My Olympic fantasy hockey picks

The boys at The Pensblog and a site called Rinkotology are running a pretty neat hockey pool for the men's Olympic hockey tournament that I decided to toss an entry in for.

The great twist in this one is that you have to pick 12 players and one from each country, meaning you can't enter without taking players from tournament minnows like Belarus, Norway, Latvia, Switzerland and Germany. Of the 12 players, eight have to be forwards, three defencemen and one a goaltender.

So, even if you like Martin Brodeur as your netminder, that's fine, but you can't take another goalie and you can't take another Canadian. Which makes things infinitely more difficult.

In any event, here's the team I came up with, one that is in 541st place out of 868 teams after the first two games. Still, I like my chances.

Forwards

1. Russia: Alex Ovechkin
2. Canada: Dany Heatley
3. U.S.: Zach Parise
4. Slovakia: Marian Gaborik
5. Finland: Mikko Koivu
6. Czech Rep.: Tomas Plekanec
7. Belarus: Sergei Kostitsyn
8. Latvia: Janis Sprukts

Defencemen

1. Switzerland: Mark Streit
2. Germany: Christian Ehrhoff
3. Norway: Jonas Holos

Goaltender

1. Sweden: Henrik Lundqvist

My strategy was to take a goaltender who I know will start and likely do well, use defencemen picks on countries which don't have a lot of firepower and then try and draft goal scorers with my remaining picks.

The pool's full rules are available here. I picked Ovechkin as my captain and Heatley and Parise as assistants because I figured those three have a decent chance to finish as the tournament's top three goal scorers, but really, who knows?

So, if you see me rooting for Sprukts on Twitter, you know why.
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