This week should be no surprise. I'm going to have my friend
Matt Cooper on to talk about the recently completed or by the time you're listening
to this recently completed NFL Draft and what some of the landing spots for players
mean for their dynasty value, as well as some of the quarterbacks. We
haven't had quarterbacks yet. Follow us on X once again reminder Fan Hockey Life,
Victor Nuno twelve v c tr and U N one to two Stupid X
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somebody's thoughts in this offseason. This is the time when people are ramping down
and it's going to be a while to the ramp up. But you know
better. If you're listening to a fantasy hockey podcast in the month of April,
you know that you've got to prepare early. You got to grind.
You got to rise and grind all year to play this madame hockey life.