Next year is now

In the third year of my dynasty hockey league, I found out what it felt like to really look ahead to next year. In the last two years, I've been trying to strengthen my roster for the postseason. I made the final twice, only to lose.

This year, my team ranked 4th out of 6 in my conference when the top 3 make the playoffs. At 7-8 and one game behind the third-place team, I had to try to forecast how the remainder of the season would turn out. Given that the top two point-scoring teams are in my conference, the chances of representing the Campbell in the final looked remote.

Fortunately for me, I had three players on the last year of their two-year contracts who would be attractive to teams trying to make a push. The players in question -- Mikko Koivu, Christian Ehrhoff and Kyle Quincey -- were at below-market prices, but would be costly to re-sign, even with a hometown discount in free agency.

My goal was to acquire good, young talent and position myself for a playoff run next year. I was able to land both my targets: Brandon Dubinsky (the subject of my first very post here) and David Backes. I took on a bloated contract in Slava Kozlov, whom I will buy out, in order to make the Dubinsky deal work, but I got two youngsters at very reasonable salaries for next year.

Now the next task is to buy out more bad contracts and add more young players. Our weekly waivers run Monday, so I'll report on players whom I hopefully added and others on my radar screen.