Last year I won our regular season hockey pool. This year, I made a bad pick back in December. I picked Corey Stillman and he was injured. He didn't come back until December, and only produced 30-odd points. Not bad for a player who missed half a season, but a death knell for a hockey pool/fantasy league. Brendan Morrow went down about the time that Stillman came back with a surgery outage, so I dropped him at the all-star break and picked up Zubrus in his place. Didn't help me much though. I stayed in 4th place pretty much the entire season. The last week of the regular season I challenged for 3rd place, but with two games to go, my team didn't produce and my brother's did so he pulled ahead and finished 4 or 5 points ahead of me.

We drafted our playoff teams Tuesday night. As usual, I did it via MSN Messenger videoconference from Grand Cayman while everyone else was at his apartment in Burnaby. One other guy, Glen, also drafted remotely, but he was somewhere in the greater vancouver area. Because we couldn't hear what other people were saying, I had to rely on Steve relaying via MSN. Then I had a flash of brilliance (I do have them from time to time) I've been playing around with Google Spreadsheets, and I had one called "playoff pool 2007" that I was doing some brackets and stats analysis on, so I clicked on it, clicked collaborate and invited Steve as a collaborator. He logged in and then when someone made a pick, he put it on the sheet and it auto-updated so I could see it almost instantly. Then we invited Glen as a viewer and he was able to see the picks appear in 'real-time' and made things go quicker. Awesome.

SO we're two days into the playoffs and guess what? I'M IN FOURTH PLACE!!

This morning I stopped in at Paperman's to get a coffee and Paul told me that their pool is online now at Officepools.com as well so I logged in there to check and see what's goin on... AND I'M IN FOURTH PLACE!!  What the ... ?