Matt_O

The theme for theme week is making up possible future themes for theme week

This might have been done already but we could have everyone write about their favorite VHL memories, or people could write suggestions and ideas to make the VHL better for theme week

@Juice
@Doomsday
@JigglyGumballs
@Frank
@Matt_O
@ROOKIE745

So, VHFL has really been booming over the last couple seasons, and the new ideas for leagues I really thought was a great idea. I had another idea though that I thought would be really cool if it could be done.
 
So, normal fantasy leagues for major sports leagues go by weekly matchups. What if we did that for the VHFL? Matchups would only be a few days, and the playoffs in each league could be top 4 make it in. If a season is six weeks long, we could have ten matchups (two against every team) then the playoffs. Matchups would switch between 3 and 4 days, so it fits into the week easily. The last week would be the playoffs for the top 4. 
 
The only downside I can think of to doing this is that it might be too much work. In order to combat this, I would suggest having two league managers in these matchup leagues, and they both will keep track of daily scoring totals for three teams each. The only problem is actually keeping track of totals, but that might not even be a problem. I know that my group has a sheet that tracks every teams point totals throughout the year, and if that is a widespread thing, it would make keeping track of scoring on a daily basic much easier. I think this would be a really good idea, but it might be a little bit impractical.
 
245 words
@fishy

1. We are doing alright, and Zod is hitting like a maniac. Not bad at all.
2. Papa Johns so I can get free pizza whenever I want.
3. I got Kyl Oferson with the last pick in the draft, I think that was a pretty good steal.
4. He is gonna win every single game he plays and you can take that to the bank.
5. I thought it was weird, both players wanted out for bigger markets and then get shipped to two of the smallest markets in the league. Feel bad for Columbus, they can't hang on to any good players. I think they got the better end just by the players involved, but I think Dubois fits better in Winnipeg, who is going to pass the puck to Laine?
6. The Merrick trade was weird, but it seems like both moves were because of locker room problems. 

Great detail and analysis of the Scotty Campbell phenomenon. Well written and informative for anyone looking into the great one. 
 
9/10.

Unbelievable disrespect on two time Boulet winner Peter Payne and also the legendary nagger. 
 
Also I stan Scotty Campbell.
 
Disappointed at no Chershenko mentions for playoffs 😢

REVIEW- Love the graphs and your In depth review and research on this. Well written and strong points. Overall a solid article and would like seeing more of these styles for future players or HOF’s.
 
9/10

⚠️ Warning: A lot of reading is ahead. Read at your own discretion ⚠️
 
We all know Scotty Campbell is the greatest VHL player of all time. It’s not even up for debate. I’ve tried to discredit Campbell’s success in an attempt to show how he had an easier time scoring than modern day players. In my last article about the decline in scoring, I even tried to convert Campbell’s stats to modern day numbers. They were not nearly as impressive, although still hall of fame worthy. Using the data from my last article, I was planning on converting every hall of famers stats to modern day scoring totals, and then ranking everyone accordingly. When I was starting to make graphs based on players stats, I quickly realized that Scotty Campbell’s dominance transcends eras. It doesn’t matter if he had an easier time than modern day players, he still dominated at an unprecedented level. I don’t think enough people truly understand just how dominant he was. So, I made seven different graphs showcasing how good he really was.
 
For some people, they like to use statistics to determine who is greatest. Other people like to use clutch stats, such as playoff performance, championships, or other things. I’m going to try to appeal to both of these people. On the x axis, we have regular season points per game, and the y axis is for playoff points per game. I even included a line that helps show how players are playing. If you are below the line, you are better in the regular season. Above the line, you are better in the playoffs. On this graph, we only used hall of famers as well. Basically, if you super high up but not very far to the right, you are a great playoff performer. If you are kind of low but pretty far to the right, you aren’t so good in the playoffs. Let's take a look.
 

 
Every hall of famer sits between the 1 to 1.5 regular season points per game range and the 1.5 to 0.5 playoff points per game mark. Everyone except Brett Slobodzian and Scotty Campbell, of course. Slobodzian was a remarkable playoff performer, with 2.08 points per game in his 36 games played. Campbell was also a great playoff performer, with a career playoff points per game average of 1.81. Campbell’s regular season dominance was much greater though. Does this mean Scotty Campbell is a choker? Not necessarily.
 
First of all, we have to understand that playing slightly worse in the playoffs doesn’t mean you are a choker. In the regular season, players can dominate against worse opponents, but come playoff time that isn’t going to happen. That explains why almost every single hall of fame player does a little bit worse in the playoffs than the regular season, but it doesn’t explain Slobodzian. How was he just so dominant? There are a couple reasons for this.
 
Firstly, Slobodzian played on what might be the greatest team in VHL history, the early Calgary Wranglers. They won back to back cups in S2 and S3, and they had 69 wins in S1 before losing to the Scotty Campbell led Vasteras team. He also did that in only 38 playoff games. Campbell’s 1.81 points per game is over the course of 72 games. Would Slobodzian have sustained his pace? It’s impossible to know, but we do know this: If you take Scotty Campbell's last 35 playoff games (a similar size to Slobodzian’s 38), we get a playoff points per game average of… 2.09. Ever so slightly better than Slobodzian’s 2.08. This is the only graph that Campbell doesn’t completely break, but had Slobodzian played a full career, maybe Campbell would have destroyed this graph too. It’s safe to assume Slobodzian’s points per game average would go down with a larger sample size. Here’s a tip: If you ever want to find Campbell on a graph, just look for the little dot that’s super far away from anyone else. 9 times out of 10, that’s him. Let's look at more playoff statistics.
 
I don’t really like using ‘clutch’ stats to determine greatness, especially in a sim league since it’s just numbers, but scoring big goals is important. Campbell didn’t shine away from the spotlight. On this graph, the x axis shows playoff assists, while the y axis shows playoff goals.
 


 
On this graph I labeled two players, Scotty Campbell and John Locke. Both played a very similar amount of games, and Locke scored four more goals than Campbell did. At first glance, Locke seems like more of an outlier than Campbell. Well, that’s because he is. But we really have to consider why that is the case. Locke may have four more goals, but he has 28 less assists than Campbell. The only reason Locke looks like such an outlier is because he didn’t have enough assists to follow the somewhat linear trend. There isn’t a trendline, but you can see the way the dots go in a somewhat uniform fashion. 
 
Elijah Incognito is another player that sticks out. I didn’t label him only because there wouldn’t have been enough room, but he is the player right around 20 on the y axis but is all the way over to the right on the x axis. He had 73 playoff assists, which is tied for the same amount as Campbell. However, he has 36 less goals. Anytime a player has Campbell beat in one thing, Campbell destroys them in the other. It’s like training all your life to become great at sword fighting a specific way because your arch rival sword fights in a certain way. You get to the duel, but it turns out he has other strategies he can use. You may be better than him at that style you practiced but he will dominate you with the other style. This was Scotty Campbell. Anytime a player was able to keep up with him in one statistical category, he completely destroyed them in all the other stat columns. 
 
Let's look at one final graph to appeal to ‘clutch’ statisticians. On the x axis, we have goals. On the y axis, we have game winning goals. 
 

(Sorry the graph is small, VHL image uploading is a tragedy)
 
I don’t think I even need to label which dot is Campbell this time.
 
It’s obvious that the more goals you score, the more game winners you will have. It just makes sense. You can even see that with the very clear linear progression of all the dots. When the spotlight was shining, Scotty Campbell never disappointed. I took the average of all players with 100 or more goals just to have a decent sample size and saw that for every 6.58 goals, one would be a game winner. Scotty Campbell scored a game winner once for every 5.95 goals, clearly a cut ahead of the rest. Not only that, but he scored at a rate so much greater than everyone else that his increased rate in scoring game winners was so evident, as shown in this graph. You could make the argument that his regular season goal scoring is what makes him seem like such an outlier, which wouldn’t be completely wrong. However, he still is considerably ahead of second placed Unassisted, who had 84 game winners. The distance between Campbell and Unassisted, who are first and second in game winners respectively, is equal to the distance between Unassisted and Tarik Saeijs, who is ranked 21. That’s a considerable jump down the leaderboard. Campbell scored at an unprecedented rate, but we haven’t even gotten started.
 
