Victor

A fine addition to the long list of great Toronto GMs. Great drafting in particular.

I do x

You've definitely given a lot more leeway with them but I also understand it with more teams and if you're happy to track them. I think the onus always lies with the GMs to keep each other accountable if they want to get super creative about it. Ah so it's you who can't read then

It's basically in the perfect balance where the consequences aren't significant enough to warrant a void. If it was anything other than a retiring goalie, then I think there'd be grounds for voiding because it screws Warsaw too much. So you are right, it does get looked at as a whole i.e. what will happen if we have to void the 2nd part. It's just that even in that case, it's not an awful trade in its own right (granted, it's not a good one) Also where has your L gone? Yup lol. I stand by the wording of the rule being cut and dry but this is a very unique set of circumstances which as above, is probably the only reason this trade shoudn't be voided.

No, the trade is allowed to go through because it's the 2nd part of such trades which gets voided. The only reason to void this trade would be if it was deemed a straight 4th for Syko swap is below market value which is probably not true as I don't imagine there's much of a market for Syko.

All this arguing about the conditions of trades and when we're allowed to trade future draft picks is excellent forum content. It's also got me wondering, what other confusing rules are there in the VHL? Let's have a quick look through the rulebook. Current cap ceiling: $44,000,000 This is a really tricky one to interpret. Like, it says a team can't spend more than $44 million but what if it really wants to? Nothing a conversation with the commissioners can't solve, surely. 5.1 - Basic Rules of Training Camp Training occurs during the pre-season, before the start of the Regular Season. I mean, it says these are basic rules but that's a real mouthful. What if I want to do training camp right now? Isn't it discriminatory for me not to be able to train when I want to? We can't all be in the same place in the same week, it's inconsiderate. Trivia Up to 2 capped TPE per week can be earned through participating in VHL Trivia, where you answer VHL related questions stored in the VHL Portal. The waters are really muddied on this one too. The whole concept of capped TPE feels like it's a bit of a grey area. If I was to acquire conditional future TPE, I think I would be within my rights to trade that for TPE that I could earn in future capped weeks to increase my weekly cap this week in exchange for maybe getting more TPE in 3-4 seasons. So many poorly written rules, so little time...

Vancouver winning cups with massive asterisks?? I don't believe it!

That's worrying, but I agree with the overall sentiment that it won't actually matter.

Doesn't actually add any further insight beyond the already clear rule, just a shameless flex.

I love the argument being made that it's a grey area when it is one of the clearest rules written, with an actual example provided, specifically to close the loophole currently being exploited. I would know as I wrote it.

That's not a contradiction. Vancouver has traded an asset it owns (a 4th). It's added a condition which, if they make it happen, means they will give up a 2nd or a 1st instead. But if the 2nd or 1st they get and trade to Warsaw is S99, then that trade gets vetoed. That follows the written rule to a tee. No grey areas.

Not sure if I agree with that if the wording is that they have the whole off-season to convert the condition.

I don't think you need a new rule for that, that's just a fact. You can't trade assets you don't own. You can't trade assets now to make up for your asset deficit by promising to trade better future assets later. That's pretty clear cut. I think @Spartan is right that this is perfectly legal if Vancouver acquires a S97 or S98 1st and/or 2nd. But @Alex is right in that it's not allowed for Vancouver to trade Warsaw a S99 pick in the off-season to meet the conditions in this trade. In which case, as someone said, Frank holds the cards. Should he choose to not acquire S97 or S98 picks, Warsaw can not receive more than the 4th. At which point this becomes commissioner's discretion on whether Warsaw taking such a risk is in the league's interest. I'd argue that a 4th is still better than Syko retiring for nothing and it's not like Warsaw is gonna win anything with him anyway. So I would agree with allowing it to go through. But lord help you if you let Vancouver trade a S99 pick to Warsaw in the off-season.

I hope no one makes an offer actually.

Trades found to bypass the above rule (i.e. trading a S40 3rd during the regular season and then having it traded back for a S42 2nd in the off-season.) are not allowed. If such trades are made, the 2nd trade (the one in the off-season) will be blocked by the commissioners. This one isn't really up to individual commissioner interpretation.

week 2 of 3

Bears go rawr

The Wranglers survive through all eternity.

Olober Syko will not be challenging Anton Nygard's long-standing save percentage record, although he is still as it stands in the top 10 of all time – an improvement to .940 would be the best mark since S55. Plus, he's given Warsaw enough quality to take the last European playoff spot which they'll appreciate in the absence of their own first round pick. Rumours of TPE meaning nothing for goalies have been overblown as expected – as Joseph Reed's numbers have normalised, the top goaltenders in terms of save percentage are who you'd expect, with the top 4 goalies in TPA all sitting in the top 4 (excluding backups). The only man who can feel aggrieved is last season's MVP Dalkr Vidarsson, whose move to Toronto has not gone to plan at all, but someone always gets the short end of the stick. For the first time Ahma's love for Davos might cause some real draft day drama, as the current 2nd best prospect in the draft would have to demand to fall outside the top 6 at least based on Davos holding their own and Vancouver's picks. One to watch.

