Do you need the top scorer in the NHL to win your fantasy hockey pool?

You know the scenario; you're all set for your NHL fantasy hockey pool draft and you draw your card to see your draft position, and...

... it's not the first pick overall. Worse, you're drafting 10th. So you can't get McDavid, or Kucherov, or Draisaitl, or MacKinnon, or...

... well, heck, you can't get any of the top scorers that you'd envisioned getting before the draft began.

So the big question is, can you still win the pool without the top scorer?

The answer is, fortunately, yes. I've poured over 14 years of stats from the numerous pools that we've tracked for folks with TheHockeyPool.com and looked at the effect of having the top scorer.

Figure 1 is a graph showing year-by-year the percentage of teams who both had the league-leading scorer AND that won their fantasy pools that season.

Figure 1. The percentage of teams who both won their pool and who had drafted the top scorer. The advantage of drafting that player seem to have decreased over the past few seasons.

For pools with unique player selections per-player-team (or per-poolie as we like to say), the good news is that the correlation between having the top scorer and winning the pool has decreased over the years.

For the Regular Season back in 2011, it shows that you would have won the pool 30% of the time if you'd managed to draft the top scorer during the 2011/2012 season (Malkin).

From 2012 through 2018, however, the odds dropped to around 20% of the time, and since then the odds have only hovered around 10%.

So since the average number of Poolies in the pools we have tracked over this time is 10 (10.66 if you want to get more exact!), a ten percent chance of winning the pool if you draft the leading scorer is no better than perfectly random! So good news is that is not the magic trick to winning your pool. There is something more to be done in order to win your pool. Of course, if you have a chance to draft a leading scorer, take it! But, follow it up with other actions afterwards. We're going to try to unpack more of those actions in this blog.

The Playoff picture is a little murkier, and we'll dive deeper into that in future blog posts as well. But the correlation between having the leading scorer in the playoffs and winning your playoff pool also seems to have dropped and leveled off recently, albeit, at a slightly higher, near 20% winning percentage. So having the leading scorer in the Playoffs does approximately double your chances of winning, but in all likelyhood, the leading scorer is going to be on one of the two teams that meet in the cup, so picking the cup winners is likely a larger driving factor - anyway we'll continue to unpack that.

Box Pools

Now some pools don't have exclusive drafts - that is, they are what we call Box Drafts where multiple teams can draft the same player. In looking at these pools, the percentage of teams that win that also draft the leading scorer is higher than the pools shown above. This seems logical; if there are no restrictions on drafting, most folks are going to go after the leading scorers, so the chances of finding the leading scorer on the team that eventually wins is higher. But in that regard, it will be the lower scoring picks that differentiate the winners from the other poolie teams.

Figure 2. Box Pools allow multiple people to draft the same player, the percentage of teams increases with this type of pool as it is more likely that the winning team also has the top scorer since the leading scorer will be on multiple teams. I mean if you have a chance to take Kucherov or Draisatl or McDavid, you take them, yeah?

Interestingly, we do see a similar overall shape to the graphs which indiates that in recent years, drafting the leading scorer is less of an important factor in winning your pool. Might this be due to more parity in the league? Or other factors?

For completeness, here are the leading scorers we checked against for all these seasons:

What are your thoughts? I'd love to hear from you about this topic or about others you'd like me to cover in future blogs! Please let us know using the BLOG FEEDBACK link on the left side of page.