Roster contest results

Remember back on June 13, when everything was so innocent?

The Flyers had made a big trade for the right to negotiate with Ilya Bryzgalov, but we didn't yet know whether he would sign, what his contract would be, or who might have to be moved to fit him in. It seemed like a fun situation for a Guess the Roster contest.

Now that opening night has come and gone, it's time to review the results and see who was -- well, nobody was even close to right, but who was least wrong.

Let's start by reviewing what the best possible score was (click the link above to see the full scoring rules). A completely correct roster would have received:

• 22 roster points, one for each player on the opening night roster
• No salary cap deduction (since the correct entry wouldn't be over the cap)
• 8 salary dump points for trade/release of players under contract (Richards, Carter, Versteeg, Betts)
• 3 RFA cap hit points for correctly guessing the cap hits of Nodl, Simmonds, and Voracek
• 2 RFA departure points for correctly leaving Powe and Carcillo off the roster
• 9 UFA signing points for correctly including Jagr, Lilja, and Talbot
• 4 UFA cap hit points for correctly guessing the cap hits of Bryzgalov, Jagr, Lilja, and Talbot
• Arguably 10 trade bonus points (5 each for Voracek and Simmonds), see below.

The trade bonus is arguable because the rules say it applies to players who were under contract with another team for 2011-12, and the two RFAs technically weren't. Fortunately, those ten points do not affect the winner, so we are going to choose to use standings that represent the intended spirit of the rule (giving credit for identifying trades) rather than the literal wording. That gives a maximum possible score of 58 points. It says something about the Flyers' offseason that nobody even got half that many.

The other arguable point in the scoring is about the salary cap deduction. The requirement was that your roster fit under the cap, and you lost two points for every $500k that your roster's actual cap hit exceeded the cap. What wasn't made explicitly clear was whether any bonus overage penalty the Flyers incurred from the previous year would be included.

The cap for 2011-12 was not yet known, and guessing how much room the Flyers would have to work with was part of the game. So again, noting that it doesn't affect the winner, we are going to use the intended spirit of the rule and require the person's roster to fit under the cap even with the Flyers' $1.4M bonus overage penalty. It's worth pointing out that the guidance we gave on the expected cap was $62-63M, and the actual cap space the Flyers had to spend was about $62.9M.

With all of that being said, congratulations to flyersrock08, whose roster included getting Bryzgalov's cap hit right and replacing Carter with Voracek in his lineup. No matter what decisions we made on the above scoring questions, he would have won. His prize is the t-shirt of his choice from the BSH store, and luckily there are a bunch of exciting new offerings for him to choose from.

Here are the final standings:

Special mention goes to JpH89 for putting together a roster so stupid that I didn't bother looking up the cap hits to calculate the score.

Special mention also goes to techwiz21, who had Carter traded away, Versteeg traded away, Simmonds acquired in trade, and Voracek signed to an offer sheet. He also got Nodl's, Bryzgalov's, and Simmonds' cap hits right. However, including Booth, Gagne, Hejda, and Leino on his roster put him well over the cap and turned a runaway winner into a T28th place finish.

Finally, an extra-special mention goes to kckrebs, whose negative score means he would have done better submitting a blank roster. He accumulated 22 cap penalty points by dramatically underestimating the free agency market. He shipped off Hartnell, Versteeg, Shelley, and Carle (who make a combined $11.8M) to make room for Bryzgalov, but replaced them with Laich, Jokinen, Torres, and Montador, whose combined cap hit is $12M.

There's a lesson in there somewhere about the risks of relying on free agency to fill roster holes.