Technically only 2 of Riga's season were in a 16-team VHL but semantics aside New York's run was more impressive / difficult. Good times, those 4 finals losses felt more meaningful/end-of-the-world than Moscow's recent run.

Someone on dark mode please translate

Is this a tentative VHL lore topic? I don't think so actually. A deeply entrenched fear of curses and jinxes is part and parcel of VHL history. We were all once upon a time firm believers of the “3-1 curse”, where the team leading 3-1 in a playoff series proceeded to lose the next 3 games and get knocked out in 7, until I debunked the claim as just something that happened to be prominent for a couple seasons in high-profile playoff series. We've still had notable comebacks since then and in recent times, but nothing more than you would expect statistically. Just the other week @CowboyinAmerica looked at the ongoing Victory Cup curse, where we've not seen a regular season champions back it up in the post-season in over a decade. I wonder if that's linked to this topic. Since S73, every Victory Cup winner has had to face a wildcard round winner following the final round of league and playoff expansion. The percentage of successful Victory Cup winners has fallen sharply since then, especially if you take out those that were meta-boosted in the S78-S82 range. You could argue that this is due to increased league parity as a whole, as we have seen a couple of the wildcard teams go all the way to winning the Continental Cup. Fortunately, we are not limited by just a post-S73 sample size. A wildcard round existed in the short-lived one conference era of S58 to S65, while in the 27 seasons before that (S31-S57), one team per conference received a bye to the conference finals which had the same effect as facing a wildcard team – one team was coming off the back of a series win, while the other (the favourite) idled around for a week. So we have a significant amount of data to parse through. I'll go through the effort of typing it all out. Fortunately, my handy playoff summary spreadsheet saves me from having to go into every index since S31. In any case, I'll start with the most recent run since S73. I will list out every wildcard round winner (2 per season) and give them a record in a W-D-L format i.e. one for making it further than the next round, one for winning just the conference semi-final, and one for losing immediately. For example, S94 Moscow would be noted down as 1-0-0 having won the wildcard round and gone all the way to win the cup. S94 Vancouver by contrast will be 0-0-1, having lost immediately after winning the wildcard. Last season's Davos would be 0-1-0 – won the wildcard, upset Malmo in the next round, but went no further. Let's begin our assessment of some serious lore. S95: Davos 0-1-0, Seattle 0-0-1 (running total: 0-1-1) S94: Moscow 1-0-0, Vancouver 0-0-1 (1-1-2) S93: Moscow 0-1-0, New York 0-0-1 (1-2-3) S92: London 1-0-0, Toronto 0-1-0 (2-3-3) S91: Helsinki 1-0-0, D.C. 0-0-1 (3-3-4) S90: London 0-0-1, Vancouver 0-0-1 (3-3-6) S89: Prague 0-1-0, New York 0-1-0 (3-5-6) S88: London 1-0-0, Vancouver 0-0-1 (4-5-7) S87: Riga 0-0-1, Seattle 0-1-0 (4-6-8) S86: Davos 0-1-0, Vancouver 1-0-0 (5-7-8) S85: Davos 0-0-1, Chicago 0-1-0 (5-8-9) S84: Davos 0-0-1, Calgary 0-0-1 (5-8-11) S83: Prague 0-0-1, Chicago 0-0-1 (5-8-13) S82: Moscow 1-0-0, Seattle 0-0-1 (6-8-14) S81: Warsaw 0-0-1, Toronto 0-0-1 (6-8-16) S80: Prague 0-0-1, Los Angeles 0-0-1 (6-8-18) S79: Davos 0-0-1, D.C. 0-0-1 (6-8-20) S78: Malmo 0-0-1, D.C. 0-0-1 (6-8-22) S77: Prague 0-0-1, Los Angeles 0-1-0 (6-9-23) S76: Prague 0-0-1, Seattle 0-0-1 (6-9-25) S75: Moscow 0-1-0, Chicago 0-1-0 (6-11-25) S74: Helsinki 1-0-0, D.C. 0-0-1 (7-11-26) S73: Malmo 0-0-1, D.C. 0-0-1 (7-11-28) OK so that's an interesting bit of binary code. Out of 46 wildcard winners in modern VHL history, 18 have gone on to win the following round of the playoffs. That is slightly less than half but still feels a bit high given these teams face the best team in the conference based on the regular season. Obviously point totals have on occasion been quite close where there's not much separating the top 4-5 teams in the conference, but it still feels like a reasonably high percentage of upsets. What is particularly telling is that a lot of the wildcard success stories have come in the last 10 seasons. 