Hello Managers,
After a month-long hiatus, Dad’s finally back with some new content. I was
planning to do a simple
Year in Review
post, but then I thought “why not
give the readers what they really want?” So, lucky for you, instead of a look
back at just one year, I’ll be looking back over the past five years. Dad’s
Column is only Dad’s Column if we take things to the extreme and go over the
top.
That being said, I have taken to heart many readers’ concerns that some of
these posts were getting too long. I apologize, I didn’t realize most of y’all
were so bad at reading. “6000 words? That’s WAY too much!” said Graeme Fish.
“Wait, you can read??” replied Dad. Sometimes I forget that the bulk of my
readership is entering their mid 20s, meaning their age has finally surpassed
their IQ. Since I honestly don’t think I’m capable of cramming this
Year in
Review
into one small post, I have broken it up into multiple parts so that
each can be shorter. I hope this makes it easier for you idiots to read. As of
now I am planning on this to be split into only two parts. If that stretches to
three, or four, or five, don’t be surprised.
Finally, I’ve modeled this post after Stepdad’s gracious filler content
earlier this month. Reading about the relationship between team name length and
team success may not be the most thrilling content, but it did get me thinking:
what actually leads to a team’s success? How are winning teams built? And what
can we learn from the worst teams of the past five seasons?
This post is a bit of a departure from previous posts, as the intent here is
for you to maybe actually kind of learn something. Are my methods questionable?
Possibly. Is the science good? Let’s just say I have a poor understanding of
numbers and a loose relationship with the truth. But at least I’m not Stepdad,
which means we’re off to a pretty good start.
Five Years in Review
This league humbly began with a 12-team draft back in 2018. Everything went
about exactly as expected: Cody won, Dad finished in 2
nd
, and every
other team was hundreds of points behind. The competition was essentially over
by the end of World Cup 1.
Fast forward 5 years and the league has grown to 40 teams. Our defending
champion is still Cody, Dad is still roughly in 2
nd
(give or take 10
or 15 spots), and there are plenty of teams that constantly find themselves
hundreds of points back. But not every team.
Currently leading our league is a veteran manager who is trying to beat his
league personal best of 5
th
place that he set back in that inaugural
2018-2019 season. Last year we saw Sky Guy narrowly miss the top spot in the
very last day of the season. The Melines shared the podium during the messy
COVID/Russian ban season of 2021-2022, and the original
Creatures of Habit
held on to the league title ahead of a surging
Dwightdaddy69
back
in 2019-2020.
Each of these top teams had a different roster of 10 skaters, but there are
still a lot of similarities among these teams. Team construction isn’t
something we talk about much in this column, but having a rough idea of how you
want your team to look like come Draft Night and having a strategy to achieve
that will set you well ahead of the shitters of the league. Don’t know what you
want your team to look like? Then it’s time to start asking some questions: Do
male skaters outperform female skaters? Should I draft my team solely off the
results from Dutch Trials? Is it possible to rely too much on sprinters? Does
it matter how many events my skaters compete in? And why is North America a
cesspool for underwhelming draft picks?
I’ve gone back and looked at the best and worst teams of the last five
seasons. For the top teams, I selected the five best teams from each of the
past 4 seasons as well as the four best teams from the 2018-2019 season. That
adds up to 24 teams who collectively made 232 draft picks (the league changed
from 8 skaters per team to 10 for the 2019-2020 season). For the worst teams, I
did the same but from the opposite end of the standings. Since the super short
COVID bubble season of 2020-2021 messes with our data a bit (like the near
absence of non-European skaters) and the 2018-2019 fantasy season featured a
much shorter skater list, for some of the things we’ll be looking at I’ll be
focusing on the past two seasons. This means the top/bottom 5 teams from each
of those two season, so 10 good/bad teams and 100 draft picks on each end of
the spectrum (which makes percentages easy to calculate even for someone of my
mathematic ability). When comparing the top teams against the bottom teams,
what can we learn?
Does Geography Matter?
Home Country Bias
One thing that I’ve noticed year after year is that the teams greedily
winning all the Emins tend to have a lot of Canadians on their roster. On the
flip side, good teams seem to lack Canadian skaters. Cody has outright won the
league twice, landed on the podium two more times, and his worst ever finish
was 7
th
. Over those five seasons, Cody drafted a single Canadian.
Not one Canadian a season, but one Canadian total. Since the inception of the
league, only two teams have finished in the top 5 of the league standings with
more than a single Canadian on their roster (with the most recent example
coming from the 2020 draft).
On the flip side, bad teams seem to be full of these pesky Canadians. Last
year's losing team (
CBT
) had three Canadians, the famed
Even
Steven's Semen Eating Emins
of 2018-2019 had three Canadians, and
Marc-André's legendarily bad 2021-22 roster had a whopping five Canadians.
Don't be like these managers.
