Today’s somehow-still-the-offseason time-waster is the long-awaited return of The $200 Game.
We first tried this a little over five years ago, so a refresher is in order. We’re building six-man rosters – three forwards, two defenseman and a goalie, with no other positional requirements – for individual NHL franchises. The salary cap is $200, and each player costs $1 per regular season game that he played with that team. Each player must have played at least one game, meaning no sneaky zeroes allowed (i.e. the Coyotes Rule).
You get credit for the player’s entire career, so the key is to find guys who had very short stops with one team during a great career spent almost entirely elsewhere. Martin Brodeur in St. Louis, that sort of thing. As we found out last time, that means that trade deadline rentals are our friend, as are stars-turned-journeymen who bounced around a lot over their last few seasons.
I highly recommend going back and checking that original post from five years ago, which will give you the hang of this. Back then, we covered a dozen teams: The Original Six, plus the Penguins, Avalanche, Kings, Stars, Hurricanes and Blues. The consensus was that that the two best teams were the Blues, led by Brodeur and Wayne Gretzky, and the Hawks, led by Bobby Orr and Dominik Hasek.
Today, we’ll see if we can top that with 12 new teams, starting with one that can walk us through how all this works.
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