McWolf

No Quebec team :[

good thing we played together

Yotes made a Conference Finals 10 seasons ago ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

London has now been in the league 10 seasons, a full decade. Which means I've been a VHL GM for a full decade myself. And what have we got to show for it? Not much really. I don't know the actual numbers, but it took something like 4 seasons for the Moscow Menace to win a Cup, then the Malmo Nighthawks did it in about as many seasons. Two of our expansion brothers have won a Continental Cup, with both the Chicago Phoenix and the Warsaw Predators capturing the biggest honours of the VHL. In these 10 seasons, the London United has made the playoffs 4 times. Which already isn't a lot. But the shittiest thing about it is that we've been 0-4 in that span. Let's go back and look at these four series. S75 Wildcard Round 5th-seeded London United: 1 4th-seeded Moscow Menace: 3 S77 European Conference Semi-Finals 3rd-seeded Helsinki Titans: 4 2nd-seeded London United: 2 S78 European Conference Semi-Finals 3rd-seeded Prague Phantoms: 4 2nd-seeded London United: 1 S82 European Conference Semi-Finals 4th-seeded Moscow Menace: 4 1st-seeded London United: 3 So hey, at least we made it to 7 games this time. And actually just making it back into the playoffs after a 3-season rebuild was kinda huge too, not gonna lie. What strikes the most is that in three of these series, we were the higher seed, we had the home ice advantage. But we came short every single time. Here's hoping this is just the start of something beautiful. We'll see.

i hurt everywhere

oop

Finding a way to break the meta has been a hot topic in the BOG for a bit now. This season being the last one where the current meta (the good old 40 PA, 99 SC, 99 DF build that costs like 300 TPE so everyone can do it), and it honestly comes right on time. It might not be as obvious as the case of the Vancouver Wolves, back-to-back defending champions and sweepers of awards in that two-season span, but the London United have also been meta abusers this season. The players contributing to it the most - and benefiting from it the most as well - have been the rookies. Since S2, there have been 27 instances of rookies scoring over 100 points in a season. From these 27, there had been, before this season, only two pairs of teammates: Sergei Komarov @Gooningitup and Casey Jones @der meister with the New York Americans in S57. Vyacheslav Smirnov @Banackock and Maxim Kovalchuk @Banackock with the Seattle Bears in S62. Well, this season, the London rookies managed to do something no other team did in the 82-season history of the VHL: have three different rookies break the century mark. We have Matt Avens @Mr Bohannan, tied for 3th all-time in rookie scoring with 132 points, Nils Godlander @Moon, 5th with 131 points, and Zaza Colors @McWolf, tied for 13th with 111 points. Not only that, but our goalie was also a rookie placing well in the all-time standings. In fact, Cole Pearce @N0HBDY won 40 games this season, the 4th most by a rookie in the history of the VHL. And finally, our two defensemen, Rhys Trenton @DeeGoat and Juice Box @Siddhus are both at the top of this season’s leaderboards in terms of rookie defensemen, with 74 and 64 points, respectively. It’s not even that ridiculous to think that the All-VHL Rookie Team could be 100% London United players.

sorry creed, I won't do it again

-156 is also an all time record, I think. Creed is now a legend

Metas are fine. Meta really just means most effective tactics. There's always gonna be a most effective way to apply TPE. The main issue with what we had vs what we are going for with the hybrid attributes is that the former meta build could be reached at like 400-500 TPE. So you could have depth players with basically full meta build, and if you start them early enough, you can have a full meta team with no superstar that's still going to crush any non-meta team, regardless of how many superstars they have. With the hybrid attributes and the way they are going to affect the actual STHS attributes, you can't have the meta low PA, high SC, high DF anymore, not until you're in the 800+ TPE range, and the gap between PA and SC is gonna be much much smaller than it was without these restrictions. Having a meta is fine, but having a meta that's available for rookies is stupid. If low PA, high SC, high DF is still the most efficient way to build a player, so be it, but at least it'll be available to only veteran players, and not any depth player with 350 TPE.

Both @MubbleFubbles and @BrutalBoost have hit us up recently to let us know that this would be their last (and only, in the case of Tagger) season as GMs of the Las Vegas Aces and the Saskatoon Wild. We thank both of them for the time they have spent with us, working towards our common goal of helping our newer members and so they are ready to play through a lengthy VHL career. And we wish both of them good luck for the remainder of the season and for the VHLM playoffs. Make your mark in you last season, guys! We'll be opening the application thread for these two jobs now, because the VHL also has two openings, so I'm going to bet that we'll have to replace more than only these two. Better start earlier and be safe. Apply in this thread directly if you are interested.

Which of you drinks beer with a straw?

#goflexgo happy to see you recreate, bud

and occasional forum content

Eventful trade deadline

good show

good idea, I'll do that when the theme comes back

was it Sonic Adventure 2 Battle? That was such a good game. The music from the game lives in my mind forever. As for my own list 1. A Link to the Past 2. Donkey Kong Country 2 3. The Binding of Isaac 4. Psychonauts 5. L.A. Noire 6. Hollow Knight 7. Chrono Trigger 8. Shovel Knight 9. The Messenger 10. Grim Fandango I'm forgetting some for sure, but that'll do for now. My consoles have been SNES, GameCube, Wii, Xbox 360, Wii U, PS4. Barely ever gamed on PC

Hey September is a month after mine is due. Congrats Bek!

