While the NHL remains in its infancy when it comes to video streaming, social media and fantasy hockey, the sport has made enormous strides in recent years. Thanks to advancements like advanced statisics which track all sorts of team and player performances, fans have unprecedented access to interesting data about the game they love.
Whether you’re a hardcore hockey fan who devours all things NHL or a casual sports fan who watches the highlights on YouTube, you’ll undoubtedly have heard of ESPN’s fantasy hockey game, Fantasy Hockey Life.
Fantasy Hockey Life is a free fantasy hockey simulation game that allows fans to play as their favorite hockey team during All-Star Week by constructing a 30-game season that includes two 7-day tournaments. In these tournaments, you compete against other fans for a spot in the NHL All-Star Game. The game also tracks all the stats you’d find in a real NHL game, using hockey analysts‘ projections for the numbers.
If you’ve ever played fantasy sports or watched the show, it’ll be quite familiar territory. However, while the gameplay is very similar, there are a few differences between the two. For one, in Fantasy Hockey Life, your roster is fixed at the beginning of the season and you don’t have the ability to sign free agents or trade players. Also, while most fantasy sports games use a points-based system to determine your draft position in a tournament, in Fantasy Hockey Life, you’re ranked based on your winning percentage during the season. You can’t earn points for nothing, so you’ll still need to beat the other players to win games.
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First Things First: The Basics
Before we get into the nuances of playing fantasy hockey, let’s discuss the fundamentals:
Just like real hockey, the first thing you’ll need to do to play is to pick a team. You can’t do that in Fantasy Hockey Life, so you’ll need to choose one from the eight teams that are included in the game. These teams are based on the 2017-18 NHL squad standings, so you’ll be selecting players who are currently active and on the rosters of NHL teams. Once you make your selection, you’ll see a brief video that explains the rules.
Roster Management: The Basics
Another similarity between fantasy hockey and reality is that you have to manage your team’s roster. Like in real life, you have to make some difficult decisions about which players you keep and which ones you send to the minors until further notice. In fantasy hockey, you’ll have to decide whether to keep or trade a forward, defenseman or goaltender who appears in your lineup.
When you make a trade, you’ll have to decide which players to get rid of and which ones you’ll want to keep. While you can’t conduct a full-blown fantasy trade within the game, you can move players to and from your active roster using the waiver wire. You’ll also have to decide which players you want to pick up from the waiver wire and which ones you want to drop. You’ll learn more about the waiver wire in a moment, but first, let’s discuss the impact of making these moves on your fantasy hockey team’s chances of winning tournaments and scoring points in the game overall.
Playoffs: The Mechanics
As we’ve established, playing fantasy hockey is very similar to playing in a real NHL game. The biggest difference is the scoring which, in theory, is based on how well you do in comparison to an average team. Just like in a real game, the first round of the playoffs is a best-of-seven series where the highest-ranked team is pitted against the lowest-ranked team. These are the matchups you’ll see in most games:
- Nashville vs. Columbus
- Buffalo vs. Toronto
- Las Vegas vs. San Jose
- New York vs. Ottawa
The rest of the playoffs are single-elimination games. However, in order to determine which team is the best, you have to re-score the games during the regular season. This system gives the NHL an additional layer of complexity which adds an extra challenge to playing fantasy hockey.
All-Star Game: The Mechanics
Just like in a real NHL game, the All-Star Game in fantasy hockey is an exhibition game where fans decide who will face off in the ultimate showcase for the best players in the league. In this game, you can’t score, you can’t win on goals and you have to manage the clock. Also, just like in a real game, the winner is the team that scores the most points at the end of the game.
These are the basics of playing fantasy hockey. Once you’ve got the basics down, you can start constructing your team. We’ll discuss each position in more detail in the next section, but for now, let’s get into the nuances of using advanced stats in fantasy hockey.
Overall Strategy
In a nutshell, the overall strategy for playing fantasy hockey is to draft a team that you expect to win the majority of the games. Like in real life, every team is a little different and you’ll have to adjust your strategy according to the rules of your particular league. Let’s say you’re in a keeper league where you can keep all the players you draft. In that case, you can afford to be a bit more aggressive and draft higher-ranked players who are more likely to contribute points early in the season. While it’s not always the case, in most fantasy hockey leagues, the higher your rank, the better your chances of winning. This is because the higher your rank, the more points you’ll accumulate during the season. The only way to improve your chances of winning is to beat the other teams. In order to do that, you have to be more selective with your draft picks and decide which players you want to keep and which ones you want to trade. Like in real life, sometimes things happen that prevent you from following the simple strategy described above. When that happens, you have to decide whether to bet on yourself and hope for the best or to trade one of your star players for a higher-ranked player who you expect to contribute more points.
To give you an idea of how well you’re doing in Fantasy Hockey Life, at the end of 30 games, you’ll receive an overall rating based on four categories:
Tournament Pace: This measures the average number of games won per week during the regular season. For example, if you have five wins this week and six the week before, your Tournament Pace would be 1.6. This number will then be averaged with your winning percentage during the season to give you an overall rating. If you play in a weekly tournament, this number will be even more important as it will determine your seeding in the tournament. A high-ranking team with a low Tournament Pace will not only have an advantage over a lower-ranked team with a high Tournament Pace, it will also have an advantage over a higher-ranked team with a low Tournament Pace due to seeding.
Winning Percentage: This measures your team’s won-lost record during the season. Like in real life, the higher your winning percentage, the better your chances of winning the championship.
Fantasy Points: This is the most important number for determining your team’s ranking in the league at the end of the season. As we established above, the winner is the team that scores the most points at the end of the game. In real life, this would be the final score of the game, but since the NHL has implemented a newfangled point system in which each team scores a point for every goal scored during the season, this number will become available sooner than you’d think. So, when it comes down to it, the team that scores the most points at the end of the season wins the fantasy league. This number will be accumulated based on your team’s won-lost record during the season and weighted games. For example, if you have a 12-4-0 record in the first half of the season and a 5-7-1 record in the second half, your Fantasy Points total would be 12.667.
This number will then be averaged with your Tournament Pace, Winning Percentage and Season Pace to give you an overall rating. The higher your overall rating, the better your chances of winning the championship. Also, remember that the overall rating consists of a combination of these four categories, so if you want to win, you’ll need to improve in all areas of the rating scale.