Welcome back to this week’s edition of The L&F Starting Line Ups series! Every week the co-hosts of the Life & Fantasy Podcast, Spence Plamondon and Kaveh Ghidy will face off against Hot Sauce Blogger Jon Eamon in a battle for your votes and affection! We will be drafting weekly line ups based on a specific criteria that pulls inspiration from sports, pop culture and life in general!
This week’s draft is the final edition of our playoff pool as we drafted from the two team competing for the Stanley Cup; the Tampa Bay Lightning and Montreal Canadiens. We used real NHL salaries with a cap of $32 million ceiling for all six players. There is one small twist this week though, we decided to go all in on this matchup which includes a punishment for the losers. The loser of the Stanley Cup Fantasy Matchup will have to do a hot sauce bet! Keeping things spicy!
Let’s dive in.
CRITERIA
1. You do not talk about Fight Club.
2. You do not talk about Fight Club.
ROTISSERIE CATEGORIES
- Goals (G)
- Assists (A)
- Power Play Points (PPP)
- Game Winning Goals (GWG)
- Shots (S)
- Wins (W)
- Saves (SV)
- Shut Outs (SO)
Before diving into the Stanley Cup Final draft, here is s a look at the standings thus far.
Now, to this week’s draft!
PICK 1 – TEAM SPENCE & KAVEH
Corey Perry (LW, MTL)
Nick Suzuki (C, MTL)
Nikita Kurcherov (RW, TBL)
Victor Hedman (D, TBL)
Erik Gustafsson (D, MTL)
Andrei Vasilevskiy (G, TBL)
Starting this off, we weren’t sure which way to go. We considered Kucherov briefly before deciding we needed to snag one of the habs entry-level studs. We leaned heavily towards Caufield before deciding on Suzuki; we felt the bang-for-your-buck at centre was too good to pass up.
After that, we waited to see where Jon and Terry were gonna go. We badly wanted Suzuki-Caufield but we were sure CC would be taken. Sure enough, he was. They went Point-Caufield, so we decided to go balls-to-the-wall and take Kucherov-Hedman, cap be damned. It was too good to pass up.
Jon and Terry followed that with Killorn-Price, which made the goalie decision for us (something we’d planned on), allowing us to pick Vasi with our last pick. After filling up four classroom-sized, wall-length chalkboards we crunched the numbers and figured out how much space we had minus Vasi’s cap hit and settled on Corey Perry and Erik Gustafsson. Perry’s been turning back the clock all season and we’re both feeling like he’s got some magic left in him for this final up ahead. Gustafsson, look… we weren’t THRILLED to have him. He’s prone to horrible brain cramps out there, but he’s on the Top PP and he moves the puck fairly well. Also, we didn’t have much of a choice. Thank god the Flyers retained half his cap hit too, otherwise we’d be looking at Brett Kulak or Jon Merrill.
Both teams are awesome, I really love where all our heads at. Here’s to a hard fought final!
PICK 2 – TEAM JON & TERRY
Alex Killorn (LW, TBL)
Brayden Point (C, TBL)
Cole Caufield (RW, MTL)
Erik Cernak (D, TBL)
Jeff Petry (D, MTL)
Carey Price (G, MTL)
Balancing what our hearts wanted versus what our heads were telling us was a very difficult proposition. However, snagging Carey Price went a long way in helping with that so while we may have reached for him a little early, we needed to appease our fandom a bit there!
Getting back to the top of the order, once Spence and Kaveh went Suzuki we knew that we had to take Caufield or he would never make it back to us. It was an easy pick to make considering the way he played against the Golden Knights and he is still on his Entry Level Contract since he has yet to formally play his rookie season! We were torn on the next pick, Point, Kucherov, Hedman, Price?! There was not shortage of talent to chose from but we agreed that Point offers cap flexibility later in the draft and Kucherov’s health was a minor concern.
Spence and Kaveh went reallll heavy at the 2/3 turn and props to them because if they didn’t draft both, one of them would have been on our roster and the cap juggling act would have began. For our third pick we decide to roll the dice on the hometown kid in Alex Killorn. He has been a machine in the playoffs and currently sits third in scoring. Being from Montreal we fully expect Killorn to burn the Habs a few times, as much as we hate to admit it. With the fourth pick we went Carey Price for obvious reasons, we wanted our fantasy and real life fandom to align and realistically speaking the Habs are likely to be outshot so we should get the category win there, hopefully.
To finish off the roster we had to get the defenseman with the highest potential for points on the Habs. Petry is playing through an injury, and the Habs are not generating much offense from the back end but if they are going to win they will need their D to step up. Cue Jeff Petry and his red eyes! Finally, Cernak fit with the remaining cap space we had left and he has been sneaky productive for the Lightning. He sits 6th in points for a Defenseman with all of his points coming at Even Strength, which hurts the PP category, but we have more than enough talent on both team’s PP to offset this.
Be sure to let us know who’s team you think is the best, as well as what roster combination you would create with $32M in cap space? Be sure to let us know in the comments along with the Line Up you would draft and you could win your chance to join Spence, Kaveh and Jon for a draft one week to see if you can take us down!
As always don’t forget to check out the rest of the Hot Sauce Family as well as our Youtube page with all of our podcasts and videos! On this week’s episode of the Life & Fantasy Podcast Spence, Kaveh and Jared recap the Conference Finals and preview the Stanley Cup Finals between the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Montreal Canadiens!