Now, before Stepdad rushes to the comments to call these examples out as
cherry picked or anecdotal, I’ll provide some numbers (if you can’t count
beyond 10, I would maybe stop reading here). The bottom teams of the last 5
seasons drafted 36 Canadians out of 232 draft slots. That's almost 16% of their
draft picks being Canadian skaters. The rate has been quickly increasing, with
22 of those coming in the past two seasons (out of a possible 100 draft picks,
so 22% of picks).
The top teams have drafted a total of 16 Canadian skaters over the past five
seasons, well under half the rate that bottom teams draft Canadians. Once
again, the more recent years show an even more alarming trend. Only 6 of those
16 Canadians have come in the past two seasons (out of a possible 100 draft
picks, so 6%). This means that the worst teams have recently been drafting
Canadians at almost 4x the rate of the best teams.
Why do teams with Canadians suck? We all know that some Canadian picks tend
to overperform, such as Ivanie Blondin after the 1
st
round. My best
guess would be that the weaker managers run out of picks early on Draft Night
and struggle to fill the last few slots on their team. Since they don’t have a
long enough list of picks to get through the full draft, they start to rely too
much on skaters that they are more familiar with which often means drafting a
(weaker) Canadian skater. Picking Ivanie or Larry in the early rounds doesn’t
doom your team just because you’ve drafted a Canadian, but picking Marsha,
Tyson, Kaylin, Lina, or Anders in the late rounds of the draft simply because
you can’t think of better names from other parts of the world usually ends up
with you losing your $10. Long story short, stop drafting so many Canadians and
maybe you'll have a chance. We only have to look at last year's winning team to
see how well a Canadian-less team can perform.
Meer Nederlanders = Goed?
The Dutch produce more than enough skaters for managers to look no further
than Dutch Trials when studying for Draft Night. The old saying “winning Dutch
Trials is harder than winning an Olympic medal” is so obviously not true, but
it’s also not the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. Dutch skaters that qualify for
their first World Cup season really do outperform other countries’ rookies.
Last year we saw Snellink, Grevelt, and Wennemars all crush international
podiums by their second World Cup, and de Boo looks like he’s threatening to
make a serious impact by the end of this season.
So can you get away with just drafting Dutch skaters? Or are they safe to
ignore? Over the past five seasons, the bottom teams drafted 61 Dutch skaters.
Over the same period, 70 Dutch skaters were drafted by top teams. At first
glance, things look relatively equal. Maybe drafting Dutch skaters has little
bearing on a team's success? Though, if we look under the hood, we see that
things aren't quite that simple.
Going back to the first two season of our league, the podium teams drafted
14 Dutch skaters and the bottom three drafted 22. The league podium finishers
from the last two seasons have a cumulative 20 Dutch skaters, while the bottom
three teams of the past two season have a total of 13. In two of the last three
seasons, the worst team in the league had zero Dutch skaters. Over time, the
best teams have gone from drafting fewer to more Dutch skaters. The current
meta seems to favour stacking up on the Dutch elite, but it was only a few
seasons ago that having more Dutch skaters correlated negatively with fantasy
league success.
It's also important to note which rounds each team is drafting Dutch skaters
in. Simply having enough
Dutch skaters probably isn’t enough to win; one needs to draft Dutch skaters in the right rounds of the draft too.
Here is a table showing the number of Dutch skaters
picked in each round of the draft by the five best teams in each of the past
five seasons.
There are three phases of the draft in which good
teams pick Dutch skaters. In the first three rounds, the best teams appear to
be loading up on elite Dutch skaters (examples would be Roest, Schouten,
Groenewoud, Rijpma-de Jong). In the next three rounds, the best teams appear to
be avoiding Dutch skaters. In four of the first five seasons in this league,
the top teams didn’t pick a single Dutch skater in the 5th round. Finally,
picking Dutch skaters in the late rounds of the draft seems to tick up a bit as
managers make bets on risky skaters with relatively high ceilings (such as
Dijs, Hoolwerf, or Michelle de Jong).
Now let’s compare this to the historically worst teams.
Here is a table showing the number of Dutch skaters picked in each round by the
five worst teams in each of the past five seasons.
In this table, the three phases are a lot harder to
make out. Bad teams seem to pick Dutch skaters at a fairly consistent rate
across each phase of the draft. When compared to the top teams, this becomes
very obvious. The following table shows how many Dutch skaters the five best and worst teams pick in each phase of the draft.
So, why are these three phases so important, particularly
for Dutch skaters? During the early rounds, picking the absolute top skaters is
a must. You may not be able to win in the first round (just take a quick look
at how bad this year’s crop of teams with Stolz is doing), but you can
definitely lose the league in the first round (Yank taking Haotian Wang in the
1
st
last year was the first step to his all-time worst team, earning
the least points ever seen in a full season). Picking the big Dutch names (such
as Roest, Schouten, or Groenewoud) early in the draft almost always pays off. These
skaters race a lot, earn lots of points when they race, and almost always
clutch up at Worlds.
