ESPN Fantasy hockey---NEVER AGAIN !

Last night we held our annual ESPN Fantasy Hockey league draft.
This is the draft a friend of mine, and I have made a tradition over the years. It is normally held between 9:30 pm, and 1 am every year. The wives and kids have gone to bed. We are free to put our full energy into having fun. I usually even cook myself some good snacks, and have a beer or two.
To set the scene: ESPN charges $ 29.95. This used to be a good value. You had a Java draft room, and a little prize for the winner.
I spent several hours tweaking my ranked players. Something I find enjoyable. This year I used the Dobber Hockey Formula ( I paid 10 bucks for) and thought this could be my year !
Anyway, it's 9 pm, and I was eagerly awaiting to find which draft position I would have this year.
It could be Christmas Day, or it could be a bust. I log in to the draft room, and what to I find ?
Not the polished JAVA Live-Draft war room I have used for many years, but a bare bones HTML piece of s@hit. It took my buddy and nearly a half hour to figure out how to get into this
stupid thing, we kept thinking it was just a glitch, and the real JAVA war room would appear at draft time.
It's 9;20, and the first owner would be on the clock in 10 minutes. Meanwhile my snacks are still in the oven, and I still really don't know how to operate this garbage draft room. Once we finally get in, I find that I have the # 9 slot out of a 12 team draft. Making me twice as ticked off! I can't believe I paid 30 bucks for a
draft room that not only did not have a chat area, but all my pre ranks were gone, and there was no way to sort the players by name, or stats. How long do you think it took to find Erik Johnson in a mess of 500 players ? No, he was not at the bottom, he was in the lower 100. Just above the really crappy players. The way this thing worked, you had to open 2 windows, go to your teams roster, click one of the 3 position categories G-D-F search through what ESPN thought was a good ranking, and find the player you wanted. Then you had to click it, and hit draft. Now you have to go to the page with the war room and see if it was drafted. Sometime it was , and sometimes it was not. There we were, sitting for over 3 hrs with no chat or anything. After a while I called my friend, and we trashed talked the guy who had the number one position. He drafted Sydney Crosby with the number one overall pick, but never drafted a goalie ! Must be some new-wave strategy, or he was not able to use the piece of junk draft room. I think the latter.
After 3 hrs me swearing and ranting and raving I did think I drafted a decent team.


Evgeni Malkin, Pit
Marc Savard, Bos
Zach Parise, NJ
Andy McDonad, Ana
Petr Sykora , Pit
Jonathan Toews , Chi
Eric Perrin, Atl
P. Bouchard, Min
Antoine Vermette, Ott
Ryan Whitney, Pit
Andrej Meszaros, Ott
Erik Johnson, StL
Andy Greene, NJ
Niklas Kronwall, Det
Lee Stempniak, StL
Ryan Clowe, SJ
Michel OuelletD ,
Colby Armstrong, Pit
M. Fleury, Pit
Vesa Toskala, Tor
Manny Legace, StL


No matter how this thing shakes out, I doubt I will ever use a ESPN product again!