I Hate My Fantasy Team: Broken trade block

(Ed. Note: "I Hate My [expletive deleted] Fantasy Team!" is a weekly feature on Puck Daddy in which we vicariously live through two Yahoo! Fantasy Hockey GMs as they provide snarky advice and tales of woe. This week's author is The Rev. Zamboni from The Palm Isle. Enjoy.)

By The Rev. Zamboni

It's a four-point cushion. Six weeks to go. And less activity in our league than in the Islanders season ticket office.

So I'm shaking things up a little. Milan Lucic, you are my $1,000 car. It's been nice, and I'm glad you didn't explode at 2 a.m. somewhere in the wilds of upstate New York in this bitter winter. But it's time. So let's all welcome aboard Milan Michalek, who scores more on the power play and has been hot, even if he isn't quite as inclined to commit violence and stir the passions of ignored, abused, yet-knowledgeable hockey-town fans.

As I mentioned, the Bad Habitants cling to playoff status and respectability, claiming a 61-60-7 overall record in week 18, with a 3-2 lead in the weekly matchup as of Thursday morning. This follows a sad sack 1-6 loss to second-place Ass Bonanza last week, which followed an equally uninspiring but more fruitful 4-3 victory in week 16 over the 10th-place Canadian Farmboys.

If you're keeping score, and unfortunately that seems to be the rub here, that's a middling 4-3, 3-4, and 4-3 series against the bottom three teams in the league, two of which (not the Farmboys, who are honorably managed by a fellow Islanders traveler) haven't managed their rosters since Neil Smith was the Islanders GM, and for about as long.

For those who were asking last week, our league does have a roster moves cap of 35, which followed a season in which one of our managers plotted games played per week for the season and used upwards of 130 moves for the year. And still lost! But, you know, the Spirit of the Thing ...

So we set it at 35, up from 30 for the past few years. I've used 9 to this point, which is on the low side, most teams around me have used 17 or 18, although our faceless leader, "Analicious" (I have no idea if Yahoo! will let that through), who still thinks the Whale are in Hartford and must have finally sold his Super Nintendo and NHL 94 because he suddenly has semi-current hockey knowledge, and I know he's getting most of it from a video game (is there a fantasy hockey mode on Rock Band?), has only used three moves.

This is about the time I start following the advice of commenters and "working the waiver wire" for hot hands and those who might benefit from trades and/or line shifts toward the playoff stretch. Thus, Milan Michalek. (And, I think I'm counting the resurgence of Tomas Vokoun as a roster move, simply because I refused to drop him, somehow knowing this might happen, and voila! for the first time this season, I am approaching "right."). Consider yourself inspired.

As for trades: Our league is so inactive on the trade front I had to do an "alt F" search on our transaction list to find a trade. And I didn't find one. Not one. What a bore. I think we had one last year, and it was so stunning, I don't remember a single player involved.

Knowing this league, probably something like Jordin Tootoo for Ruslan Fedotenko.

I have no idea what the solution for this might be. We've got fairly deep rosters: seven active forwards, three defenseman, two goalies, and three bench spots. And although the two or three teams atop the standings usually have a nice cushion, playoff hopes are alive as far down as ninth on the board, and that's with six weeks to go.

If you've got any suggestions other than "you guys teh suck!" or "I can tell you're sooooo American because you teh suckxxrs!" pass them along and I'll get them to our commish.

Otherwise, let the stretch run begin.