It's that time of year again, hockey season is right around the corner. Pre-season games are just about finished and regular season starts Tuesday the 4th.

That means that right around now is draft day for the... 10th? 11th? Annual Faccin Invitational Hockey Pool. Yours truly won first place last year, so I got the honor of picking first... I picked the first name out of the hat who got to pick first. I pulled my brother Steve's name, then he pulled my mom, she pulled me and then I pulled my other brother, Tony.

"FIX! FIX! THE FIX IS IN!" everyone shouted but it was all random. First pick out the door was Joe Thornton, last year's scoring champion, followed by Sidney Crosby and the I took Alexander Ovechkin.

The rest of my team was pretty good too:

1. Alexander Ovechkin (WAS)
2. Jarome Iginla (CAL)
3. Olli Jokkinen (FLA)
4. Alex Tanguay (CAL)
5. Cory Stillman (CAR) (recovering from shoulder surgery)
6. Brendan Morrow (DAL)
7. Milan Hejduk (COL)
8. Daymon Langkow (CAL)
9. Jussi Jokkinen (DAL)
10. Alexander Semin (WAS)

Ovechkin is going to be on fire this year, and at the very end I snapped up Semin as well, who's coming back from a Russian league and will probably be linemates with Ovechkin. Same with the Iginla/Tanguay combination. Iginla didn't produce as much as forecast last year, but he also didn't have much support... now he does and they should both benefit from it (as will I mouahahaha) Jussi Jokkinen is my "sleeper" pick. He didn't do too well last year, but his forecast it to improve by 40 points according to the Hockey News, which is nearly double his output from this year.

Now all I have to do is collect up my winnings from LAST year! :)