This next graph I’m about to show you tell us just how many points Campbell would score. On the x axis we have games played, on the y we have points per game averages. You are gonna pretty clearly see that a lot of data points are clumped together in lines. Those games come in 72 game intervals because that’s the amount of games most players play. I only included players with 200 or more career games for a good sample size, since anyone can have a great points per game average if they play only one or two seasons. Let’s take a look at another graph, shall we? I hope your eyes aren’t hurting.
 

(Sorry for the bad cropping, VHL image uploading for some reason did this and I can't fix it)
 
Campbell is very clearly again way ahead of everyone else. I labeled a few players, but I want to focus on Brett Slobodzian. He is Campbell’s biggest competitor again, but he has an unfair advantage. He played over 200 less games than Campbell, making the pace he scored at much easier to sustain. Campbell played a full career, and scored 2.15 points per game. 2.15! I don’t think you guys are beginning to understand how insane that is. I know obviously it just sounds crazy, but this is on a whole different level. This might be one of the most jaw dropping stats I have ever seen, and I’ll explain why. On the graph it doesn’t seem as crazy as some other things I’m going to show you, but let me just give you some context.
 
Wayne Gretzky is very clearly the greatest player in NHL history. It’s not even a competition. He scored at a rate of 1.921 points per game, which is still really crazy. Mario Lemiuex is second on the list with a points per game mark of 1.883. These two were absurd. The difference between them is only .038. The difference between Campbell and second placed Slobodzian (who played 200 less games) is .38, ten times greater than the difference between Gretzky and Lemiuex. That’s pretty crazy, but it gets even more absurd.
 
The difference between first placed Campbell to second placed Slobodzian is equal to the distance between Slobodzian and 61st placed Carl Jacobs, a hall of famer. That’s pretty cool, but let's make it even crazier. The difference between Campbell and Slobodzian is equal to the difference between Jacobs (61st place) and 294th placed Sven Wolf. That’s a huge difference, but lets keep going. Just bear with me for a moment. Right around 1.01 points per game, which is what Wolf is at, we have multiple hall of famers. Freeman at 1.03, Ay Ay Ron at 0.99, and Jake Wylde at 0.97. If we turn to the NHL point per game leaders, we see guys like Mats Sundin, Teemu Selanne, and Darryl Sittler sitting around 1.01. These guys are hall of famers too. Let's take the difference between first placed Gretzky and second placed Lemiuex and see how big of a difference it makes in the NHL all time points per game leaderboards, shall we? We go all the way down to… more hall of famers? Not just any hall of famers either, we have guys like Luc Robitaille, Cam Neely, Ray Bourque, even Maurice Richard all hovering in that area. When we take the difference from Gretzky to Lemiuex, we go from elite hall of famers to more elite hall of famers. Now lets see what happens when we do that with Campbell and Slobodzian.
 
Keep in mind, the 1.01 points per game mark has multiple VHL hall of famers. When you take the difference between first placed Campbell and second placed Slobodzian, you go from players like Julius Freeman, Ay Ay Ron, and Jake Wylde, all the way down to guys like Peter Payne, Nick Hampton, and Owen Sharpley. You don’t know who those guys are? Alright fair enough, you might be new here. Let me explain. Wait, you aren’t new here? You’ve been around for quite a while and still don’t know them?
 
 
 
Well, it isn’t really inconceivable. The three players I named, along with anyone else in a 100 player radius, are complete no name, mediocre sim players. These guys are the very definition of a mediocre role player. No one knows who they are. No one remembers their names, or writes about them. Hell, even the users behind those players might not even remember them. Their impact on the VHL was nothing. No one batted an eye when these guys retired. And yet, they still play a part in this story. The difference between Campbell and Slobodzian is the exact same as the difference between hall of famers and absolute nobodies. When we do the same for Gretzky and Lemiuex, it’s not at all the same. We go from some of the greatest players in league history to more of the greatest players in league history. Compared to Campbell, everyone else is merely a peasant. They were at the will of what Scotty wanted to do. No one could stop him. No one even came close, not even some of the other greatest players of all time. We still have to keep in mind that Slobodzian only played 360 game, and if he had played a full career, chances are he wouldn't sustain that pace. The difference between Campbell and everyone else was so large, it’s hard to even comprehend. But let's keep going. I have a couple more things to show you.
 
I have two final graphs to show you. These are my personal favorites, just because of how clearly it shows Scotty’s dominance. Both graphs show the same thing, so I won’t label them. It shouldn’t be too hard to remember. On the x axis we have assists, and on the y we have goals. The higher up you are, the more goals you scored, and how far to the right you are is how any assists you had. The only difference between the graphs is that the one on the right only includes hall of fame players, while the one on the left has every player to ever play a game in the VHL. In case you don’t know your rights and lefts, the hall of fame graph is red and the every player graph is in blue. If you don’t know rights and lefts and are colorblind, well, I have nothing for you.
 


 
These graphs show a noticeable trend, especially the graph that includes every player. At first it’s just a big collection of dots, but then once we get to a point where players are scoring enough points, there is a clear and obvious split. The players that flatten out are defenseman, who have far more assists than goals. The players that continue going up are forwards, who score goals and get assists at a more even rate. This is evident in the hall of fame graph too, you can clearly see a split. You could even group the dots into two separate categories entirely with the way it’s split. But that isn’t what we are here for.
 
As we go up the chart, we see some of the greatest players in VHL history. You see the two dots farthest to the right on either graph? That’s Japinder Singh and Sterling Labatte, two of the greatest defensemen of all time. The dot highest up the y axis is Christian Stolzschweiger, closely followed by fellow VHL greats Mike Szatkowski and Matt Thompson. 
 
Wait a minute.
 
Where is Campbell? Did I miss him? There’s no way, he must be in there somewhere. Did I actually miss him?
 
 


 
Oh. There he is.
 
 
 
 
2,400ish words
 
 

oi the uploader has not made this video available in my country

*ANTI-AMERICAN BIAS*

⚠️ Warning: A lot of reading is ahead. Read at your own discretion ⚠️
 
We all know Scotty Campbell is the greatest VHL player of all time. It’s not even up for debate. I’ve tried to discredit Campbell’s success in an attempt to show how he had an easier time scoring than modern day players. In my last article about the decline in scoring, I even tried to convert Campbell’s stats to modern day numbers. They were not nearly as impressive, although still hall of fame worthy. Using the data from my last article, I was planning on converting every hall of famers stats to modern day scoring totals, and then ranking everyone accordingly. When I was starting to make graphs based on players stats, I quickly realized that Scotty Campbell’s dominance transcends eras. It doesn’t matter if he had an easier time than modern day players, he still dominated at an unprecedented level. I don’t think enough people truly understand just how dominant he was. So, I made seven different graphs showcasing how good he really was.
 
For some people, they like to use statistics to determine who is greatest. Other people like to use clutch stats, such as playoff performance, championships, or other things. I’m going to try to appeal to both of these people. On the x axis, we have regular season points per game, and the y axis is for playoff points per game. I even included a line that helps show how players are playing. If you are below the line, you are better in the regular season. Above the line, you are better in the playoffs. On this graph, we only used hall of famers as well. Basically, if you super high up but not very far to the right, you are a great playoff performer. If you are kind of low but pretty far to the right, you aren’t so good in the playoffs. Let's take a look.
 

 
Every hall of famer sits between the 1 to 1.5 regular season points per game range and the 1.5 to 0.5 playoff points per game mark. Everyone except Brett Slobodzian and Scotty Campbell, of course. Slobodzian was a remarkable playoff performer, with 2.08 points per game in his 36 games played. Campbell was also a great playoff performer, with a career playoff points per game average of 1.81. Campbell’s regular season dominance was much greater though. Does this mean Scotty Campbell is a choker? Not necessarily.
 
First of all, we have to understand that playing slightly worse in the playoffs doesn’t mean you are a choker. In the regular season, players can dominate against worse opponents, but come playoff time that isn’t going to happen. That explains why almost every single hall of fame player does a little bit worse in the playoffs than the regular season, but it doesn’t explain Slobodzian. How was he just so dominant? There are a couple reasons for this.
 