7 of the 18 “upsets” went on to make the cup finals, 5 of which have been since S86, including the 3 champions (Vancouver, London, and Moscow) who started off in the wildcard round. There appears to be a trend towards wildcards having more success, especially in the European Conference where the wildcard winner has defeated the regular season champion in each of the last 5 seasons, and three of them have been the European representative in the finals. But let's look at what history from more bygone eras tells us before jumping to conclusions. Starting with the one conference era, this was a time with just 5 playoff teams in total, two of which fought it out for a spot in the semi-finals where they faced the Victory Cup winners. Let's see how they fared. S65: Helsinki – defeated Seattle, lost in finals S64: Toronto – won Continental Cup S63: Quebec – lost to Riga S62: Seattle – lost to Calgary S61: New York – lost to Calgary S60: Calgary – lost to New York S59: Seattle – won Continental Cup S58: New York – lost to Riga Again, slight advantage to the teams that didn't have to go through the wildcard round but only very slight – 3 out of 8 wildcard winners made it to the finals, and 2 of them pulled off underdog championships. Let's move on to the original expansion era where I'll swap back to the W-D-L format being champion, finalist, and lost in conference final respectively (we've got 6 playoff teams in total here, the top 2 skipping round one, so we are tracking how the winners of the first round fared). S57: Helsinki 0-0-1, Toronto 0-0-1 (0-0-2) S56: Davos 0-1-0, Calgary 0-0-1 (0-1-3) S55: Davos 0-0-1, New York 0-0-1 (0-1-5) S54: Helsinki 1-0-0, New York 0-0-1 (1-1-6) S53: Helsinki 0-0-1, New York 1-0-0 (2-1-7) S52: Cologne 0-0-1, New York 1-0-0 (3-1-8) S51: Cologne 0-0-1, Toronto 0-1-0 (3-2-9) S50: Davos 0-1-0, Quebec 0-0-1 (3-3-10) S49: Riga 0-0-1, Toronto 1-0-0 (4-3-11) S48: Stockholm 0-0-1, Seattle 0-0-1 (4-3-13) S47: Stockholm 0-1-0, Calgary 0-0-1 (4-4-14) S46: Davos 0-0-1, Calgary 0-1-0 (4-5-15) S45: Davos 0-0-1, Calgary 0-1-0 (4-6-16) S44: Davos 0-0-1, Calgary 1-0-0 (5-6-17) S43: Cologne 0-1-0, Seattle 1-0-0 (6-7-17) S42: Cologne 1-0-0, New York 0-0-1 (7-7-18) S41: Helsinki 0-0-1, Quebec 0-0-1 (7-7-20) S40: Riga 1-0-0, Calgary 0-0-1 (8-7-21) S39: Riga 0-0-1, Seattle 0-0-1 (8-7-23) S38: Riga 0-0-1, Toronto 0-1-0 (8-8-24) S37: Riga 0-0-1, Seattle 0-0-1 (8-8-26) S36: Helsinki 0-0-1, Quebec 0-0-1 (8-8-28) S35: Cologne 0-0-1, Calgary 0-0-1 (8-8-30) S34: Riga 0-0-1, Calgary 0-1-0 (8-9-31) S33: Riga 1-0-0, Calgary 0-0-1 (9-9-32) S32: Riga 0-1-0, New York 1-0-0 (10-10-32) S31: Riga 0-0-1, New York 0-1-0 (10-11-33) Not a hugely different outcome here from the current era, where 21 out of 54 (compared to 18 out of 46) teams with a “boost” from a previous series win took that momentum to at least one more series win afterwards. It is worth caveating here that because the S31-S57 era didn't have a true wildcard round, there were multiple occasions here where this was simply a case of 2nd place beating 1st place, but having had to beat an inferior opponent in round one to begin with. On the whole, I would say this era had a lower degree of unpredictability which might make it less comparable to the league today. Across all three distinct era then, the final results are as follows: 108 teams which played and won an extra round while their opponent rested / had a bye 42 of them (39%) beat their next opponent, on paper the favourite based on regular season results 20 of those winning teams went on to win at least one more playoff series, which you could argue is evidence that they were pretty good teams coming off a regular season underperformance. Of course, you could also cynically argue that means that the boost from winning a playoff series carries significant momentum for more than one subsequent series. Is that overall percentage a concern? I don't think so. If we dug deeper in the detail, we'd find that quite a few of the “upsets” were from good teams who had slow regular seasons but played to their potential in the playoffs. There have also been numerous seasons where the gap between the regular season leader and the underdog wasn't so large, both in terms of points and quality on paper. So really the percentage of genuine surprising wins is probably lower than shown above, at which point it becomes something you would statistically expect to happen every now and then. Plus, even if there was an unfair advantage to teams playing a wildcard round, how would we go about fixing it? You could decrease the amount of playoff teams to 4 per conference which would mean half the league misses the playoffs. That's not a terrible idea in principle and would be the same as the current 32-team NHL, plus the team that loses the wildcard round doesn't get a lot of playoff action (2-3 days) anyway, and it would shorten the post-season slightly for everyone else. However, we have evidence in recent seasons of 5th place teams being very competitive and even being crowned champions, so denying them the opportunity doesn't seem fair or reflective of the balance of the VHL at the moment. So with that, I declare the alleged wildcard boost to be a myth and something to be confined into the depths of VHL lore.

One of mine and @JardyB10's great unsung heroes of S18, alongside Juha Ikonen and Hiro @Renomitsu

If it can produce efficient trains it can produce great VHL players.