Best fantasy hockey website - Yahoo, CBS, ESPN etc

[BladesOfSteel]

I along with a co-commish are currently putting together a brand new 18-team H2H dynasty league with a group of seasoned, active fantasy hockey experts.

Most of us have never done a full out dynasty league, with farm terms and the rest. Quite familiar with keeper leagues and draft picks trading. That all being said,

The question I have is, which website platform is the best for a full out dynasty H2H league? Yahoo, CBS, ESPN or other? Which one do you recommend and why?

Thanks!

[Doug Glatt]

Definitely not ESPN. No features for dynasty play, fubar position eligibility every year.

[notch4077]

In my opinion, you can not beat Fantrax.

[Kofax]

Fantrax lets you keep a minor league roster which in my opinion is the only benefit Fantrax provides. To me it's interface is far more clumsy, unintuitive and complicated and can be very annoying.

Yahoo is best for its ease of use, and as long as everyone is fine using a second site to track draft picks/prospects, I think it's the best bet.

Those are the only two I have experience with.

[Daydream Nation]

I am a big fan of Fantrax especially over ESPN. Yahoo couldn't do our 4 team, 2-week playoff model so we didn't consider them for the fantasy league I run. I am in a different league using Yahoo and have no problems with them.

[SockPuppet]

Fantrax is by far the best option. Our league switched over 3 years ago and we still look back at it as the best move our league ever made (12 team dynasty). Excellent support for custom changes (we wanted 2 week playoffs? Boom - they made it available). They're also by far the quickest on the trigger for IR eligible players and have a great list of (constantly updated) features. The ONLY drawback is that their mobile app kind of sucks, but if that continues to improve at the same rate as everything else then I expect it to surpass ESPN's functionality in the next year.
I can't say enough good stuff about this platform.

[SeaDawg]

We use CBS for one of our leagues, and we love it. It is expensive (by comparison). I don't know exactly how much, but I want to say just under $200 US per year. Could be wrong, though.

CBS is very customizable and our commish has had good (fast) results in getting changes added to the site that make it easier for him to manage our league.

I can't really think of any downside to CBS, besides the cost.

[0PucksGiven]

For your standard H2H I actually prefer the UI of ESPN . not sure why it gets such bad reviews

[forumname]

I don't doubt that Fantrax has a lot of fancy features that make it valuable, but as a yahoo guy, I HATED fantrax when I tried it out last year. Grossly unintuitive and difficult to navigate. It really sucked and I just stopped paying attention to the league altogether (free playoff pool).

I also have a league on ESPN and while some things are nice it also has some ridiculous inconsistencies. For example, each team has a team name and an owner name, right? So I might be John and my team name is the Cobras... Well, some areas of the site refer to me as John and other refer to me as the Cobras, so you never have any idea who the hell is who. Oh, Ryan proposed a trade to me, let me go see who he has on his team... I don't know what team is his so I'm ****ed. **** that!

[0PucksGiven]

^
You are right about that.

I am in a Fantrax league as well and it's OK .. I do like the dynasty aspect of it. The UI seems to be over complicated and gets annoying sometimes .

ESPN I find has a good balance of everything you need. I never have used the App.. If there is on , not sure. I especially like the player rater and being able to gauge a players value in your specific league

[Slug]

Have done both yahoo with a secondary site and fantrax. Yahoos site is fine for everything you need but maintaining the secondary site can be a lot of extra work. Fantrax does a great job of handling farm teams and is very customizable. Only thing I disliked about Fantrax was the only way to PM another GM was through the league chatroom. There were lots of times private talks accidentally became public.

[forumname]

Have done both yahoo with a secondary site and fantrax. Yahoos site is fine for everything you need but maintaining the secondary site can be a lot of extra work. Fantrax does a great job of handling farm teams and is very customizable. Only thing I disliked about Fantrax was the only way to PM another GM was through the league chatroom. There were lots of times private talks accidentally became public.

Is there a way to PM on yahoo?? I always thought the lack of that was a big downfall of yahoo...

[audiopile]

We use CBS and it is OK from a user perspective. I use it for simple stats but they getting historicals can be a bit more work. Not a big fan of the league feed on the home page (same problems that Percy mentioned where a PM can become a league message if you are not paying attention) and they change nearly the entire site yearly just when I get comfortable with it.

This year they added a chat function which seems more secure. Draft order can be customized based on picks traded and lottery results, and for a time we had it set to be able to trade picks ourselves but adding that ability caused us to lose others. Now the commissioner has to keep track of draft pick transactions separately. I don't like hearing CBS is the most expensive though, that could be money in someone's pocket!

[Slug]

Is there a way to PM on yahoo?? I always thought the lack of that was a big downfall of yahoo...

No but with the secondary site you could. In my case it was proboards, you can hold an actual back and forth without the risk of forgetting to click on a GMs name like fantrax. Your trade talks on fantrax if you use the chat can get pretty messy if you are talking to more than 1 guy at a time, while having the regular public chat at the same time.

[MCMackerel]

Fantrax