Firstly, Slobodzian played on what might be the greatest team in VHL history, the early Calgary Wranglers. They won back to back cups in S2 and S3, and they had 69 wins in S1 before losing to the Scotty Campbell led Vasteras team. He also did that in only 38 playoff games. Campbell’s 1.81 points per game is over the course of 72 games. Would Slobodzian have sustained his pace? It’s impossible to know, but we do know this: If you take Scotty Campbell's last 35 playoff games (a similar size to Slobodzian’s 38), we get a playoff points per game average of… 2.09. Ever so slightly better than Slobodzian’s 2.08. This is the only graph that Campbell doesn’t completely break, but had Slobodzian played a full career, maybe Campbell would have destroyed this graph too. It’s safe to assume Slobodzian’s points per game average would go down with a larger sample size. Here’s a tip: If you ever want to find Campbell on a graph, just look for the little dot that’s super far away from anyone else. 9 times out of 10, that’s him. Let's look at more playoff statistics.
 
I don’t really like using ‘clutch’ stats to determine greatness, especially in a sim league since it’s just numbers, but scoring big goals is important. Campbell didn’t shine away from the spotlight. On this graph, the x axis shows playoff assists, while the y axis shows playoff goals.
 


 
On this graph I labeled two players, Scotty Campbell and John Locke. Both played a very similar amount of games, and Locke scored four more goals than Campbell did. At first glance, Locke seems like more of an outlier than Campbell. Well, that’s because he is. But we really have to consider why that is the case. Locke may have four more goals, but he has 28 less assists than Campbell. The only reason Locke looks like such an outlier is because he didn’t have enough assists to follow the somewhat linear trend. There isn’t a trendline, but you can see the way the dots go in a somewhat uniform fashion. 
 
Elijah Incognito is another player that sticks out. I didn’t label him only because there wouldn’t have been enough room, but he is the player right around 20 on the y axis but is all the way over to the right on the x axis. He had 73 playoff assists, which is tied for the same amount as Campbell. However, he has 36 less goals. Anytime a player has Campbell beat in one thing, Campbell destroys them in the other. It’s like training all your life to become great at sword fighting a specific way because your arch rival sword fights in a certain way. You get to the duel, but it turns out he has other strategies he can use. You may be better than him at that style you practiced but he will dominate you with the other style. This was Scotty Campbell. Anytime a player was able to keep up with him in one statistical category, he completely destroyed them in all the other stat columns. 
 
Let's look at one final graph to appeal to ‘clutch’ statisticians. On the x axis, we have goals. On the y axis, we have game winning goals. 
 

(Sorry the graph is small, VHL image uploading is a tragedy)
 
I don’t think I even need to label which dot is Campbell this time.
 
It’s obvious that the more goals you score, the more game winners you will have. It just makes sense. You can even see that with the very clear linear progression of all the dots. When the spotlight was shining, Scotty Campbell never disappointed. I took the average of all players with 100 or more goals just to have a decent sample size and saw that for every 6.58 goals, one would be a game winner. Scotty Campbell scored a game winner once for every 5.95 goals, clearly a cut ahead of the rest. Not only that, but he scored at a rate so much greater than everyone else that his increased rate in scoring game winners was so evident, as shown in this graph. You could make the argument that his regular season goal scoring is what makes him seem like such an outlier, which wouldn’t be completely wrong. However, he still is considerably ahead of second placed Unassisted, who had 84 game winners. The distance between Campbell and Unassisted, who are first and second in game winners respectively, is equal to the distance between Unassisted and Tarik Saeijs, who is ranked 21. That’s a considerable jump down the leaderboard. Campbell scored at an unprecedented rate, but we haven’t even gotten started.
 
This next graph I’m about to show you tell us just how many points Campbell would score. On the x axis we have games played, on the y we have points per game averages. You are gonna pretty clearly see that a lot of data points are clumped together in lines. Those games come in 72 game intervals because that’s the amount of games most players play. I only included players with 200 or more career games for a good sample size, since anyone can have a great points per game average if they play only one or two seasons. Let’s take a look at another graph, shall we? I hope your eyes aren’t hurting.
 

(Sorry for the bad cropping, VHL image uploading for some reason did this and I can't fix it)
 
Campbell is very clearly again way ahead of everyone else. I labeled a few players, but I want to focus on Brett Slobodzian. He is Campbell’s biggest competitor again, but he has an unfair advantage. He played over 200 less games than Campbell, making the pace he scored at much easier to sustain. Campbell played a full career, and scored 2.15 points per game. 2.15! I don’t think you guys are beginning to understand how insane that is. I know obviously it just sounds crazy, but this is on a whole different level. This might be one of the most jaw dropping stats I have ever seen, and I’ll explain why. On the graph it doesn’t seem as crazy as some other things I’m going to show you, but let me just give you some context.
 
Wayne Gretzky is very clearly the greatest player in NHL history. It’s not even a competition. He scored at a rate of 1.921 points per game, which is still really crazy. Mario Lemiuex is second on the list with a points per game mark of 1.883. These two were absurd. The difference between them is only .038. The difference between Campbell and second placed Slobodzian (who played 200 less games) is .38, ten times greater than the difference between Gretzky and Lemiuex. That’s pretty crazy, but it gets even more absurd.
 
The difference between first placed Campbell to second placed Slobodzian is equal to the distance between Slobodzian and 61st placed Carl Jacobs, a hall of famer. That’s pretty cool, but let's make it even crazier. The difference between Campbell and Slobodzian is equal to the difference between Jacobs (61st place) and 294th placed Sven Wolf. That’s a huge difference, but lets keep going. Just bear with me for a moment. Right around 1.01 points per game, which is what Wolf is at, we have multiple hall of famers. Freeman at 1.03, Ay Ay Ron at 0.99, and Jake Wylde at 0.97. If we turn to the NHL point per game leaders, we see guys like Mats Sundin, Teemu Selanne, and Darryl Sittler sitting around 1.01. These guys are hall of famers too. Let's take the difference between first placed Gretzky and second placed Lemiuex and see how big of a difference it makes in the NHL all time points per game leaderboards, shall we? We go all the way down to… more hall of famers? Not just any hall of famers either, we have guys like Luc Robitaille, Cam Neely, Ray Bourque, even Maurice Richard all hovering in that area. When we take the difference from Gretzky to Lemiuex, we go from elite hall of famers to more elite hall of famers. Now lets see what happens when we do that with Campbell and Slobodzian.
 
Keep in mind, the 1.01 points per game mark has multiple VHL hall of famers. When you take the difference between first placed Campbell and second placed Slobodzian, you go from players like Julius Freeman, Ay Ay Ron, and Jake Wylde, all the way down to guys like Peter Payne, Nick Hampton, and Owen Sharpley. You don’t know who those guys are? Alright fair enough, you might be new here. Let me explain. Wait, you aren’t new here? You’ve been around for quite a while and still don’t know them?
 
 
 
Well, it isn’t really inconceivable. The three players I named, along with anyone else in a 100 player radius, are complete no name, mediocre sim players. These guys are the very definition of a mediocre role player. No one knows who they are. No one remembers their names, or writes about them. Hell, even the users behind those players might not even remember them. Their impact on the VHL was nothing. No one batted an eye when these guys retired. And yet, they still play a part in this story. The difference between Campbell and Slobodzian is the exact same as the difference between hall of famers and absolute nobodies. When we do the same for Gretzky and Lemiuex, it’s not at all the same. We go from some of the greatest players in league history to more of the greatest players in league history. Compared to Campbell, everyone else is merely a peasant. They were at the will of what Scotty wanted to do. No one could stop him. No one even came close, not even some of the other greatest players of all time. We still have to keep in mind that Slobodzian only played 360 game, and if he had played a full career, chances are he wouldn't sustain that pace. The difference between Campbell and everyone else was so large, it’s hard to even comprehend. But let's keep going. I have a couple more things to show you.
 
I have two final graphs to show you. These are my personal favorites, just because of how clearly it shows Scotty’s dominance. Both graphs show the same thing, so I won’t label them. It shouldn’t be too hard to remember. On the x axis we have assists, and on the y we have goals. The higher up you are, the more goals you scored, and how far to the right you are is how any assists you had. The only difference between the graphs is that the one on the right only includes hall of fame players, while the one on the left has every player to ever play a game in the VHL. In case you don’t know your rights and lefts, the hall of fame graph is red and the every player graph is in blue. If you don’t know rights and lefts and are colorblind, well, I have nothing for you.
 


