I participated in my very first NHL fantasy draft tonight.  It was an auction draft, which I did not realize until after I signed up.  Having never done any kind of draft, this news brought an even higher level of "WTF do I do??" to my anxiety about the upcoming event.  I did some research about how the damn thing would work:

1. $300
2. 9 forwards
3. 6 defensemen
4. 2 goalies
5. 4 bench
6. 1 utility

and an IR spot in case someone breathes on Jones or something.  I kind of put together a list of guys that I kind of thought, "Hey, why not?"  and "Yeah, they're worth that much."  And then tonight rolled around.

Straight off the bat, I realized some of these guys were idiots because they were way overspending for important players and then spending decent money on players who really didn't deserve it.  It came out that this was a strategy of a few owners: drive up the price!  For example, Ovechkin (while a fantastic player) is NOT worth $50 , especially when you can get Teeamu Sellane (albeit with one foot out the door) for $3.  Of course, you could pay money for players who are out indefinitely on IR or were asked to leave training camp or are still unsigned FAs for $15...yeah, I nominated those guys just to troll.  (And I'd be lying if I said Bubs wasn't with me. lol)

I just lost interest in it so quickly and I decided to go for a nice little core of strong second and third line forwards and D-pairings with a solid goalie tandem, a star forward, a star D, and a scattering of bench guys I either liked or got stuck with when my trolling backfired.  (Hello Taylor Hall!  Welcome to the LBC Ice Dogs!)

My list is neither good nor horrid.  It won't be brilliant nor embarrassing.  It won't dominate nor be crushed.  And I'm cool with that because I don't plan on doing much with it this year in terms of trading or FA aqusitions and stuff.

For those wondering, here's my list.  Like I said, there aren't any who will jump out at you necessarily.  It's a cruisin team --let's grab an intertube and float down the river drinkin beers --and there are some players on my bench roster that were "what the hell, let's finish this damn thing that was supposed to last an hour or hour and a half and it's been three hours."

(The numbers to the right represent how much I paid for them.  Some too much, others were steals, and still others...whatever-will-this-just-end?  My strategy was to get a solid first round top pick goaltender, forward and defenseman, or as close to, as possible, and then move on from there trying to stick to second liners as much as possible while everyone else overpaid for the big names.  Fill up the roster with depth.  It didn't quite work out how I had planned because of the CRAZY nonsensical bidding that was going on, so this is what I got.  Meh, middle of the road works for me.I filled all my spots and had $3 left.)

LBC Ice Dogs
F Zach Parise 34
F Bobby Ryan 24
F Paul Stastny 23
F Peter Mueller 13
F Wojtek Wolski 15
F Joe Pavelski 7
F Wayne Simmonds 6
F Mike Fisher 4
F Milan Hejduk 7
D Drew Doughty 36
D Shea Weber 12
D Brian Campbell 12
D Brent Seabrook 4
D Kurtis Foster 4
D Ryan Suter 11
UTIL Teemu Selanne 3
G Ryan Miller 41
G Tomas Vokoun 29
BE Taylor Hall 1 TJ Galiardi (Hall was a trolling acquisition...no one fell for that one. lol. Just dropped him and am waiting on Gali to clear waivers.)
BE Ryan O'Reilly 9
BE Daniel Winnik 2
BE Brandon Yip 1