Drafting the second tier of Dutch skaters carries a
lot more risk and this is likely why the top teams seem to avoid Dutch skaters
over the middle phase of the draft. Skaters like Otterspeer, Fledderus, and
Michelle de Jong are good skaters, but what if they don’t make World Champs?
What if they miss the winter World Cups? If you take these skaters and they
qualify for everything, then you’ve likely made a very good pick. But skaters
at this level too often end up burning their team by underperforming later in
the season. Just ask any hopeful manager that drafted Hollaar, Visser, Ntab, or
Verbij over the past few seasons.
In the final phase of the draft, top teams usually
start exposing themselves to a bit more risk. Taking a dud in the first 6 rounds
really hurts, but screwing up in the 8
th
or 9
th
round can
almost always be fixed with a quick free agent pickup. Otterspeer, Fledderus,
and de Jong might be risky picks in the 2
nd
phase, but near the end
of the draft they are usually the skaters on the market with the highest points
ceiling. They are joined by other Dutch skaters like Hoolwerf who are
absolutely worth picking but just not good enough to ever justify being
selected in the first two phases. Whether managers are looking to go big or go
home, or they just need another steady earning points option, there are usually
plenty of solid Dutch names available in the final phase of the draft.
So what’s the lesson here? Well, Dutch skaters aren’t inherently
bad by any means. But, because of how competitive Dutch trials is, picking
skaters in the first two phases who have a high chance of seeing their season
cut short can end up costing your team a lot. Early in the draft, don’t bother
to shy away from the big Dutch names (and no, winning Dutch trials does not
make them a big Dutch name – previous World Cup success is usually much more
important!). In the middle phase of the draft, maybe lean away from taking some
of the riskier names. If Kjeld falls to you in the 4
th
or 5
th
,
don’t avoid drafting him just because Dad said to avoid Dutch skaters in the
middle rounds. But if you have a choice between drafting David Bosa, who will
race everything every damn season, and Merijn Scheperkamp, who may only end up
skating a handful of World Cups, maybe you should think twice about instantly picking
Scheperkamp even if he really is the better skater. The best skaters don’t always
make the World Cups and your “better” skaters won’t do your fantasy team much good
if they’re not competing internationally.
Europeans vs The World
Finally, there is a third countries-related category
that is useful when comparing the best and the worst teams of past seasons. Are
European skaters generally a safer bet than non-Europeans? Or are Asia and
North America untapped wells full of rich talent? For this category, we had to
rely mostly on the last two years of data since the COVID bubble season really
skewed the numbers due to the lack of non-European skaters that went to
Heerenveen to compete.
Much like when I looked at Canadian skaters and Dutch
skaters, there was a clear difference between what the best and worst teams
were doing here. The bottom five teams of the past two seasons drafted 45
European skaters out of a total of 100 draft slots. The top teams drafted a
whopping 68 European skaters over the same period. This means that the bottom
teams had over half their rosters coming from Asia and North America (surprisingly,
none of these teams drafted skaters from New Zealand or Australia the past two
seasons) while the best teams tend to limit the number of Asian and North
American skaters to less than a third of their roster.
I think a large part of this is similar to the
home-country bias that we saw with Canadian skaters being overpicked by bad
managers. Additionally, the fast pre-season times that we see coming out of
Calgary and Salt Lake City usually make Canadians and Americans look very
strong on the global leaderboards heading into Draft Night. For lazy managers
that simply look at the SpeedSkatingResults pre-season leaderboards, skaters
like Cooper Mcleod and Carolina Hiller look super strong going into the first
World Cup. Between the fast altitude-induced times and the familiar North American
names, it’s not surprising that bad managers fall into the trap of picking too
many North American skaters.
Interestingly, it has been suggested to me by Stepdad that
Asian skaters are underpicked by bad teams and that Asia really is the untapped market
of the skating world. A very brief look at this shows that bad teams pick more Asians
than good teams do, coming in at 25 and 18 respectively over the past two
seasons. This very brief and inadequate analysis suggest that bad teams are
overpicking all skaters from outside of Europe, but I invite Stepdad to contest
my findings by means of a more legitimate analysis, possibly based more on
numbers than vibes.
I’m quickly running out of space as I just remember that
I promised to keep this post relatively short. In summary, we’ve so far found
out that 1) picking Canadian skaters = bad, 2) picking Dutch skaters = situationally
bad, and 3) picking Europeans = generally good.
I’ll follow this post up soon with a look at some
other questions such as when to pick skaters of each sex, do your skaters need
to race multiple distances for your team to succeed, and is there a benefit to scoring points in all
distance categories or can a specialized team really win?
Until next time,
Dad