 
These graphs show a noticeable trend, especially the graph that includes every player. At first it’s just a big collection of dots, but then once we get to a point where players are scoring enough points, there is a clear and obvious split. The players that flatten out are defenseman, who have far more assists than goals. The players that continue going up are forwards, who score goals and get assists at a more even rate. This is evident in the hall of fame graph too, you can clearly see a split. You could even group the dots into two separate categories entirely with the way it’s split. But that isn’t what we are here for.
 
As we go up the chart, we see some of the greatest players in VHL history. You see the two dots farthest to the right on either graph? That’s Japinder Singh and Sterling Labatte, two of the greatest defensemen of all time. The dot highest up the y axis is Christian Stolzschweiger, closely followed by fellow VHL greats Mike Szatkowski and Matt Thompson. 
 
Wait a minute.
 
Where is Campbell? Did I miss him? There’s no way, he must be in there somewhere. Did I actually miss him?
 
 


 
Oh. There he is.
 
 
 
 
2,400ish words
 
 

⚠️ Warning: A lot of reading is ahead. Read at your own discretion ⚠️
 
We all know Scotty Campbell is the greatest VHL player of all time. It’s not even up for debate. I’ve tried to discredit Campbell’s success in an attempt to show how he had an easier time scoring than modern day players. In my last article about the decline in scoring, I even tried to convert Campbell’s stats to modern day numbers. They were not nearly as impressive, although still hall of fame worthy. Using the data from my last article, I was planning on converting every hall of famers stats to modern day scoring totals, and then ranking everyone accordingly. When I was starting to make graphs based on players stats, I quickly realized that Scotty Campbell’s dominance transcends eras. It doesn’t matter if he had an easier time than modern day players, he still dominated at an unprecedented level. I don’t think enough people truly understand just how dominant he was. So, I made seven different graphs showcasing how good he really was.
 
For some people, they like to use statistics to determine who is greatest. Other people like to use clutch stats, such as playoff performance, championships, or other things. I’m going to try to appeal to both of these people. On the x axis, we have regular season points per game, and the y axis is for playoff points per game. I even included a line that helps show how players are playing. If you are below the line, you are better in the regular season. Above the line, you are better in the playoffs. On this graph, we only used hall of famers as well. Basically, if you super high up but not very far to the right, you are a great playoff performer. If you are kind of low but pretty far to the right, you aren’t so good in the playoffs. Let's take a look.
 

 
Every hall of famer sits between the 1 to 1.5 regular season points per game range and the 1.5 to 0.5 playoff points per game mark. Everyone except Brett Slobodzian and Scotty Campbell, of course. Slobodzian was a remarkable playoff performer, with 2.08 points per game in his 36 games played. Campbell was also a great playoff performer, with a career playoff points per game average of 1.81. Campbell’s regular season dominance was much greater though. Does this mean Scotty Campbell is a choker? Not necessarily.
 
First of all, we have to understand that playing slightly worse in the playoffs doesn’t mean you are a choker. In the regular season, players can dominate against worse opponents, but come playoff time that isn’t going to happen. That explains why almost every single hall of fame player does a little bit worse in the playoffs than the regular season, but it doesn’t explain Slobodzian. How was he just so dominant? There are a couple reasons for this.
 
Firstly, Slobodzian played on what might be the greatest team in VHL history, the early Calgary Wranglers. They won back to back cups in S2 and S3, and they had 69 wins in S1 before losing to the Scotty Campbell led Vasteras team. He also did that in only 38 playoff games. Campbell’s 1.81 points per game is over the course of 72 games. Would Slobodzian have sustained his pace? It’s impossible to know, but we do know this: If you take Scotty Campbell's last 35 playoff games (a similar size to Slobodzian’s 38), we get a playoff points per game average of… 2.09. Ever so slightly better than Slobodzian’s 2.08. This is the only graph that Campbell doesn’t completely break, but had Slobodzian played a full career, maybe Campbell would have destroyed this graph too. It’s safe to assume Slobodzian’s points per game average would go down with a larger sample size. Here’s a tip: If you ever want to find Campbell on a graph, just look for the little dot that’s super far away from anyone else. 9 times out of 10, that’s him. Let's look at more playoff statistics.
 
I don’t really like using ‘clutch’ stats to determine greatness, especially in a sim league since it’s just numbers, but scoring big goals is important. Campbell didn’t shine away from the spotlight. On this graph, the x axis shows playoff assists, while the y axis shows playoff goals.
 


 
On this graph I labeled two players, Scotty Campbell and John Locke. Both played a very similar amount of games, and Locke scored four more goals than Campbell did. At first glance, Locke seems like more of an outlier than Campbell. Well, that’s because he is. But we really have to consider why that is the case. Locke may have four more goals, but he has 28 less assists than Campbell. The only reason Locke looks like such an outlier is because he didn’t have enough assists to follow the somewhat linear trend. There isn’t a trendline, but you can see the way the dots go in a somewhat uniform fashion. 
 
Elijah Incognito is another player that sticks out. I didn’t label him only because there wouldn’t have been enough room, but he is the player right around 20 on the y axis but is all the way over to the right on the x axis. He had 73 playoff assists, which is tied for the same amount as Campbell. However, he has 36 less goals. Anytime a player has Campbell beat in one thing, Campbell destroys them in the other. It’s like training all your life to become great at sword fighting a specific way because your arch rival sword fights in a certain way. You get to the duel, but it turns out he has other strategies he can use. You may be better than him at that style you practiced but he will dominate you with the other style. This was Scotty Campbell. Anytime a player was able to keep up with him in one statistical category, he completely destroyed them in all the other stat columns. 
 
Let's look at one final graph to appeal to ‘clutch’ statisticians. On the x axis, we have goals. On the y axis, we have game winning goals. 
 

(Sorry the graph is small, VHL image uploading is a tragedy)
 
I don’t think I even need to label which dot is Campbell this time.
 
It’s obvious that the more goals you score, the more game winners you will have. It just makes sense. You can even see that with the very clear linear progression of all the dots. When the spotlight was shining, Scotty Campbell never disappointed. I took the average of all players with 100 or more goals just to have a decent sample size and saw that for every 6.58 goals, one would be a game winner. Scotty Campbell scored a game winner once for every 5.95 goals, clearly a cut ahead of the rest. Not only that, but he scored at a rate so much greater than everyone else that his increased rate in scoring game winners was so evident, as shown in this graph. You could make the argument that his regular season goal scoring is what makes him seem like such an outlier, which wouldn’t be completely wrong. However, he still is considerably ahead of second placed Unassisted, who had 84 game winners. The distance between Campbell and Unassisted, who are first and second in game winners respectively, is equal to the distance between Unassisted and Tarik Saeijs, who is ranked 21. That’s a considerable jump down the leaderboard. Campbell scored at an unprecedented rate, but we haven’t even gotten started.
 
This next graph I’m about to show you tell us just how many points Campbell would score. On the x axis we have games played, on the y we have points per game averages. You are gonna pretty clearly see that a lot of data points are clumped together in lines. Those games come in 72 game intervals because that’s the amount of games most players play. I only included players with 200 or more career games for a good sample size, since anyone can have a great points per game average if they play only one or two seasons. Let’s take a look at another graph, shall we? I hope your eyes aren’t hurting.
 

(Sorry for the bad cropping, VHL image uploading for some reason did this and I can't fix it)
 
Campbell is very clearly again way ahead of everyone else. I labeled a few players, but I want to focus on Brett Slobodzian. He is Campbell’s biggest competitor again, but he has an unfair advantage. He played over 200 less games than Campbell, making the pace he scored at much easier to sustain. Campbell played a full career, and scored 2.15 points per game. 2.15! I don’t think you guys are beginning to understand how insane that is. I know obviously it just sounds crazy, but this is on a whole different level. This might be one of the most jaw dropping stats I have ever seen, and I’ll explain why. On the graph it doesn’t seem as crazy as some other things I’m going to show you, but let me just give you some context.
 
