In the end, my downside was not focusing enough on 2019-20 and focusing more on what a player has done in the last 2-3 years.
Pavelski, Subban, Bobrovsky, Niederreiter, Kase all seemed like great picks to me for where they were valued but I also took them at lowest value and it helped crater my team.
Last year, I built a worse team on paper but people liked it more and it would have went far but I forgot to vote for myself and lost by one, so that strategy of roster-building is clearly better than this one (not the voting strategy though).
Thanks to
@Joey Moss for running a great show!