Allright. Well, there are a couple of options we can do.
We can do keeper. Basically we'd pick a number of players and we could keep that many from year to year, with or without restrictions.
We can do dynasty, which is basically you just keep your whole team year to year, with or without restrictions.
Or we can go whole hog. We all draft full sized NHL rosters as well as a deep prospect pool, rules for when a prospect must graduate to the NHL roster or be dropped, IR limits identical to NHL rules.
If we go this route, our first draft would be LONG, likely longer than we'd like in one sitting. We'd draft 12 forwards, 6 d, 2 goalies, and however long we want our bench to be. We would then draft several rounds of prospects. These would be our teams going forward, period. Drafts in the following years would be rookie drafts of only a few rounds. New teams entering the league would go through an expansion draft process, and players wishing to leave the league would be asked to find a new "owner" for their franchise and if one can not be found, a dispersal draft would take place.
Research would be critical, not just on what players are doing well in the NHL, but who is doing well as an undrafted prospect or potential drafted player. Only prospects who are in an NHL system would be allowed to be drafted or picked up as a free agent into our teams prospect pools.
Undrafted players would either be free agents or we could do continuous waivers. We'd do dropped players differently than normally. Possibly some kind of salary cap system. We would have a hard NHL + Prospect roster limit and teams would be penalized for going over this limit. For a player to be considered a prospect he would have to be under an NHL game limit and an age limit.
Basically, if we go the whole hog route, we cease being a fantasy hockey league and we become an NHL simulation league.
If we're really interested in the final route, I'll do some research into a few things, see how things can work, what our options would be.
