Sunday, September 06, 2015

The Pool Worthy Goon Squad

Yesterday, the announcement was made that penalty minutes would be one of the mini-games, if you were looking to try and get your money back in the pool, assuming you've tanked in the scoring race.  Hell, maybe you're in it for the penalty minutes, just to be ironical, this season and you want the biggest and baddest goon squad and virtually play for nothing.

Well, what if you had the best of both worlds?  A pool-worthy team, which racked up their minutes in the box.  What would that look like?

Yes, we're a month away from the draft and I'm really struggling to keep this blog interesting.

So, in order to be pool-worthy, I am working with last season's parameters, a 23-team league, which means you'd have to be in the top 184 forwards, top 92 defensemen and top 46 goalies, in order to be included.  We'll take the top penalty minutes from those ranked players to form our team and see how many points & minutes they've racked up.

Forward NHL Points PIM
David Backes STL 58 104
Scott Hartnell CBJ 60 100
Brad Marchand BOS 42 95
Chris Kreider NYR 46 88
Shane Doan ARI 36 88
Pat Maroon ANA 34 82
Milan Lucic LOS 44 81
Gabriel Landeskog COL 59 79
Defense
Dustin Byfuglien WPG 45 124
Dion Phaneuf TOR 29 108
Simon Despres ANA 23 86
Travis Hamonic NYI 33 85
Goalies
Jonathan Quick LOS 85 18
Mike Smith ARI 29 10
623 1,148

By comparison, this team is actually pretty darn good.  The PIM column would blow just about everyone out of the water, because the rest of the pool worthy players wouldn't match up, but the scoring wasn't too bad either.  The 623 points would have had this team in the top 10 in scoring, which is pretty decent.

This team would have a reasonable 1st round pick in Jonathan Quick, who led all goalies in having their teammates spend time in the box for them.  They'd also have another starting goalie on their side, even though he played on a pretty poor Arizona team in Mike Smith.

The 2nd round pick from this team could be either Scott Hartnell from Columbus or, if one was so inclined to jump on the blueline train early on, Dustin Byfuglien of the Jets.  Both got decent points at their position, both hitting triple-digits in the penalty minute column.

There is some more decent talent up front, as Gabriel Landeskog could be thought of in the 4th round area, David Backes not too far away from that either.  Those two are both relied upon for some gritty play at both ends of the ice and their leadership skills.

A couple more captains were taken on this team, somewhat of an interesting trend on this goon squad, as Shane Doan in Arizona and Dion Phaneuf in Toronto would play prominent roles in their positions as well.

It would be a very interesting team in the 2016 season, if you were to piece this one together.

Just for argument's sake, if there was another team, which was drafted along side the pool worthy squad, based on what was left for PIM, you would get something like this.

Forwards NHL Points PIM
Steve Downie ARI 28 238
Cody McLeod COL 12 191
Derek Dorsett VAN 25 175
Tom Wilson WAS 17 172
Antoine Roussel DAL 25 148
Brandon Prust VAN 18 134
Ryan Reaves STL 12 116
Matt Martin NYI 14 114
Defense
Mark Borowiecki OTT 11 107
Eric Gryba EDM 12 97
Robert Bortuzzo STL 8 93
Adam McQuaid BOS 7 85
Goalies
Corey Crawford CHI 69 8
Tuukka Rask BOS 74 8
332 1,686

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