Hello Managers,
This is the third and final part of the
Year in
Review
series. In this series, we’re looking at the best and worst teams of
the last five seasons to see what we can learn about team composition. In Part 1,
we tried to figure out if certain countries or regions are over- or
under-picked by good or bad teams. In Part 2, we did a similar analysis but
focused on sex. In Part 3, we’ll be covering a couple of variables, mostly
related to skating distances and events.
Sprinters vs Long-Distance Skaters: Are
they equally valuable?
You can have success with a balanced team or with a
team full of either sprinters, mid-distance skaters, or long-distance skaters.
All types of combinations have won and lost money over the year. There doesn’t
appear to be a golden combination that will work every season, but there are
some season-specific guidelines that you could safely follow.
Before we jump into it, I should mention that I
defined the three categories (a bit lazily). Sprinter were skaters who skated
the 500m or the sprint combo as their main event(s). Long-distance skaters were
those who were their best in any of the races that were at least 3000m long.
Mid-distance skaters were a bit harder to define, but most ended up being
skaters who 1) raced the 1000m/1500m combo as their main events or 2) raced the
1500m plus a longer distance but were noticeably better at the 1500m (for this
category I also included strong 1500m/MS combo skaters like Mantia (and yes I unfortunately
just called him strong (I hate it too))). When in doubt, I used my best judgment
(which happened a lot since plenty of skaters don’t fall nicely into any of
these categories. Like how about Cheon-Ho Um? Buddy was only good at mass start
but calling him a long-distance skater felt pretty bad when he never broke 6.40
in a Salt Lake City World Cup 5000m. I guess I should have made a 4
th
category called “bad”).
Now, take a look at the how many sprinters,
mid-distance, and long-distance skaters that the best and worst teams drafted
in each of the five past seasons. The numbers reflect the percent of total
skaters drafted that season by the five best/worst teams.
Overall, the best teams picked a higher rate of
long-distance skaters while the worst teams picked more sprinters and slightly
more mid-distance skaters. I do want to reiterate my comment from the start of
this section though:
All types of combinations have won and lost money over
the years. There doesn’t appear to be a golden combination that will work every
season, but there are some season-specific guidelines that you could safely
follow.
Let’s see what those guidelines are.
For starters, it’s important to know how many World
Cup 500m events are listed for the season. When there are multiple 500m events per
World Cup, sprinters gain a lot of value and tend to be worth about as much as
a comparable long-distance skater. Note the 2020 season, which featured double
500m events at every World Cup. Two things happened this season: good teams picked
almost as many sprinters as long-distance skaters, and top sprinters were
viable picks in the early rounds of the draft (Golikova was the 1
st
round pick for all three podium teams). 2018 had almost the same rate of 500m
events (5 of 6 Worlds Cups had 2x 500m) and we see the same rate of sprinters
picked as in 2020 (40%) and the top teams once again picked sprinters early (this
time it was Herzog and Kulizhnikov).
Alternatively, if there is only one 500m per weekend,
the best teams seem to leave their sprinter picks for later. Last season, the
top 10 teams that finished in the money drafted a total of ONE sprinter in the
first two rounds (that’s 5% of the picks in the first two rounds). Long-distance
skaters carried a lot more value last season.
Second, is this a World Sprints/Allrounds year? If it
is, then many male mid-distance skaters lose some value. Dutch beasts like
Kjeld or Krol aren’t guaranteed a spot at this event while skaters like Ning and
Mantia are incapable of skating a respectable 500m at World Sprints. Do keep in
mind that many female skaters who are primarily mid-distance beasts still carry
a lot of value at World Sprints/Allrounds (like Miho, Bowe, or a late-career
Wust).
Third, you should generally try to cap the number of
sprinters on your team at 40% (and definitely under 50%). Anything above this
and you'll run the risk of having too many roster spots competing for the same
points, especially at World Champs where sprint heavy teams usually run out of
steam. Some teams have seen success with a super sprint heavy squad, but this
seems to be the least common combo for winning teams. Last year’s
Sky Guy
crushed the regular season with a sprint heavy team but lost steam at
Worlds and fell to fifth place. The only team to podium with mostly sprinters
was Jonah’s ridiculously lucky bubble season roster that featured Lennart
Velema on the 500m podium.
Multi-Distance Specialists
It should come as no surprise that managers who draft
more skaters that are good at multiple distances often do better than managers
who draft too many single distance skaters. By "good" I mean a skater
who is getting top 8 finishes in multiple
different
distances (thus
excluding skaters who race multiple 500m events per weekend)).