Wayne Gretzky is very clearly the greatest player in NHL history. It’s not even a competition. He scored at a rate of 1.921 points per game, which is still really crazy. Mario Lemiuex is second on the list with a points per game mark of 1.883. These two were absurd. The difference between them is only .038. The difference between Campbell and second placed Slobodzian (who played 200 less games) is .38, ten times greater than the difference between Gretzky and Lemiuex. That’s pretty crazy, but it gets even more absurd.
 
The difference between first placed Campbell to second placed Slobodzian is equal to the distance between Slobodzian and 61st placed Carl Jacobs, a hall of famer. That’s pretty cool, but let's make it even crazier. The difference between Campbell and Slobodzian is equal to the difference between Jacobs (61st place) and 294th placed Sven Wolf. That’s a huge difference, but lets keep going. Just bear with me for a moment. Right around 1.01 points per game, which is what Wolf is at, we have multiple hall of famers. Freeman at 1.03, Ay Ay Ron at 0.99, and Jake Wylde at 0.97. If we turn to the NHL point per game leaders, we see guys like Mats Sundin, Teemu Selanne, and Darryl Sittler sitting around 1.01. These guys are hall of famers too. Let's take the difference between first placed Gretzky and second placed Lemiuex and see how big of a difference it makes in the NHL all time points per game leaderboards, shall we? We go all the way down to… more hall of famers? Not just any hall of famers either, we have guys like Luc Robitaille, Cam Neely, Ray Bourque, even Maurice Richard all hovering in that area. When we take the difference from Gretzky to Lemiuex, we go from elite hall of famers to more elite hall of famers. Now lets see what happens when we do that with Campbell and Slobodzian.
 
Keep in mind, the 1.01 points per game mark has multiple VHL hall of famers. When you take the difference between first placed Campbell and second placed Slobodzian, you go from players like Julius Freeman, Ay Ay Ron, and Jake Wylde, all the way down to guys like Peter Payne, Nick Hampton, and Owen Sharpley. You don’t know who those guys are? Alright fair enough, you might be new here. Let me explain. Wait, you aren’t new here? You’ve been around for quite a while and still don’t know them?
 
 
 
Well, it isn’t really inconceivable. The three players I named, along with anyone else in a 100 player radius, are complete no name, mediocre sim players. These guys are the very definition of a mediocre role player. No one knows who they are. No one remembers their names, or writes about them. Hell, even the users behind those players might not even remember them. Their impact on the VHL was nothing. No one batted an eye when these guys retired. And yet, they still play a part in this story. The difference between Campbell and Slobodzian is the exact same as the difference between hall of famers and absolute nobodies. When we do the same for Gretzky and Lemiuex, it’s not at all the same. We go from some of the greatest players in league history to more of the greatest players in league history. Compared to Campbell, everyone else is merely a peasant. They were at the will of what Scotty wanted to do. No one could stop him. No one even came close, not even some of the other greatest players of all time. We still have to keep in mind that Slobodzian only played 360 game, and if he had played a full career, chances are he wouldn't sustain that pace. The difference between Campbell and everyone else was so large, it’s hard to even comprehend. But let's keep going. I have a couple more things to show you.
 
I have two final graphs to show you. These are my personal favorites, just because of how clearly it shows Scotty’s dominance. Both graphs show the same thing, so I won’t label them. It shouldn’t be too hard to remember. On the x axis we have assists, and on the y we have goals. The higher up you are, the more goals you scored, and how far to the right you are is how any assists you had. The only difference between the graphs is that the one on the right only includes hall of fame players, while the one on the left has every player to ever play a game in the VHL. In case you don’t know your rights and lefts, the hall of fame graph is red and the every player graph is in blue. If you don’t know rights and lefts and are colorblind, well, I have nothing for you.
 


 
These graphs show a noticeable trend, especially the graph that includes every player. At first it’s just a big collection of dots, but then once we get to a point where players are scoring enough points, there is a clear and obvious split. The players that flatten out are defenseman, who have far more assists than goals. The players that continue going up are forwards, who score goals and get assists at a more even rate. This is evident in the hall of fame graph too, you can clearly see a split. You could even group the dots into two separate categories entirely with the way it’s split. But that isn’t what we are here for.
 
As we go up the chart, we see some of the greatest players in VHL history. You see the two dots farthest to the right on either graph? That’s Japinder Singh and Sterling Labatte, two of the greatest defensemen of all time. The dot highest up the y axis is Christian Stolzschweiger, closely followed by fellow VHL greats Mike Szatkowski and Matt Thompson. 
 
Wait a minute.
 
Where is Campbell? Did I miss him? There’s no way, he must be in there somewhere. Did I actually miss him?
 
 


 
Oh. There he is.
 
 
 
 
2,400ish words
 
 

⚠️ Warning: A lot of reading is ahead. Read at your own discretion ⚠️
 
We all know Scotty Campbell is the greatest VHL player of all time. It’s not even up for debate. I’ve tried to discredit Campbell’s success in an attempt to show how he had an easier time scoring than modern day players. In my last article about the decline in scoring, I even tried to convert Campbell’s stats to modern day numbers. They were not nearly as impressive, although still hall of fame worthy. Using the data from my last article, I was planning on converting every hall of famers stats to modern day scoring totals, and then ranking everyone accordingly. When I was starting to make graphs based on players stats, I quickly realized that Scotty Campbell’s dominance transcends eras. It doesn’t matter if he had an easier time than modern day players, he still dominated at an unprecedented level. I don’t think enough people truly understand just how dominant he was. So, I made seven different graphs showcasing how good he really was.
 
For some people, they like to use statistics to determine who is greatest. Other people like to use clutch stats, such as playoff performance, championships, or other things. I’m going to try to appeal to both of these people. On the x axis, we have regular season points per game, and the y axis is for playoff points per game. I even included a line that helps show how players are playing. If you are below the line, you are better in the regular season. Above the line, you are better in the playoffs. On this graph, we only used hall of famers as well. Basically, if you super high up but not very far to the right, you are a great playoff performer. If you are kind of low but pretty far to the right, you aren’t so good in the playoffs. Let's take a look.
 

 
Every hall of famer sits between the 1 to 1.5 regular season points per game range and the 1.5 to 0.5 playoff points per game mark. Everyone except Brett Slobodzian and Scotty Campbell, of course. Slobodzian was a remarkable playoff performer, with 2.08 points per game in his 36 games played. Campbell was also a great playoff performer, with a career playoff points per game average of 1.81. Campbell’s regular season dominance was much greater though. Does this mean Scotty Campbell is a choker? Not necessarily.
 
First of all, we have to understand that playing slightly worse in the playoffs doesn’t mean you are a choker. In the regular season, players can dominate against worse opponents, but come playoff time that isn’t going to happen. That explains why almost every single hall of fame player does a little bit worse in the playoffs than the regular season, but it doesn’t explain Slobodzian. How was he just so dominant? There are a couple reasons for this.
 
Firstly, Slobodzian played on what might be the greatest team in VHL history, the early Calgary Wranglers. They won back to back cups in S2 and S3, and they had 69 wins in S1 before losing to the Scotty Campbell led Vasteras team. He also did that in only 38 playoff games. Campbell’s 1.81 points per game is over the course of 72 games. Would Slobodzian have sustained his pace? It’s impossible to know, but we do know this: If you take Scotty Campbell's last 35 playoff games (a similar size to Slobodzian’s 38), we get a playoff points per game average of… 2.09. Ever so slightly better than Slobodzian’s 2.08. This is the only graph that Campbell doesn’t completely break, but had Slobodzian played a full career, maybe Campbell would have destroyed this graph too. It’s safe to assume Slobodzian’s points per game average would go down with a larger sample size. Here’s a tip: If you ever want to find Campbell on a graph, just look for the little dot that’s super far away from anyone else. 9 times out of 10, that’s him. Let's look at more playoff statistics.
 
I don’t really like using ‘clutch’ stats to determine greatness, especially in a sim league since it’s just numbers, but scoring big goals is important. Campbell didn’t shine away from the spotlight. On this graph, the x axis shows playoff assists, while the y axis shows playoff goals.
 


