Mission | Scoring System | How we got here | JOIN!

 

Mission:

Provide the best damn Fantasy Hockey League on the web.

How it all works:

The whole scoring system may look confusing at first...here's how it works.

  • Draft:
    The Campbell draft is held through an Instant Messenger chat room; all others are live drafts. Before the draft, everyone picks a number between 1 and 100. Then, a random number is selected to determine the draft order. The closest to that number gets first pick, second closest gets second pick, etc. In an attempt to keep things as even as possible, the draft order goes 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1. So, the team with the 1st pick doesn't pick again until the 18th pick. This is also known as a "snake" draft order.
    The rosters are set at 10 forwards, 7 defensemen, and 3 goalies.
  • Scoring:
    There are 5 skater categories and 3 goalie categories that are used to create the totals and standings.
    The skater categories are Goals, Assists, Points, Penalty Minutes, and Plus Minus. Goalie categories are Wins, Goals Against Average (GAA), and Minutes Played.
    These totals accumulate from your active players. If there are nine teams in the league, the team with the most total goals gets 9 points in that category. The team with the second most gets 8 points, etc.
    Your overall score in the standings is determined by your points in all 8 categories.
  • Trading:
    Trades can occur as early as the end of the draft. Teams cannot deviate from their 10 forward-7 defensemen-3 goalie lineup, so a goalie must be traded for a goalie, etc.
    Trades can be submitted here. There's a trade talk page available where teams can put players on a trading block to show that they're available for the right price.
    To complete a trade, one team must logon to the Trade page and submit the trade. Upon doing so, an email is sent to the other team with a link to validate the trade. Upon going to that page, they can accept or deny the trade. Traded players get swapped immediately and the new players for your team begin accumulating points that night.
  • Bidding:
    At the beginning of the season, each team is given $100 to work with for bidding on free agents. At Christmas, another $100 is tacked on to each team's total. Think of it as my Christmas gift to the teams. Bids are run every Sunday night at midnight. A team can attempt to drop a player for any player at that position not currently on a team. Teams can attempt to drop up to 3 players per week. Free agents can be found here. Bid values are in whole dollar amounts. Bidding commences a couple weeks into the season and closes approximately 3 weeks before the end of the year.
    A team's money available is shown at the top of their team page

    An interesting piece of this league is that there is NO Injured Reserve. So, if your star is going to be out awhile, you have to make a tough decision of dropping them for someone else and hoping to get them when they get healthy, or take 0's each day for the player and potentially lose valuable points.
    If you win your bid, the player you "drop" stops accumulating stats for your team and goes into your Inactive Players list. Your new player begins accumulating stats at that point. In the below graphic, David Tanabe was dropped for Karel Rachunek.

  • At the end of the season, there is a Playoff Picks tournament available for anyone interested. Select who you think will win each round in the playoffs and see where you end up. You receive one point for each correct pick in the first round, 2 points for the second round, 3 for the third round, and 4 for selecting the stanley cup winner. You can see results from Playoff Picks '07 Here.

Schreibdog.com is hosted through a Pittsburgh-based ISP at www.pair.com. Web code utilizes PHP, HTML, and JavaScript. Background processes use Perl and TC Shell. The database is MySQL.

How we got here:

March '94...One cold evening in March 1994, Ryan Brown and I headed out to a Penguin game. During the car ride, we were talking about the upcoming rotisserie baseball season and who we wanted to get on our team. After awhile, we thought it would be fun to run a fantasy hockey league. Like baseball's hitting and pitching categories, we selected skater and goalie categories and said we'd give it a shot next season.

September, '94...We held the draft for Fantasy Hockey League 1994-95 at the end of September. Each team had $300 to spend on 9 forwards, 8 defensmen, and 3 goalies. Bidding started at $1 for each player and went until only one team was left. Stats for the year were run every Sunday night from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and entered into Lotus 1-2-3 on an old 386SX computer. FHL was born.

September, '95...Three teams out, three new teams in. After a successful season during the lockout with Ryan being the champion, we went at it again. Every team held eight players except the new teams, which received 5 players from the defunct clubs. Same draft, same rules. Year 2 got underway.

September, '96...One team out and two new clubs in. Ryan won again the past year. Interest was up more than ever and we got through a third draft. Near the end of the season, interest slowed and final stats were never totally calculated. We'll just say that I won that year :)

September, '98...After taking a year off, I tried to get people interested in going for FHL version 4. rotonews.com had a free stats service so I used that to lessen the workload. Few moves were made and most owners let their teams ride.

August, '01...Tito and I were at Handel's getting ice cream not long before I moved to South Carolina. We started talking about web design and also talked about the old Fantasy Hockey League I used to have. "It'd be cool if we could do that online somehow". The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like it could work. When I moved down south, I knew no one and had nothing else to do, so I started making the site. I was able to pull 4 owners from the original FHL (Ryan, Chris Huber, Joe Babyak, Greg Lewis) and got a few other teams involved. Since some of us no longer lived in Pittsburgh, we held a draft through AOL Instant Messenger Chat and picked a number from 1-100 to determine the draft order. After three years, FHL was back.

September, '02...One team out and one team in. I'm still amazed that only a few things broke during our first run on schreibdog.com. Stats got interrupted for a few days, some bids didn't go through right, but all in all, it survived. Chris Huber won his first FHL title last year. We held the draft via chat room again, and FHL version 6.0 got underway.

September, '03...Since two years went well online, and more people were interested, I decided to add a second league to the mix, the "Campbell" conference. A couple of guys bailed at the last second, but we still added 7 new owners to FHL and Chris Huber and I added ourselves to the league.
18 teams in 2 separate leagues: a far cry from what used to be when this began nine years ago. Last year, Ryan Brown took over his usual position as fantasy hockey king...I'll pass him up someday...

September, '05...After the NHL's year-long hiatus, FHL starts up again for the 8th season. Since I moved back to Pittsburgh, we were able to have a live draft for the Wales Conference league. One new team in the Wales conference and 4 new teams in the Campbell. A couple teams from 1996 make their return (Shawn Rudy in the Wales, and Marc Kraszewski in the Campbell).
Pete Egburtson won the Campbell league last season in a tight 3 team race and Ryan again took the championship in the Wales league.

September, '06...FHL Year number 9. We held the Wales draft again at my house and kept the same teams from last year. The Campbell league had some re-arranging as new comers Dave Ingold and Ryan Brown jumped in.
Last year, Scott Coles took the hardware home in the Campbell league, and Ryan won again in the Wales league.

September, '07...The 10 year anniversary (well, really 13, since we skipped a few years way back when) of Schreibdog FHL, and we kicked it off in style by adding a third league, started by Ryan and a group of his friends. Ryan again won the Wales league by edging Chris Huber out in the last couple weeks, and Scott Coles picked up his second consecutive Campbell League trophy.

I want YOU!

I'm always looking for more fantasy hockey players to add. Would you like to join? I have plenty of spots to fill for next season, so let me know! Thanks!

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--Hope you like my little home here.
Yours truly,
Mike Schreiber
"Schreibdog"



Last Night's Scores
ARZ 8 - NSH 4
CAR 4 - DET 0
NYR 3 - COL 2 (SO)
EDM 4 - LA 1
NYI 3 - FLA 2
MIN 3 - SJ 1
MTL 4 - PHI 1
OTT 2 - CHI 0
PIT 3 - CBJ 2
SEA 4 - ANH 2
STL 5 - CGY 3
TOR 5 - WSH 1
DAL 3 - VAN 1
VGK 4 - WIN 1

Today's Schedule
NJ at BUF