Alright, I've caught up in the thread so I'll try to have a go at explaining my team, will see how far I get before I have to rest my broken wrist (bad time of year for someone who's a verbose writer). Let's go by cost.
PINOT Thibaut (861 points, 60 teams) - zoomed out, before digging into the numbers, I had two competing narratives: "Thibaut Pinot is cursed and can never bring it home" and "Thibaut Pinot looked like a goddamn star at the TdF before his crash". I want to be careful about projecting results that never happened into the future, lest we all fanfic Igor Anton's 2010 Vuelta onto future races for 5 years of bad CQ decision making. But looking into it further, one narrative has decisively taken hold for me, and that's that Thibaut Pinot is a goddamn star. Let's review his recent trajectory. 2018 he has a decent start to the season in Haut Var and Catalunya, then wins Alps, podiums the Giro solidly if not spectacularly before spectacularly flaming out on the last day with frigging pneumonia that lasted for awhile. No bother, he dusts himself off in the summer, podiums Pologne, 6th at the Vuelta, 9th at Worlds (which, I may add, has a not dissimilar parcours to TWO 400-point races in 2020), rips apart the Italian 1-days, capped by winning Lombardia. Fin. That's 1696 points even without the ~300 he should have gotten for Giro GC.
2019 he's in 6 stage races before the Tour, wins 2 of them and finishes top 5 in all except Catalunya where he finishes 11th, goes to the Tour and does two things that I didn't think were possible - shows that Sky doesn't have the race under control and makes me genuinely believe that the French might have a Tour winner - before having an even worse almost-last-day exit than Giro 2018. Then, shuts down the season to recuperate with renewed focus. If he's not the best stage racer in the world, he can be on his day, and he's among the most high-performing and consistent. And when he sees a one-day that suits him, he's on it too. I'm glad to pick someone I can cheer for (don't worry, I'll have fewer words for Moscon and Froome, I promise).
YATES Simon (668, 84) - I've seen a bit of 'discounting 2018 he hasn't had a good year' on this thread, but yeah, why in the world would I discount 2018? He was a world-beater in the Giro until he wasn't, and then he came back on a completely different peak of form and was a world-beater in the Vuelta, not to mention consistent over the whole year. That doesn't seem like a fluke. He's clearly disappointed in his 2019, which suggests to me that barring catastrophic crashes that's his baseline, and if his ceiling is 2200 plus not losing the Giro with a day to go, I can't not have him.
KWIATKOWSKI Michal (645, 65) - Tried to do everything in 2019 and couldn't do anything, which is a lesson that tends to be learned for good after it happens.
MOSCON Gianni (424, 57) - yeah there'll be some hate watching this year. I guess at least when I see him do well I'll have the solace of some points.
KELDERMAN Wilco (402, 26) - I always get to a point in my team where I have half or a little over half chosen and I have to make a decision that'll determine the direction of the rest of the team. Last year it was choosing MvdP, this year it was deciding to take Kelderman and Chaves over Bardet (and presumably someone real cheap). I generally like to spread out risk and not pick a rider over 500 points unless I'm really confident he'll have a good year, so usually I default to 3-400 pointers. But I really wanted to get Bardet, I like him well enough, he's got the plucky French underdog thing going for him coming off a bad year, plus it's great to see French riders change it up by eschewing the Tour. But... I'm not sure of his ceiling. What I am sure of is that Kelderman crashes alot, but also that he's averaged 766 points over the last 6 years despite that, and he's top GC dog in a shifting Sunweb team. So I spread out the risk. I think he can get between 7-900 this year, and Chaves is slooowly gaining some of the old self back, so I ended up thinking they were the better choice.
LATOUR Pierre (352, 78) - I mean, this season has to go better than one that started with him breaking both arms, right? He regained some of his old level by the end of the season, and his 810 points from 2018 should be more the expectation.
SOLER GIMENEZ Marc (350, 74) - he's going to step into more of a leadership role, so that hissy fit in the Vuelta hopefully was demostrative of his hunger for success as top dog. Unlike Quintana and Landa, he fits as a good counterpoint in Movistar - great for targeting the one-week races, can get top 10 in support role in GTs and that shouldn't be a problem for his ego for now. Even so, I hesitated on him a bit, so I was definitely surprised when I was filling out the popularity tab and he was more popular than Froome through about 40 entries. But he's a good pick, so I guess lots of people saw that.
DUMOULIN Tom (341, everyone) - just call it a hunch. I think he's gonna have a bounceback year.