 
On this graph I labeled two players, Scotty Campbell and John Locke. Both played a very similar amount of games, and Locke scored four more goals than Campbell did. At first glance, Locke seems like more of an outlier than Campbell. Well, that’s because he is. But we really have to consider why that is the case. Locke may have four more goals, but he has 28 less assists than Campbell. The only reason Locke looks like such an outlier is because he didn’t have enough assists to follow the somewhat linear trend. There isn’t a trendline, but you can see the way the dots go in a somewhat uniform fashion. 
 
Elijah Incognito is another player that sticks out. I didn’t label him only because there wouldn’t have been enough room, but he is the player right around 20 on the y axis but is all the way over to the right on the x axis. He had 73 playoff assists, which is tied for the same amount as Campbell. However, he has 36 less goals. Anytime a player has Campbell beat in one thing, Campbell destroys them in the other. It’s like training all your life to become great at sword fighting a specific way because your arch rival sword fights in a certain way. You get to the duel, but it turns out he has other strategies he can use. You may be better than him at that style you practiced but he will dominate you with the other style. This was Scotty Campbell. Anytime a player was able to keep up with him in one statistical category, he completely destroyed them in all the other stat columns. 
 
Let's look at one final graph to appeal to ‘clutch’ statisticians. On the x axis, we have goals. On the y axis, we have game winning goals. 
 

(Sorry the graph is small, VHL image uploading is a tragedy)
 
I don’t think I even need to label which dot is Campbell this time.
 
It’s obvious that the more goals you score, the more game winners you will have. It just makes sense. You can even see that with the very clear linear progression of all the dots. When the spotlight was shining, Scotty Campbell never disappointed. I took the average of all players with 100 or more goals just to have a decent sample size and saw that for every 6.58 goals, one would be a game winner. Scotty Campbell scored a game winner once for every 5.95 goals, clearly a cut ahead of the rest. Not only that, but he scored at a rate so much greater than everyone else that his increased rate in scoring game winners was so evident, as shown in this graph. You could make the argument that his regular season goal scoring is what makes him seem like such an outlier, which wouldn’t be completely wrong. However, he still is considerably ahead of second placed Unassisted, who had 84 game winners. The distance between Campbell and Unassisted, who are first and second in game winners respectively, is equal to the distance between Unassisted and Tarik Saeijs, who is ranked 21. That’s a considerable jump down the leaderboard. Campbell scored at an unprecedented rate, but we haven’t even gotten started.
 
This next graph I’m about to show you tell us just how many points Campbell would score. On the x axis we have games played, on the y we have points per game averages. You are gonna pretty clearly see that a lot of data points are clumped together in lines. Those games come in 72 game intervals because that’s the amount of games most players play. I only included players with 200 or more career games for a good sample size, since anyone can have a great points per game average if they play only one or two seasons. Let’s take a look at another graph, shall we? I hope your eyes aren’t hurting.
 

(Sorry for the bad cropping, VHL image uploading for some reason did this and I can't fix it)
 
Campbell is very clearly again way ahead of everyone else. I labeled a few players, but I want to focus on Brett Slobodzian. He is Campbell’s biggest competitor again, but he has an unfair advantage. He played over 200 less games than Campbell, making the pace he scored at much easier to sustain. Campbell played a full career, and scored 2.15 points per game. 2.15! I don’t think you guys are beginning to understand how insane that is. I know obviously it just sounds crazy, but this is on a whole different level. This might be one of the most jaw dropping stats I have ever seen, and I’ll explain why. On the graph it doesn’t seem as crazy as some other things I’m going to show you, but let me just give you some context.
 
Wayne Gretzky is very clearly the greatest player in NHL history. It’s not even a competition. He scored at a rate of 1.921 points per game, which is still really crazy. Mario Lemiuex is second on the list with a points per game mark of 1.883. These two were absurd. The difference between them is only .038. The difference between Campbell and second placed Slobodzian (who played 200 less games) is .38, ten times greater than the difference between Gretzky and Lemiuex. That’s pretty crazy, but it gets even more absurd.
 
The difference between first placed Campbell to second placed Slobodzian is equal to the distance between Slobodzian and 61st placed Carl Jacobs, a hall of famer. That’s pretty cool, but let's make it even crazier. The difference between Campbell and Slobodzian is equal to the difference between Jacobs (61st place) and 294th placed Sven Wolf. That’s a huge difference, but lets keep going. Just bear with me for a moment. Right around 1.01 points per game, which is what Wolf is at, we have multiple hall of famers. Freeman at 1.03, Ay Ay Ron at 0.99, and Jake Wylde at 0.97. If we turn to the NHL point per game leaders, we see guys like Mats Sundin, Teemu Selanne, and Darryl Sittler sitting around 1.01. These guys are hall of famers too. Let's take the difference between first placed Gretzky and second placed Lemiuex and see how big of a difference it makes in the NHL all time points per game leaderboards, shall we? We go all the way down to… more hall of famers? Not just any hall of famers either, we have guys like Luc Robitaille, Cam Neely, Ray Bourque, even Maurice Richard all hovering in that area. When we take the difference from Gretzky to Lemiuex, we go from elite hall of famers to more elite hall of famers. Now lets see what happens when we do that with Campbell and Slobodzian.
 
Keep in mind, the 1.01 points per game mark has multiple VHL hall of famers. When you take the difference between first placed Campbell and second placed Slobodzian, you go from players like Julius Freeman, Ay Ay Ron, and Jake Wylde, all the way down to guys like Peter Payne, Nick Hampton, and Owen Sharpley. You don’t know who those guys are? Alright fair enough, you might be new here. Let me explain. Wait, you aren’t new here? You’ve been around for quite a while and still don’t know them?
 
 
 
Well, it isn’t really inconceivable. The three players I named, along with anyone else in a 100 player radius, are complete no name, mediocre sim players. These guys are the very definition of a mediocre role player. No one knows who they are. No one remembers their names, or writes about them. Hell, even the users behind those players might not even remember them. Their impact on the VHL was nothing. No one batted an eye when these guys retired. And yet, they still play a part in this story. The difference between Campbell and Slobodzian is the exact same as the difference between hall of famers and absolute nobodies. When we do the same for Gretzky and Lemiuex, it’s not at all the same. We go from some of the greatest players in league history to more of the greatest players in league history. Compared to Campbell, everyone else is merely a peasant. They were at the will of what Scotty wanted to do. No one could stop him. No one even came close, not even some of the other greatest players of all time. We still have to keep in mind that Slobodzian only played 360 game, and if he had played a full career, chances are he wouldn't sustain that pace. The difference between Campbell and everyone else was so large, it’s hard to even comprehend. But let's keep going. I have a couple more things to show you.
 
I have two final graphs to show you. These are my personal favorites, just because of how clearly it shows Scotty’s dominance. Both graphs show the same thing, so I won’t label them. It shouldn’t be too hard to remember. On the x axis we have assists, and on the y we have goals. The higher up you are, the more goals you scored, and how far to the right you are is how any assists you had. The only difference between the graphs is that the one on the right only includes hall of fame players, while the one on the left has every player to ever play a game in the VHL. In case you don’t know your rights and lefts, the hall of fame graph is red and the every player graph is in blue. If you don’t know rights and lefts and are colorblind, well, I have nothing for you.
 


 
These graphs show a noticeable trend, especially the graph that includes every player. At first it’s just a big collection of dots, but then once we get to a point where players are scoring enough points, there is a clear and obvious split. The players that flatten out are defenseman, who have far more assists than goals. The players that continue going up are forwards, who score goals and get assists at a more even rate. This is evident in the hall of fame graph too, you can clearly see a split. You could even group the dots into two separate categories entirely with the way it’s split. But that isn’t what we are here for.
 
As we go up the chart, we see some of the greatest players in VHL history. You see the two dots farthest to the right on either graph? That’s Japinder Singh and Sterling Labatte, two of the greatest defensemen of all time. The dot highest up the y axis is Christian Stolzschweiger, closely followed by fellow VHL greats Mike Szatkowski and Matt Thompson. 
 
Wait a minute.
 
Where is Campbell? Did I miss him? There’s no way, he must be in there somewhere. Did I actually miss him?
 
 


 
Oh. There he is.
 
