It is not fancy, nor does it have big, impressive prizes, but Canes and Coffee is having its first ever “Off-Season Fantasy Hockey Contest.”

The contest is for bragging rights, fun and entertainment purposes only, so we do not need to get lawyers involved to write legalese.

At a basic level, there will be two separate contests and an overall winner. (In creating the 2017 NHL Draft part of the contest, I came to the realization that for the vast majority of people it will be a couple educated guesses in the early rounds followed by chucking darts after that. So I figured that part might not interest everyone.)

Contest 1 is predicting the various Carolina Hurricanes’ moves that will build the 2017-18 opening day roster.

Contest 2 is focused solely on predicting the 2017 NHL Draft.

If you need ideas and/or a cheat sheet, I suggest checking out The Draft Analyst which has a full 7-round mock draft from late May.

There will be individual contest champions, but the overall winner will be the person who collects the most total points in both contests combined.

Rules (to be amended as necessary):

1. One entry per person.
2. Initial deadline is Monday, June 12 at midnight. Ideally, the deadline needs to be before deals start happening, but there is no sure way to know that. A reasonable guess is that things will be quiet until the Stanley Cup Finals end and will explode after that. We might extend the date if the Stanley Cup Finals goes to seven games, and all is quiet on the NHL transaction front.
3. The draft contest will end neatly when the draft is completed. The 2017-18 Hurricanes roster building contest will not officially end until opening day since trades are possible until then.
4. All scoring, rules and anything else is at the sole discretion of Canes and Coffee. There are a few situations (deals happening before the deadline) that could impact the contest and the scoring. If that happens, we will adjust accordingly with the aim of keeping things fair for everyone but also not having that shut down entries early.
5. We might/might not add a small prize or two, but those are non-guaranteed, not officially part of the game and would just be a gift afterward if the winners are lucky. More significantly, there was some talk of a goofy coffee cup trophy that could have small name plates for each year’s winners like the Stanley Cup. We will see about that…

In an ideal world, we would do something a tiny bit fancier, but this quick Google Forms version should do the trick without requiring resources. Please speak up via email or comment form on site if you encounter any technical problems or issues completing your entries.

So take your shot at documented Canes hockey genius and the chance to own bragging rights for the entire 2017-18 season!

Go Canes!