VAN POPPEL Danny (334, 22) - Surprised more people didn't take him. I've had him for like 3 different CQ games and he's always at a high level, and stepping down to PCT I see a lot of 80-point 1.1 hauls in his future. He can pick up 20-30 points in various sprints where they get a wildcard and he's a featured sprinter too, he can definitely hold his own.
CHAVES Esteban (322, 14) - it took awhile for me to come around to putting him on my team, but still... FOURTEEN teams? I'm not saying he's gonna hit his 1300 point peak from 2016, but there's gotta be like a 10% chance in my mind that he will, and a solid chance he'll be above 5-600 as he regains form. Lingering viruses are hard things, monkey wrenches in CQ games and of course the real life careers that they affect (RIP Intxausti's career). But there was enough solid baseline last year to make me think Chaves has it in him and is getting back to it.
BOUHANNI Nacer (276, 52) - what'd I put in my spreadsheet notes? Right, "got 276 points in 35 race days on a team that hated him". I mean, he's... (finger quotes) volatile (/finger quotes), sure. But he's still really fast, and hopefully away from the "I'm trying to turn around a moribund French PCT team and am going to publicly engage with my star rider with stereotypically provincial pettiness and play mind games" vibe of Cofidis, he can breathe a bit and get the oxygen he needs for those big sprints. It wasn't THAT long ago that a dropped chain possibly cost him MSR, and if I can make an argument that a rider could feasibly get 280 points from a single race at a cost of 276, I'm going to pick him even if he lost me points last year.
ANDERSEN Soren Kragh (268, 43) - seeing him in Algarve last year was like 'whoa, this guy's going to compete in everything this year'. Then illness, comeback, saddle sores at the tour, comeback, liver damage from some weird enzyme thing from a cold at Benelux... kind of everything that could go wrong did. I can't specifically forecast what races he'll do well in, but I know he's capable of a lot more, even if he 'only' gets back to 2018 level.
BALLERINI Davide (252, 22) - I hemmed and hawed for a long time.... a bit of a price tag for a rider with a relatively short track record, but proven consistency and quickness and ability to survive to some small bunch sprints... that's a pretty good baseline to think he could get back to his 2018 score (ie. double his 2019 score), but then the QuickStep booster catalyst knocks that potential through the stratosphere. No team can maximize the strengths of their riders like that team, and a classics guy's dream team (well, also specifically this rider's dream team) makes it a tantalizing fit. He's a good complement for them too, leave the fast stuff to the Bennetts and Hodegs and Jakobsens, leave the WT-level hilly stuff to the Alaphilippes and Jungels-s of the world, leave the WT-level cobbles to 8 other riders they have. This guy can clean up the rest, the Limburgs and mid-summer races and the like.
CORT Magnus (227, 38) - Less certain he's a great pick than some, but certain he'll be a good pick. He's solid, like a Ballerini with more of a track record but a worse team (although EFE is sneaky good in the classics I must say). I put him in on my third or so pass through potential riders, and couldn't find a compelling reason to drop him. I was thinking of this exercise that especially Netserk used to do, which was to pick a few riders from someone's team and compare them with comparably priced riders that weren't on the team to see what was the better choice at the end of the year. For me, I think this year's choice of 'guys I picked but might not have vs. guys I didn't pick but almost did several times' is gonna be Bardet, Geniez and Power vs. Kelderman, Ballerini and Cort. We shall see.
CANOLA Marco (205, 7) - well, usually my rarest pick is... someone I am more interested in. Or have any feeling about whatsoever. I dunno, his 2017 was totally nuts and his 2018 fairly nuts, but in both of them he did get enough points throughout all parts of the year in the small races that he showed it wasn't just a fluky win or two. His 2019 was... okay, and it included him wasting 21 days in the Giro,a level at which he's not gonna get points. Assuming Gazprom doesn't get invited to it (fingers crossed), if he uses 21 race days to better effect (ie. asian races or european .1/.HC ones) then he should be good. I didn't really get anything from him about why 2019 was rather meh (other than an instagram post saying it wasn't as good as he'd like), but doubling his points would be fine, and more would be great.
DAINESE Alberto (201, 30) - thought about this one a bit too... I haven't really seen him race, and heard both here and in interviews that he's real fast, but then the races he's won haven't been over the most impressive competition. But then, Sunweb, a team I've stayed away from like it was Cofidis or Dimension Data, is undergoing a bit of a sea change back to what it was when it first became ProTour - a sprinter focused place where youth could actually have some chances. So I think he could be a good fit.
ARU Fabio (194, 83) - I still believe he's got the basis for generational talent that he showed in U23 and his first 3 years pro, so he's worth a shot for another year. At least at this price.
Okay I'm about halfway through, gonna stop for today. More thoughts later. And racing coming up!
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram