Fantasy Hockey 2013 - My ESPN Team

I just drafted a free fantasy hockey team on ESPN. I usually don't, but my money-league draft on CBS is coming up tomorrow evening and I felt like it would be good practice. However, the rankings on ESPN are pretty screwy, and the competition is pretty slim, so I'm not sure how much practice I actually got. But in any case, here's what I ended up with in a 10-team head-to-head (my CBS team is a 12-team roto, so I figured I'd switch it up a bit).

I had the 1st overall pick, which was nice, not so much as for the top selection (albeit, I didn't mind landing Malkin), but for the 2 picks in a row.

Roster
F: Evgeni Malkin, PIT
F: Henrik Sedin, VAN
F: Phil Kessel, TOR
F: Tyler Seguin, BOS
F: Scott Hartnell, PHI
F: Dany Heatley, MIN
F: Matt Moulson, NYI
F: Evander Kane, WPG
F: Bobby Ryan, ANA
D: Mark Streit, NYI
D: James Wisniewski, CLS
D: Dennis Wideman, CGY
D: Cam Fowler, ANA
D: Dmitry Kulikov, FLA
G: Cam Ward, CAR
G: Miikka Kiprusoff, CGY
UT: Nail Yakupov, EDM
B: Jonas Hiller, ANA
B: Milan Michalek, OTT
B: Alex Tanguay, CGY
B: Sam Gagner, EDM
B: Marcus Foligno, BUF


As you can see, I held off on drafting defensemen until the late rounds. That's my usual strategy, and especially so for a h2h league. My philosophy: If you can get good defensemen at the end of the draft, why overpay for what amounts to 40 - 50 points in the early rounds?

With that being said, my team obviously looks insane. There's no way I'll end up with a roster like that on CBS. When Phil Kessel falls to the 3rd round, and Cam Ward falls to the 7th, you know your rankings are a bit off. Miikka Kiprusoff isn't even a top 30 goalie, according to ESPN (I got him in the 14th round -- a guy who won 35 games last year, recorded a .921 SV% and allowed 2.35 goals per game -- go figure). All you can do is scratch your head.

Granted, if you know what you're doing, screwy rankings are a big advantage, because they throw off everyone else. But, sometimes it can be difficult trying to guess which players will fall. For example, Jarome Iginla is severely underrated on ESPN. I wanted to take him in the 5th round (which is a steal), but I thought he might fall to the 6th due to his low rankings. But alas, someone figured it out before he got back to me. So, having learned my lesson, I went ahead and "reached" for players like Evander Kane, Bobby Ryan, Kiprusoff, etc. They weren't even on ESPN's radar, so I literally stole them off the board.

Anyway, we'll see how my team does. I don't imagine the league will be very competitive. As is usually the case on ESPN, half the owners will probably lose interest after the first two weeks in the season and stop playing.