Standings Update

As with last week, the Tuesday night game had a big effect on the standings: Northeastern handled Vermont with ease, 4-1, with big payoffs for everyone who had invested in Aerin Frankel, Alina Müller, Chloe Aurard or Veronika Pettey. This was particularly good for Northeastern graduate and homer Nate Vaughan, who went up by almost four points on the back of that single game and up two places in the standings. I won’t say who dropped three places because it was me. Full standings as of today are on the standings tab till it updates, and can be found permanently here.

Final standings for the week, and final costs for trades for players on the relevant teams, will have to wait for the BC/UConn game at BC tonight, Thursday. This will probably help some more managers, including Hockey East graduate and homer Nate Vaughan.

Some advice from a friendly computer

I’ve updated my table that recommends the best player at any given cost so that it ignores players who’ve played less than six games. Without that extra condition, it was recommending players from Brown who I really don’t expect to sustain their performance, and players from Cornell and Princeton who it’s really too early to get a bead on. With that said, here are the players who’ve scored more than a point a game that the sheet really thinks you should be looking at.

• Loren Gabel (Clarkson, $76.3, 2.36 PPG)
• Ella Shelton (Clarkson, $49.9, 1.89 PPG)
• Maureen Murphy (Providence, $39.1, 1.87 PPG)
• Samantha Ridgewell (Merrimack, G, $36.5, 1.54 PPG)
• Abigail Levy (Minnesota State, G, $23.8, 1.54 PPG)
• Andrea Brändli (OSU, G, $23, 1.18 PPG)
• Sara Hjalmarsson (Providence, $20.4, 1.17 PPG)
• Morgan Fisher (UConn, G, $18.5, 1.03 PPG)
• Hallie Theodosopoulos (St Cloud, $16.2, 1.03 PPG)
• Lauren Bailey (Robert Morris, G, $12.6, 1.02 PPG)/

Of these players, none of you have picked Samantha Ridgewell or Abigail Levy. The sheet is judging you heavily for not picking Samantha Ridgewell or Abigail Levy, though it does understand why you liked Kassidy Sauvé. None of you have picked Hallie Theodosopoulos either, though it is of course possible that some of you have started picking her but haven’t finished yet. (Because her name is very long, get it!)

Games this weekend

All three WCHA games pit one of the top teams against a team from the lower tier: Bemidji are at Minnesota, St. Cloud are at Ohio State, Wisconsin are at Minnesota State. Minnesota State took Ohio State to overtime three weeks ago but Wisconsin are an even stiffer test; it’ll be interesting to see how Abigail Levy stands up against the Badgers. Minnesota are missing Pannek and Potomak, so this is a chance for Nicole Schammel to go even further ahead in this year’s points race. St Cloud are missing their two top goalies and Ohio State are not missing Emma Maltais, just sayin.

The CHA has three pairs of conference games: Mercyhurst at Lindenwood, Syracuse at Penn State, Robert Morris at RIT. Mercyhurst and Robert Morris are favorites, though not prohibitively so. Syracuse seem to be having a down year and Penn State seem to be up, so this could be a chance for Penn State to stake a real claim to second in the conference.

The ECAC is almost all conference play. (I should explain the ECAC schedule here. The twelve-team conference is split into six pairs of “travel partners”: from north-west to south-east, Clarkson / St. Lawrence, Cornell / Colgate, Union / RPI, Princeton / Quinnipiac, Harvard / Dartmouth, Brown / Yale.  On a conference weekend, two pairs of travel partners are matched up and each team from the first pair plays each team from the second pair: so if Cornell/Colgate travel to Yale/Brown, as happens this weekend, on one night you have Cornell v Yale and Colgate v Brown and on the other night you have Cornell v Brown and Colgate v Yale. This happens most conference weekends; on the others, each travel pair plays a set of home-and-home games between themselves, so Colgate at Cornell followed by Cornell at Colgate. Knowing this helps compress the game descriptions, as follows.)

Two sets of games offer opportunities for a lot of point scoring. Cornell and Colgate play Yale and Brown, which is either a chance for Cornell and Colgate to score all the goals or a chance for Brown to surprise everyone yet again. Clarkson (without Gabel) and St. Lawrence play Union and RPI (without Selander in goal, RIP RPI). A perhaps more even set of games is Dartmouth and Harvard against Quinnipiac and Princeton — this will be a chance to see if Princeton really is the best of those four teams, as it currently seems to be. We need to wait till the weekend after Four Nations, November 16-17, for the really intriguing matchups between Princeton and first Colgate, then Cornell. Amazingly, Princeton doesn’t play Clarkson or St. Lawrence till February 2019.

Hockey East is also almost all conference play, with a lone Vermont/Dartmouth game tucked away next Tuesday. BC take on Providence in BC’s last game till after Four Nations — remember that BC will be missing Caitrin Lonergan, Cayla Barnes, Megan Keller and Kali Flanagan for this one. Providence don’t have quite the depth of BC but this could still be a test for BC’s underperforming offense. Vermont plays New Hampshire twice. Maine plays Merrimack, which could be a big game to see if Merrimack continues punching above its historical weight, and then plays Holy Cross, which seems like an opportunity for lots of goals. And Northeastern plays Holy Cross, which should be a good game for a lot of our managers, including Northeastern graduate and homer Nate Vaughan.

Trades, based on the current cost on the Cost tab, by 11.59 pm Eastern Time Thursday November 1 to tigFantasyHockey@gmail.com, please. Good luck everyone!