 
 
 
2,400ish words
 
 

Recently, I have really been grinding out a lot of media spots. My most recent was showing how scoring has changed throughout the VHL (it's steadily declined), and then I tried to adjust Scotty Campbells stats for what they would be in todays game. I think my method wasn't terrible, but I did make a flaw that I noticed. Some players are at a disadvantage when being compared to their own generation because the average career length is longer, so they will have less of an edge on goals, assists, points, etc. I was doing some more research for my next media and I adjusted this so it's all about per game metric, which I then converted to actual stat totals through a 576 game career.
 
I have been trying to tear down Scotty Campbell. I wrote a media about how he is a playoff choker, only to find that the playoff stats just are wrong in his HOF article. I tried to explain why his stats are so dominant, and I showed how scoring was way easier back then and he had numerous advantages. That was actually valid, but next week I won't be trying to tear him down. My media spot for next week will be showing just how dominate he was, and put the numbers he put up into true context. I have eight or nine graphs showing how he was simply on a different level than everyone else. I'm hoping it will be a banger.
 
250 words

These main rules of defending are what Tom Eagles has learned over the years and is now sharing with everyone in this article. This is more for younger players trying to make it into the league but can be a good use to even veteran players. If you want to be a top defender in the VHLM and VHL then you should follow most of these rules. The best Defenders in the VHL follow these Golden Rules most often. A player of average skill will do very well if these rules are trained and if he always has them in the back of his head. While the rules are basic and seem obvious, it may take many years of concentrated effort for most players to automatically perform them properly.
 
1. Always back your defensive partner whether its on the offensive blue line, in the neutral zone or, especially, in the defensive zone.

2. Always one defenseman in front of the net when the opposition has the puck in your zone or there is danger that they may gain possession. This is used to help clear out any players in front of the net so that your goalie can see or that a rebound will not be scored by the opposing team

3. Do not leave the offensive zone too soon. Leaving too soon is a much more common mistake than leaving too early. A lot of new defenders will be seen making this mistake but if you want to make it to the pro’s, you need to know when to leave and when to stay.

4. Always play defense first. If attacking with the puck, only go deep into the offensive zone until the prime scoring opportunity is over and you are part of it. All Defenseman want to help and put up points but always remember your main priority is and always will be Defense.

5. Never play a 1-on-1 head on. Give the attacker a little room on one side to force him to go where you want him to go. This will help you having a higher success in taking the puck away from him but also gives your goalie a higher percentage to make a save.

6. Shoot intelligently from the point. The best shot is always low, generally not too hard and accurate. This will help produce rebounds or will give someone a chance to tip the puck into the net. Most skilled Defensmen seldom shoot to score, but rather to put the puck into the scoring area so that forwards can score.

7. Do not tie-up the opposing players in front of the net, rather gain position and control. This will make it easier for you and your goalie to prevent anything slipping past and into the net

8. Do not tie-up with an opposing player anywhere when your team is a man short. As the players on the team with a penalty tie up and are out of the play, the odds get better on the power play, i.e. 4-on-3 is better than 5-on-4, 3-on-2 is better than 4-on-3, etc.

9. Do not stand looking for someone to pass to, especially in the defensive zone. Always move your feet, always be skating as this will make it harder for the opposing team to know where you will be sending the puck and harder for them to strip you off the puck. This will also make your pass more accurate as it will have more momentum then when you are standing still

10. Always train your backwards skating and turning. A defenseman must be as comfortable going backwards and sideways as forward. You may find it easy but it always helps to practice to make sure your backward skating is always as smooth as possible and that you can keep up with the incoming forwards.

11. One of Tom’s biggest rules is to check only for purpose. Checking just for the sake of a hit is seldom of value and creates risk of self-injury, missed checks and open opposition players, as well as penalties. While hitting is always fun and makes the fan’s get excited, don’t go for a hit that can open up a opportunity for the opposing team to score.

12. Communicate with your defensive partner, your goalie and your forwards. It is an important part of teamwork. Without communication and team-work and team will not gel well. Make sure to call out where to pass or if the other teams players are nearby.

13. The blue lines are critical. Always clear the puck over the defensive blue line as a first priority, then, move up to the blue line quickly.

14. Learn the critical skills of flipping the puck out of your zone and deflecting the puck off the glass without sending it over the glass. This is always vital in a penalty killing situation, but you want to make sure you don’t get an extra penalty for going over the glass.

With these 14 simple rules, you will be on your way to becoming a great VHLM and VHL Defender
 

1. Lots of trades, and Zod had a great Pro-AM tournament.
2. Being a GM in the VHLM is easier than the VHL in terms of asset management but it's harder in other ways because you have to really keep players engaged, that's your primary job. I'm sure everyone hired will be good.
3. No more expansion. Anything more than 16 teams is too much unless recruitment really booms. The more teams, the less chances to win cups which is no fun.
4. I really like the all division matchups, I just dislike that some divisions are stacked and others are weaker. The Canadian division has six real good teams but no real cup contenders, yet someone is guaranteed a final four spot. The east division is stacked, but two teams that could be playoff caliber will be left out, meanwhile a team like the Wild or Coyotes or Sharks will sneak into the fourth seed in the west.
5. Our defense and goaltending is strong, and our offense is good too but not as good as the defense. I'd say we are due for regression, but still will be very competitive.
6. Game film. A great General must study his opponents, as well as ways to improve himself.

Great work.😮

Interesting article. A very long read, the graphs definitely made it less dry. Good history lesson for a newer member to the community. Good essay format; intro, body and conclusion. Was there an increase in talent or change in game engine? 9/10

Scotty Campbell, very clearly, is the VHL’s greatest player of all time. No one even comes close. He is the only player to have a point total in the quadruple digits, as well as the only player to average over one goal per game through their entire career. He is the undisputed GOAT of the VHL. However, it’s impossible to deny he had some help. I have been tirelessly trying to find ways I can to prove that Campbell isn’t perhaps as great as everything thinks. I had a media spot a couple weeks ago accusing Campbell of being a playoff choker; this held true until I realized that his playoff career totals in his hall of fame article were completely incorrect. So, I naturally had to take things one step further.
 
We all know that the league has the most activity right now than ever before. There are more players in the league, double the amount of teams we once had, and we are not even ten seasons removed from the two largest draft classes in league history (S66+S67). In the modern VHL, there are more good players, less minutes to be played, and less opportunities to score, problems that Campbell did not ever have to face. The biggest difficulty that players face now is that when they enter the league, most players have more TPE than them at the start. Since Campbell started in S1, he didn’t have this problem. He was always the best player, throughout his whole career. It’s clearly harder as a player to produce points in the modern VHL than it was in the beginning, but how can we prove this? Unfortunately, the only true way to find out how scoring has changed throughout VHL history is to collect every single player's all time stats, and sort them accordingly. This is going to be fun, right?
 
I split up VHL history into nine generations. Each generation was 8 seasons, the maximum length of a player's career. Every player with 200+ games played is a part of this data. I collected the points, goals, assists, points per game, and games played for forwards and defense, as well as save percentage and goals against average for goaltenders.
 
Data
 
Firstly, we are going to look at forward stat changes throughout the years. In order to find this, I took the average games played, goals, assists, points, and points per game and put them on a graph over time, to show how scoring has increased or decreased throughout VHL history. Here is the graph:

Blue: Games played \ Yellow: Points \ Red: Assists \ Orange: Goals \ Green: PPG (multiplied by 100, so it would show up on the graph)
 
Just from a first look at this graph, we can tell that everything decreases over time. The only thing that doesn’t noticeably decrease is games played, which was actually steadily increasing until it hit a low in the ninth generation. It’s very clear to see the trend; as more time went on, scoring became less common. We see this especially towards the end of the graph, which is where the ninth and final generation take over. Goals, assists, points per game, and especially points all clearly decrease, especially points. It takes a nosedive. This is the trend that I was hoping to find. Despite the total number of games played staying pretty steady throughout all of VHL history, the point totals have all taken a very noticeable dip, in two distinct four season groups.
 
The first four generations all saw average point totals over the point per game mark, a testament to how offenses would dominate in the early years. However, that then dropped to around 0.92 points per game for four seasons, and would hover around that mark until the final generation where it dropped all the way to 0.7.
 