In 2022, the five best teams drafted 24 skaters who
were good at two or more distances. In 2021, the top five teams drafted 25 good
multi-distance skaters. That’s 49 picks out of 100 over the past two seasons,
meaning the best teams are filling half their rosters with skaters who both
race a lot and earn a lot of points each time they race.
On the flip side, the worst five teams in 2022 drafted
9 such skaters, slightly less than the mark of 16 that they hit in 2021. That's
25 good multi-distance skaters in the past two seasons, almost exactly half of
what the best teams drafted. That is a massive difference between the best and
worst teams and I think that the reason why this is so important is so friggin
obvious that I won’t even bother explaining.
Now, does it matter when these skaters get picked? In
the first 4 rounds of the draft, the best teams have almost exclusively drafted
good multi-distance skaters. Only two types of single distance skaters
occasionally got picked up in the first four rounds of the drafts: 1) long
distance gods that skate both the 3k/5k or 5k/10k at World Champs, or 2) 500m
allstars drafted by Greg. The first group is composed of skaters like Nils van
der Poel, Martina Sablikova, and Natalia Voronina, who can make up a lot of
ground at Worlds when they finally get a chance to skate multiple distances
within the long-distance category (and essentially become multi-distance
skaters). The latter group is comprised of skaters like Yuma Murakami and Erin
"Mediocre" Jackson.
I had hypothesized that sprinters like Murakami and Jackson
would be an exception to the rule since they could technically race as often as
multi-distance skaters during 2x 500m weekends, though this actually didn't pan
out in the way that I thought it would. Only one top team has ever successfully
drafted a 500m specialist in the first three rounds during a 2x 500m World Cup
season, and once again that was Jonah during the freak 2020-2021 COVID season. In
fact, Jonah’s team was one of only two teams that have ever placed in the top TEN
and top half of the league during any season after drafting a 500m specialist in
the first three rounds.
The only other team? Greg's infamous 2022
Sky
Guy
roster that had MULTIPLE 500m specialists drafted in the first
three rounds during a World Cup season that featured only one 500m event per
World Cup. I don’t know about you, but I find this stat absolutely insane. The
lesson here is equally as obvious as the last lesson, but I’ll spell it out for
those of you who are on the slower side: the key to picking pure sprinters
early in the draft is to be Greg. There is no other way. You HAVE to be Greg.
If you aren’t Greg then you simply just aren’t good enough to pull this stunt
off.
Dwightdaddy69
vs
Sky Guy
: Would you rather win Worlds or the World Cup Circuit?
The same thing happens every season: one or two teams
look like they’re running away with the win, but then World Single Distance
Championships happens and tens of thousands of points get handed out and a
handful of teams that we had counted out start catapulting to the top of the
standings. This is the story that I always hint at when I write columns about
how only 28% of the season’s points have been distributed, meaning there is
still plenty of time left to make a comeback. But how true is this Cinderella story?
How often do lowly World Cup teams actually make up the difference at Worlds and
finish in the money?
Answering this question would have taken a bit of work
and it’s getting kind of late and I’m old and tired so I decided to leave this
one for Stepdad. Instead, I’ll answer a very similar but slightly more basic
question: if your goal is to win the league, is it more important to win the
World Cups, World Singles, or World Sprints/Allrounds? Or put another way, performance
at which of these three is most likely to indicate league success?
First off, I should point out that the three event
categories are not equally weighted. World Cups includes all the World Cups
plus the End of Season Rank points. The winner of this category usually scores
around 1400 points. World Singles is a relatively simple category and the
winner here usually scores in the 900s, though the highest recorded haul was
Dwightdaddy69
’s
1065 points. World Sprints/Allrounds is the combined total for these two competitions
regardless of whether they are actually scheduled as a single event and the
winner of this category usually scores in the 550-600 range. Knowing this, we
could logically assume that World Cups are the most important, then World
Singles, and then World Sprints/Allrounds.
Is this assumption accurate? It’s tough to say since
the winner usually does really well in all three events, though I’d argue that
the assumption is indeed accurate. On the one hand, we can see that the average
final league placement for teams that win World Sprints/Allrounds is the
highest (2
nd
overall) followed closely by the winner of the World
Cups category (3
rd
overall). On the other hand, no league winner has
ever placed worse than 2
nd
in the World Cup category. I find this
second stat extremely convincing. League winners have done as bad as 10
th
at World Singles, and the winner of World Singles has finished as low as 7
th
in the league, but the winner of the league has always been one of the top two
teams on the World Cup circuit.
As a second finding, I am surprised to see how strong
of a predictor that World Sprints/Allrounds is. I had predicted that the
numbers for this category would be by far the highest because this category is
worth the least points and predicting which skaters would attend this event
during the pre-season draft always felt harder than for the other categories. It
turns out that the winner of World Sprints/Allrounds has never placed worse
than 2
nd
overall in the league, and the league winner has never
missed the World Sprints/Allrounds podium. This category also had by far the
least data due to these events being reduced to a biannual status, though I
still find the numbers surprising despite their unreliability. I guess it turns
out that those 600ish points up for grabs at the last competition of the year can
really make or break a team.
