Ladies, Start your Engines!

We’re off to the Autoshow today.  What will be there?  Never been and with the industry in a nosedive…who knows?  But we’ll report back here later 2nite. Congrats to Kenseth for the Daytona win!  Now we start our Fantasy Nascar season from the back row! Whoops!  Speaking of Nascar, we predict this is the last season for the COT.

Canucks win! Burrows shines!  Brilliant!

Michel Therrien fired!  Just like we predicted in October:

Also, we predict the Penguins will fire their coach Michel Therrien by the end of the season.  We’re still at a loss as to why this guy got an extension after failing miserably in the cup finals last season.

About freakin’ time! What was the final straw… a loss to the Maple Laffs? More news at 11.

Fantasy Nascar Wrap

The season’s end is 2 races away and our 2 teams running in various Yahoo NASCAR leagues can already see the finish line. Team 1’s mantra was to play the traditional card. Picking drivers that had historically done well at certain races and at certain times of the year. Team 2 was to effort to play more of the hot hand. To try and pick who’s on a streak and stick with that driver until someone else got hotter. The results are in and Team 1 is ahead of Team 2 by an approx. 200 points. Which simply translates to about a race ahead. Meaning Team 1 could not start any drivers in the last race and still take the title between the 2.

In our leagues both teams have flirted with running in the middle of the pack but in the last few weeks have faded into the bottom third. In one of our more competitive leagues, Team 2 is 1000 points off the league which in some ways seems a lot. But if you view it race by race over the course of a 40 race season, isn’t much at all (25 points/race). The wildcard in this season was the introduction of the Car of Tomorrow (CoT). Some teams were quick off the block with the CoT, which played to Team 2’s advantage but as the final results show, in the end the historical teams prevailed.

The relatively poor season from Tony Stewart and the rise of Carl Edwards were definite highlights to trying to keep “track” of the racing news. Like most things in fantasy sports, if we weren’t involved in fantasy teams would we even be following these related story lines that closely? In our case, not really. Admittedly NASCAR is not our forte and in our 4 years of doing this, we’ve never won a league. Though we’ve been competitive in all years and looking back this one has turned out to be the same. Next year we’ll try to employ slightly tweaked version of our mantra’s for the 2 teams.  We’ll use what we’ve learned this past year from both how our teams performed and by what we saw from the others ahead of us. Here’s to hoping for the checkered flag next year!

Weekend Wrap Smorgasbord!

Here’s what we found curious this past weekend:

1. Leafs are worth lots.  Really?  OK, so that is not news but we found Peddie’s arrogance in the article noteworthy.  Read and feel his confidence grow. Also note how the farm team, Marlies is losing sveral million dollars a year.  Were they better off on the Rock or was the move justified?  If memory serves correctly, the team moved from NFLD in order to save money and be more financially sound.  Was the team in St John’s losing more than 10 million a season?  Doubt it.
2. Soccer and Entertainment mixing in North America?  A good story about the new Seattle Sounders.  Who knew that Drew Carey was part owner?  The Price must have been Right!  (that’s twice we’ve used that line in a week!)  The golden nugget in this story (outside of the Obama links) is that its written in LA but all about avoiding LA to be successful in the MLS.  Congrats to the team on a great logo, colour choice and tribute to their past!  Just don’t confuse the team with the USL league one that just finished its season and its run with the name.  
3. Staying with the Sounders.  This article has been one of only a handful to mention that Freddie Ljungberg’s signing was a good thing.  Most of the stuff we’ve read has been negative about him being too old, a has-been, washed up etc…  Personally, we’ll wait to see him on the pitch before we make up our minds.  Really, until a player suits up and joins in the fray can we truly judge his quality.  Sure his past is up and down so what will we be getting in North America for a rumoured 5 million a year?  Time will tell of course.
4. The Formula 1 season came to a close yesterday.  What an exciting last lap and end to the season it was!  Glock’s dry tire strategy doomed him and allowed Lewis Hamilton’s dramatic pass on the final turns.  We could not believe our eyes and immediately thought that Glock had orders to slow (yes, time for some conspiracy theories) but as he correctly and plausibly admits, it was mother nature that got the best of him.  Regardless, our congrats to Hamilton for not losing the title this year and winning it in such a memorable fashion!  Formula 1 needed to end the season on a high note and they certainly delivered!
5. Sticking with driving, Nascar has a great showdown lined up for the last 2 races.  Can Jimmy Johnson hold on?  Can Carl Edwards unseat the champ?  Murphy’s law aside, we think the title is Johnson’s.  He’s historically clutch (pun intended) and drives his best down the stretch (pun even more intended).