Duncan Keith Jersey Card

I talked about my keeper pool a few days ago in this Dustin Brown post, and I thought I could share a bit more about my team now that one of my star defensemen, Duncan Keith, is out with a knee injury.

First off, here are the rules: points count as one, regardless of who gets them, or whether they're goals or assists. Defensemen, however, have their minuses count against them. Goalies get two points per win and five per shutout.

Each team has three centers, six wingers, six defensemen and three goalies. The top two centers, four wingers and four defensemen count, as well as the top goalie count for each team.

Each year, we keep two centers, four wingers, three defenders and a goalie, and draft the rest; players on their entry-level deal are exempt from being dropped.

This year, after trading Ryan Getzlaf and Corey Perry for Henrik Lundqvist and Jakub Voracek, I elected to keep the following players:

C: Jason Spezza, Alex Galchenyuk
W: Voracek, Marian Gaborik, Valeri Nichushkin, James Neal
D: Erik Karlsson, Keith, Cam Fowler
G: Lundqvist

Which means I dropped the following players:
C: none
W: Jason Pominville, Cory Conacher
D: Jack Johnson (for the third time in four years), Dmitri Kulikov (for the fourth time), Andrej Sekera
G: Semyon Varlamov, Roberto Luongo, Jake Allen

And I stocked up on the following:
C: Sam Bennett
W: Artemi Panarin, Sergei Plotnikov
D: Noah Hanifin, David Savard, Shane Gostisbehere
G: Craig Anderson, John Gibson

So, yeah, I think I'll have a pretty competitive team. Also, because Keith fell to long-term injury, I was allowed to pick up Jay Bouwmeester from waivers, so hopefully it won't hurt so bad (though he was a minus-2 in his first game on my team).

As you can see from my previous posts, I mostly draft players I like; this year, I had targeted Panarin, Bennett and Anderson above all (I had the third pick of each round), and I would have been fine with taking either of my goalies from last year back.

I've been trying to get my hands on P.K. Subban as well, to have the top trifecta on defense, but I'm also fine with Karlsson, Keith and Fowler.

Keith, you'll recall, was the beast who played an ungodly 30 minutes per game in last year's playoffs on route to securing the Conn Smythe Trophy and helping the Chicago Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup for the third time in six years.

He was already elite, with two Nicklas Lidstrom-era Norris trophies on his resume, but adding the Conn Smythe will cement his place in the Hall Of Fame when he retires.

You can imagine how delighted I was to fall upon this card of his in a group opening of Upper Deck's 2013-14 Series 1 cards last year:

It's card #GJ-DK of the UD Game Jersey sub-set, and shows him wearing the Hawks' white (away) uniform, with a black game-worn jersey swatch incorporated into the card.