Are highly specialized teams more likely
to win?
Our final analysis for today is to look at teams that are
highly specialized in particular distances (i.e. getting most of their points
in the 500m). Much like the last question, I got a bit lazy on this one. I went
through all the data but didn’t feel like presenting it in a nice, complete table
that tells a full story. Instead, you’ll have to deal with this very limited
summary:
This table shows the best, worst, and average league
final placement for teams that win each of the individual distance
classifications. One immediately obvious finding is that teams that have won
the 500m, 1000m, and 1500m have all gone on to win the league, though the same
cannot be said for the long-distance and mass start events. When combining this
with our findings regarding sprinters vs mid-distance skaters vs long distance
skaters, we can now say that despite long-distance skaters often being under-picked
by bad teams, focusing too hard on long-distance skaters may end up limiting
your ability to win overall.
Other than that, I don’t actually have much else to
say about his table. It looks like teams that have won the 1500m are on average
best positioned in the league standings with an average league finish of between
3
rd
and 4
th
. That being said, the average league finish
for both the winners of the 500m and the MS is only slightly further back at 4
th
flat. It does appear that highly specialized teams do quite well, though if you
look at the teams on the other end of the standings then it also becomes clear
that specialized teams are more likely to lose. It turns out that most managers
just favour certain distances and end up focusing their points in one or two
events. Or maybe my definition of a specialized team needs to be seriously
refined (winning a distance really doesn’t say much about how specialized a
team is since it would technically be possible to win every single distance. This is where my laziness is showing. Maybe I'll come back to this one another time).
One final note on the viability of specialization.
Only four teams have ever won money while earning zero points in one of the
five event categories. Two top-10 teams last year failed to earn a single point
from the mass start, while one top-10 team from last season and another top-10
team from the bubble season earned zero points from the 500m. So as much as dominating
one or two distances can give you an edge in the league standings, almost all good
teams appear to be competing for points in every single distance category
throughout the season. This makes sense since your skaters won’t all be
competing for the same points. By having skaters race in many different events,
you increase the total potential point pool that you can draw from.
What are the Golden Rules for drafting a
winning team?
It’s time that we summarize all three parts of this
series and compile our findings into a short list for future reference (maybe
this will be useful during the 2024 Draft Night). I’ll admit that calling any
of the following a “Golden Rule” is probably being a bit misleading since
winning teams really have been a diverse bunch and no single team composition
appears to be continuously winning. That being said, there are still some “Golden
Guidelines” that could be followed to improve you chances of winning.
1. Lean toward picking the strongest female skaters in
the early rounds and then fill the roster with depth men later in the draft.
2. Favour European skaters over Non-European skaters.
Specifically, draft the best Dutch skaters early, draft the longshot Dutch
skaters late, and stay away from those pesky Canadian "depth"
skaters.
3. Pay close attention to the season race schedule.
2x500m? Feel free to take your sprinters. World Allrounds/Sprints? Maybe leave
that male mid-distance skater for an extra round or two.
4. Strong multi-distance skaters are a must. You will
not succeed without them.
5. Draft a team that can compete throughout the full
season rather than a clutch team that only shows up at Worlds. The World Cups
are the most important category of events most seasons.
6. It is generally better to increase your access to a
larger potential point pool by drafting skaters who compete in different
events, though highly specialized teams have also been successful.
7. Don’t draft too many skaters who have sex.
8. If you want to draft strong 500m specialists in the
early rounds of the draft, make sure that you are Greg. This eighth and final guideline is so set in stone that it could safely be considered a golden rule.
So there you have it! Eight hopefully helpful guidelines
to help you draft stronger teams. Hopefully this means I can stop watching half
of you draft Larry in the first round, or Allan in the second round, or Esther Kiel
in the third round, or too many Canadians in every round. Every year the draft gets more and
more competitive, and I hope this column can contribute even a little bit to
that.
Looking ahead, World Cup 5 is just around the corner and I am quickly
running out of time to publish some other posts I’ve been working on. I’ve got
a round table discussion with a couple of fantasy speed skating experts coming
up in the next few days and then I’m also considering releasing an updated
version of the power rankings now that we’ve seen most national team trial
events for World Singles and World Allrounds/Sprints. This would also include an updated Injury and Free Agent Tracker, something that is long overdue. Just don’t be surprised if
either or both of those posts get released later than I want.
Bye for now, Shitters.
Dad