With the All Star break past us and the NHL and DDFHL Trade Deadline steadily approaching, it’s time to take a step back and take a look at the state of the league. Plenty of teams have already bottomed out, trading some of the their more expendable non-keeper assets in return for 1st, 2nd and 3rd Round Draft Picks. All of these clubs are just waiting out the storm, and hoping the off-season comes ever so closer to resetting and rebuilding their teams into contenders of the future.
On the other side of the aisle, we have the battleships and behemoths batting down the hatches as they prepare for their playoff campaigns. The divide between Contender and Hopeful and Bottom Feeder has been set. The standings have seen drastic change since the 1st quarter of the season where the Spokane Sharpshooters dominated the legaue, but now the playing field has evened out, as Panarin’s Pastries, Bakery, and Bread and Team SwedishEagle5 reign supreme.
The Top 8 Teams make the playoffs in the DDFHL. But as shown by the point totals in the standings on the left, the race for those last two spots is wide open. And the gap to enter the Top 6 widens as the weeks moves on. The South Jersey ShinyFishs and the Seoul Skaters have been the most prominent in terms of their rise in the standings, as months ago they were teams on the outside looking in. Now, The ShinyFishs have a significant edge over their other South Jersey counterpart the Jackalopes due to the stunning play of Leon Draisaitl (29 Goals, 54 Assists, 83 Points) and the acquisitions of Alexander Radulov and Taylor Hall.
Meanwhile, Panarin’s Pastries, Bakery, and Bread exploded onto the scene to cement his spot into first place passing the rest of the Top 5. Having Ben Bishop, Darcy Kuemper (Pre-Injury) and Elvis Merzlikins has given GM Zoned’s team arguably the best goaltending in the league. Other than the stellar goaltending, the team’s depth of Artemi Panarin, Brayden Point, Mika Zibanejad, Tyler Seguin, Kris Letang and Thomas Chabot may just be the deepest team in the league in terms of talent from a contender.
As shown above, these are the rankings of each team’s success in specific skater and goalie categories. Listed below are the league leaders in these categories. Besides the Spokane Sharpshooters who tie in one category, no one team dominates more than one individual statistic. This shows the true parity of the league even with the disparity in points among the teams in the standings.
- Goals: MoJo’s Finest
- Assists: South Jersey Jackalopes
- Penalty Minutes: H4XORS
- Shots on Goal: Spokane Sharpshooters
- Special Teams Assists: Backstrom in the USSR
- Special Teams Goals: Tie – Panarin’s Pastries, Bakery and Bread/Spokane Sharpshooters
- Hits: Bouch’s Mom
- Blocks: Yorkshire Tea Bags
- Net Faceoff Wins: South Jersey ShinyFishs
Post draft, I ranked and graded all the teams based on the players they drafted and depth of their lineups. Turns out predicting team placement is a crap shoot especially in in a fantasy Hockey League where players, teams and stats in between change like nobody’s business. Hockey is parity central. Below are my preliminary rankings with their rank disparity listed next to them however many spaces higher or lower they belong. In sum, I got some teams in the right spots but pretty much blew it. But that’s the fun in ranking, you guess and hope for the best to be right. Otherwise we’d be genies.
- South Jersey Jackalopes(⇓ 8)
- Panarin’s Pastries Bakery and Bread(⇑ 1)
- South Jersey ShinyFishs(⇓ 3)
- Hughes Your Daddy?(⇓ 12)
- Yorkshire Tea Bags(⇓ 6)
- Backstrom in the USSR(⇑ 3)
- Bouch’s Mom(⇓ 5)
- MoJo’s Finest(⇑ 1)
- Seoul Skaters(⇑ 1)
- Spokane Sharpshooters (⇑ 6)
- Sunnyvale Samsquanches(⇓ 3)
- SwedishEagle5(⇑ 10)
- H4X0Rman(⇑ 3)
- WhySoSerious(⇓ 1)
- Gold Coast Koalas(⇑ 10)
- Reykjavik Robbie Rottens (⇑ 3)
To finish off I’d like to discuss the most important part of this whole league. The Players. No not the GMs of the teams, but the actual hockey players. Many players have come to compete this season and have become pleasant surprises for those who own them. Johnathan Huberdeau and Jack Eichel who are on pace for 104 points (which would be career highs for both player), Darcy Kuemper who leads the league in Save Percentage, John Carlson who is playing the best hockey of his career vying or the Norris and Cale Makar with Quinn Hughes as rookies are just a few players that have become impact players for each franchise. The League Leaders are listed below in the graphic, as well as a chart that lists the best steals and surprises from each round of the draft.
