RW wrote:
It's been going on for decades. When Detroit was always near the top of the league standings, Scotty Bowman and later, Mike Babcock would always start resting players somewhere between the 1st to the 15th of March especially as Detroit's main players got older. 1st or 2nd place in the conference was usually already guaranteed at that point so playoff seeding was already determined and the reasoning went, why risk your star players to injury in meaningless games at the end of the year. If you were a knowledgable fan you knew not to buy late season tickets games that were likely to mean little and would be missing any number of star veterans. There was usually one game near the end of March against somebody like Colorado and everyone knew that this was probably the last game where all the stars would play and give maximum effort until the playoffs began. The rest of the games were development time for some of the up and coming kids to get some NHL game time in. Now, as we all remember, this practice could be a two-edged sword as there were a number of years where the top players got rusty sitting out for too long and then a top seed would face an 8th seed that had been in playoff mode for 2 months just to get in and, viola, a first-round upset. The 2002 Red Wings are a classic example of this situation where Vancouver caught the Red Wings getting back into game shape in the first two games and it took the Red Wings until game 3 when they finally woke up and avoided the upset.
I don't know anything about fantasy leagues so I'll leave that to others to comment on.
Heh...remember when we went to the last game of the year against Chicago one season and it was actually a really entertaining game?
No problems with it. If you've essentially secured a playoff spot, then you try to limit one of the biggest factors for the playoffs - injuries.