Godlander stronk

Hey sock monkey. You know very well that you are our puppy's favourite toy. Please stop pursuing this nonsensical hockey career and come back home, our doggie misses you.

I'll allow it if you want to skip Hornet and talk about McWolf instead

London represent

Have you ever tried getting a custom VHL jersey with your name on the back, but then opted for a generic one with no name when you realized your commoner name added like 50 bucks to the total price? Letters are hella expensive man. Now imagine if you were in charge of the equipment for a new team. The owners send you to the local proshop, telling you "hey, can you go buy us 6 new jerseys? Oh and make sure they get their names and their numbers in the back. We'll totally pay you back when you come back with the receipt." Man, you're gonna flip when they tell you the price for 6 jerseys with custom name plates and numbers on all of them. Fuck that. My dream team is for those like me who don't want to pay for these expensive custom lettering jobs. I'm buying one full alphabet set at the proshop and spelling the names of my 6 players with these 26 letters. We're even gonna have some leftovers, but I hope they have names with no vowels. Oh and I tried to do with only current players but I couldn't get it done, so we're getting some all time greats back from the retirement home for this. They're gonna get so confused when I suit them up. LW [S54] Fook Yu @Baozi Yu never broke the 100-point mark, but there's nothing wrong with that. I never broke it either and I got a Hall of Famer. In his prime he was a world class power forward, winning the Scott Boulet Trophy in S55, and the Daisuke Kanou the very next season. More importantly, we only use two fairly uncommon letters for him, leaving 24 more letters for 5 players. C [S61] Podrick Cast @Victor Cast scored 174 points in his sophomore season. Only Scotty Campbell ever scored more than that but he played against kids that didn't even know how to skate. Cast > Campbell. Checkmate. He was also a first ballot hall of famer, thanks to him winning more awards than you could count on a reasonable number of fingers. We use 4 common letters here, but only one vowel, and Cast is worth it. RW [S74] Lee Xin @Blazzer Xin never won a single award, but they won a Continental Cup and had 4 straight 100-point seasons to finish their career. Cast only had 4 100-point seasons in his career too. Xin = Cast? Possibly. We only need to use three letters, including the X. I was ready to throw it out as soon as I bought the set. Good thing I didn't. I'm throwing the Z out though. D [S35] Conner Low @Smarch The man won five straight Sterling Labatte Trophies from S36 to S40. Need I say more? If this alone doesn't put him in contention for best defenseman in the history of the VHL, I don't know what would. Plus he's an all-star when it comes to only needing three letters in the back of his jersey, including the dreaded W. All-star! D [S75] R @Kylrad Is R an amazing player? I mean, he scored 100 points once as a defenseman, and he won three total Continental Cups. Individually, he's the lesser player of this dream team, but he knows how to win and we need that. I'd be lying if I pretended that he's here for any other reason than the fact that we need players with few letters, especially few vowels in their name. But we're happy to bring the wins to the team too. G [S25] CAL G @JardyB10 And we go from a player with a single-letter last name to an even better player with a single-letter last name. CAL G is a legendary memeworthy non-bot goaltender, from a legendary memeworthy non-bot member, who played for Seattle and Vasteras, but never for Calgary. He's a living meme. Actually, I'm not so sure he's still alive, he retired like half a century ago. Either way, we need a solid man between the pipes, and in his prime, few did could beat G. So far, we have used A C G I L N O R S T U W X Y, leaving us with only B D E F H J K M P Q V Z, meaning we could have a backup on the squad, but they'd probably need to be called Kemp, Zed, Me, Dvebjz. All actual names, probably. Now for the numbers. Our set of letters also came with a single set of 10 digits, so let's use them, I guess. I know the numbers of three players from their HOF articles. CAL G was #69, because obviously, he was #69. Low was #34. Cast was #13, but we're using the 3 for Low already, because veterans have the first choice. So let's say Cast switches to #10. It's a good superstar forward number. I have no idea what numbers the others used and I'm just a shy equipment manager, so I'm not asking them. Yu will have #8, Xin will have #27, and that leaves #5 for R. YU 8 - CAST 10 - XIN 27 LOW 34 - R 5 G 69 When I was trying to make this budget dream team happen, the first version of the forward line was Bentz, Su and AK47, which would have given us two Hall of Famers (Bentz and Su) instead of one (Cast), but I felt like the line was overall much worse because of the addition of AK47, who was basically only good for one season, during which he scored like 70 goals and 140 points. The rest of his career was uninteresting, and I felt kinda cheap about adding a player with numbers in his name. Also because I didn't check, but I'm pretty sure this letter set didn't come with nameplate-sized numbers. So I would only have the AK for the name plate and then we could have made his number 47, but that means the legendary Conner Low would have had his iconic number 34, so I felt kind of bad about it and decided to find another way to make it work, which is how we ended up with Yu, Cast and Xin. I'm happy about it. // 1,000+ words