The Puck Stops Here

For the last two weeks, the NHL's Defensive Player of the Week has been a goalie who started out the season in the minors. Two weeks ago, Curtis Sanford of the St Louis Blues was the defensive player of the week. This past week, Mike Morrison of the Edmonton Oilers was the defensive player of the week.

Sanford has been an AHL goalie since 2000, he played eight games in 2002/03. On the strength of his excellent week, he has won an NHL job with St Louis, with Reinhard Divis sent to the minors.

Mike Morrison was playing in the ECHL until he was called up when Ty Conklin was sent to the minors for a conditioning stint and then got hurt. Its not clear how the Oilers will juggle their roster when Conklin returns.

Its suprising that two unheralded goalies would come along in back to back weeks and play as well as they did. This is a rare occurance. Despite these strong weeks, I still consider Dominik Hasek the best goalie so far this season.

These suprising minor call-up goalies have had an impact on my fantasy hockey league. We have a deep league with thirty teams that each have rosters of 25-26 men. Nevertheless, these two future NHL players of the week have been available as free agent signings (not on any roster). Amazingly, the same team signed both of them. However, it is not that simple. The team first signed Curtis Sanford and *during* his "player of the week" week, they chose to release him to sign Mike Morrison. The GM of this team argues that because Morrison is playing well he made a good move even though it is the first time in our league's history (we go back to 1999) that the player of the week was released during his week (a bit of a dishonor). I would argue that they would have been better off keeping both players of the week and releasing somebody else (Derek Boogaard the Minnesota Wild goon might be an option). They could later make a trade to offload one of their goalies (in fact the team that had waiver priority to claim Sanford has already traded him).

Its extremely rare for NHL Players of the Week to be unheralded players like Curtis Sanford or Mike Morrison - especially in back to back weeks.

If you would like to join my fantasy hockey league (we have an opening), drop an email to y2kfhl at hotmail dot com.