Last night, Slaughtergarde had a fantasy hockey draft that took under four minutes, and then I tried to trade two sawhorses for Mike Smith.
The last time we had a draft in Slaughtergarde, the fantasy league where there are no rules and the statistics are nonsensical, we drafted over 400 players in eight minutes and crashed CBS Sports' website. But because we're all busy people with lives outside of fantasy sports, I decided that I wanted to speed things up this year. In retrospect, I should have warned our players -- the four seconds that they had to make their pick each round is actually less time than it takes the website to announce "You're on deck... You're up!" and by the time most owners had clicked on a player to draft, they saw the bright red YOUR TURN HAS EXPIRED message.
All in all, the draft took three minutes and fifty-seven seconds to draft just over 300 players. 300 amazing, amazing players.
The first round was a surprise. I figured that we'd have some owners who'd phone it in and draft a "regular" fantasy team, despite the byzantine and unpredictable scoring system we use in Slaughtergarde. But even Chippy, who's team is named "Don't know what I'm doing", proved that he knows exactly what he's doing by drafting the single most valuable player in Slaughtergarde: Mike Smith. Smith was first on my draft list, and so this turn of events frustrated me.
Team Mousers showed off their research skills by drafting Marc Methot. CBS Sports' own website tries to discourage you from drafting him: they complain that his pairing with Erik Karlsson will surely lead to him hanging back while all the action happens at the other end of the rink. This lines up incredibly well with the Doodler stat in Slaughtergarde, which rewards the player who can skate the longest without touching the puck.
One team made a reckless decision that I should have seen coming. While developing the stats for Slaughtergarde, it became clear that not only were we rewarding players who are traditionally "bad" in fantasy hockey, but also putting huge penalties on good players. For 2014, the most valuable player in the league was worth about five million points over the course of the season, but the least valuable player was worth negative twelve million points. That was P.K. Subban. As a caution to owners who perhaps didn't know how Slaughtergarde was going to play out, I changed the commissioner's message to read "Do Not Draft P.K. Subban". Naturally, Andy took this as a challenge and drafted not only P.K., but the entire Subban family.
And an honourable mention must go to team T.U.R.D.S. for deliberately drafting a fantasy all star team (because even the CBS Autodraft Robot was smart enough not to go after the good players) featuring Crosby, Getzlaf, Malkin, Toews and Foligno, all projected to draft in the 25th round or later. I can't wait to see what happens when the negative numbers are too big for CBS Sports' website to deal with.
Likewise, The D Team gets an honourable mention for dropping nearly their entire team within 15 minutes of the draft's end, and the Zeroes get a special shout out for having Ray Parker Jr. as their starting centre. I'll leave the final word on our draft to our participants:
Click here to visit Slaughtergarde, and follow the hashtag #NFHleague on Twitter for live updates. Next time: Hunger, Thirst and Despair.
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20151006223939813