Despite games played staying pretty consistent throughout each generation, scoring takes a very noticeable decline. Let's look at stat changes for defensemen.

Blue: Games played \ Yellow: Points \ Red: Assists \ Orange: Goals \ Green: PPG (multiplied by 100, so it would show up on the graph)
 
For defensemen, the trends are a little different, but still tell the same story. Defensemen’s careers actually got longer as time went on, yet all their other stats continued to decrease. If you look at the start and end points of the graph, it looks pretty even. However, that doesn’t tell the full story. Point totals peaked at around the fourth generation, and then continued to decline even though games played continued to increase. In the ninth generation, games played increased by one of the most noticeable margins, yet all offensive stats went down at the same time.
 
The two distinct four generation groups strike again, similar to how it worked for the forwards. The first four generations saw point per game totals around .85, peaking at .91 in the third generation (S16-S23). From the fifth to the eight generation, points per game all hovered around 0.75, and then in the final generation it hit its lowest point, at 0.68 points per game.
 
The biggest difficulty with defenseman was sorting out which defenseman were forwards for a portion of their career. All of the point totals would go up artificially, so I had to fix some things. If a player played half his career as a forward and then the other half as a defenseman, I collected their season by season stats and put their offense stats with forwards and defense stats with the defenseman. The only players this affected was Matt Bailey and Keaton Louth, who both played exactly half of their careers as a forward and the other half as a defenseman.
 
For defensemen, you can look at this graph in two different ways. If you take the graph as a whole, you can clearly see that games played continue to increase, while the rest of the stats stay the same or slightly decrease. You also could look at the graph’s from the peak in points. The point totals go way down after the peak, even though games played increase. Now it’s time for goalies.


 
I decided to add trend lines for the goalie graphs, to make it slightly easier to look at. The data is a little choppy, going up and down, so the trendline helps make it easier to see how the stats change over time. Goals against averages decreased over time, while save percentage increased over time. GAA was at 3.11 in the beginning of the VHL, which reached a low of 2.03 in the seventh generation (S49-S56). It has gone up since then, but the average is still very clearly decreasing.
 
The graphs show that the GAA for goalies have decreased over time, but we can really put these numbers into context. Throughout VHL history, 104 goalies have played 150+ games, the minimum number of games to qualify for this list. When you rank them in terms of GAA, the best first generation (S1-S8) goaltender to appear on the list is Matt Pogge. He ranks 37th, with a GAA of 2.48. He is the only first generation goalie in the top half of the list. Perhaps even more amazingly, Pogge (hall of famer) and Adrian McCreath (hall of famer) are the only goaltenders from the first generation that aren’t in the bottom 25. Out of 14 first generation goaltenders, 12 of them are in the bottom 25. Compare this to the most recent generation (S65-S75), where only one goalie is ranked in the bottom 25.  That goalie is Owen May, and it's almost not even fair to have him ranked in the bottom 25. In his five seasons as a starter, he spent four of them on expansion teams (Moscow and Prague), and then another season with the rebuilding Toronto Legion. Meanwhile, we have hall of fame goaltenders from the first generation ranked below May.
 
Save percentage is another trend that is clearly on the rise. In the first generation, the average save percentage wasn’t even above 0.91. Despite the decline in recent years, it still is clearly increasing, as shown by the trendline. When you rank all 104 goaltenders by save percentage, eight first generation goalies are in the bottom 25. However, we also see three goalies in the top 20. What does this mean? Does it mean that goalies in the first generation weren’t as bad as we think? Not necessarily.
 
The way I interpret it is that there were way more shots on net in the early days of the VHL. If the save percentages of the top goalies are holding up 75 seasons later, but their GAA’s are in the tank, it must mean that goalies were facing tons of shots per game. When we look through the all time stats, my claim holds up. Three first generation goaltenders appear in the top 10 for shots against. Dominick Stryker, Greg Goldberg and Anton Nygard are the three, and Nygard and Stryker are the two highest ranked first gen goalies by save percentage. Stryker is first in shots against, Nygard is sixth, and Goldberg is eighth. In fact, Stryker is over 2,000 shots ahead of second place despite playing 60 less games. Despite being ranked in the top 10 for shots against, Goldberg, Stryker, and Nygard own three of the four fewest games played totals in the entire top 25. Nygard only played 377 games and still sits 70 shots ahead of Norris Stopko, who played over 150 extra games than Nygard. Who is the goalie that also has one of the four fewest games played totals? Jonas Markstrom, a second generation goaltender. In the early days of the VHL, shooting was much higher than it is now, and that is reflected through goaltending stats.
 
Final analysis
 
So, what does all of this mean? Did I just spend hours combing through the all time VHL played and goaltending stats for nothing? That was a fear I had before I took on this project. What if I spent all this time researching, only to find that there is no trend at all? What if I found the opposite; that scoring is actually more common now? After a few hours worth of research, I luckily discovered that was not the case. Scoring has clearly gone down since the early VHL days, and it’s by a good margin. In the first four generations of VHL history (S1-S32), the average player scored at a rate above a point per game. Now, the average player doesn’t even score at a rate of 0.7 points per game. Shooting numbers have gone way down, while GAA’s have gone down and save percentage has gone up. But if you recall, the reason for doing this wasn’t to look at scoring trends throughout history. It all was about watering down Scotty Campbell’s success. How did he do it? He was so good, he was impossibly good. He played in the era with plumbers, players today are much stronger. It’s impossible to tell how a player from a different era would do in the modern game. This is true in real life sports, with real life players. It’s even more impossible to determine how older players would do in the modern era when they don’t even actually exist. However, I tried my best to do just that.
 
Julian Borwinn, the highest scoring player of the ninth generation. In 576 games, he had 325 goals, 380 assists, and 705 points. How can we compare him to Scotty Campbell? What I did might not be the best, most scientific way to go about things. In fact, it probably isn’t. But at the end of the day, I thought it was acceptable, so I went through with it. 
 
I compared Scotty Campbell’s stats to that of an average first generation player, and then compared Borwinn’s numbers to the average ninth generation player. Campbell scored goals 3.2 times as often as the average player, and also dished out 2.5 times as many apples. Borwinn, on the other hand, scored 2.8 times as often as a ninth generation player, and had 2.3 times as many assists. I took those numbers, where we compared Borwinn and Campbell to average players from their eras, and then flipped it all around. I took Borwinns rates of scoring, 2.8 and 2.3, and applied it to the average first generation player, and then I took Campbells rates, 3.2 and 2.5, and applied it to the average ninth generation player. What are Campbell and Borwinn’s new stat lines? Is Campbell still the VHL goat? 
 
Campbell, when adjusted for ninth generation scoring rates, had a career where he scored 372 goals, had 410 assists, and 782 points. Hall of fame worthy career? Absolutely. Greatest of all time? No way. But what about Borwinn? The reason Campbell is the GOAT is because of his sheer dominance, and if Borwinn can’t put up seriously elite numbers, it will simply prove Campbell is worthy of his GOAT status. So, what did Borwinn do? When compared to first generation scoring rates, Borwinn put up 524 goals, 593 assists, for a whopping 1117 points. It isn’t the same as what Campbell put up, but it still is an incredible total and would make Borwinn only the second player to ever reach 1000 points. This study doesn’t even take into account the change in shooting numbers. Campbell took over 1500 more shots than Borwinn in the same amount of games. If Borwinn shot the puck as much as Campbell, perhaps his adjusted numbers would be even better than Campbells. 
 
So, after a ton of research and lots of writing, what conclusions can we draw from this? Firstly, Campbell is still the GOAT. Even though he played in an era where it was much easier to score, he still dominated at an unprecedented level. However, it also shows us why many of his records are considered unbreakable. No one will ever reach his point total, or even come close, just because it’s much harder to score in the modern VHL. Scotty Campbell will always be the GOAT of the VHL, but it’s impossible to deny he had a much easier time scoring than any current players would.
 
2378 words

Scotty Campbell, very clearly, is the VHL’s greatest player of all time. No one even comes close. He is the only player to have a point total in the quadruple digits, as well as the only player to average over one goal per game through their entire career. He is the undisputed GOAT of the VHL. However, it’s impossible to deny he had some help. I have been tirelessly trying to find ways I can to prove that Campbell isn’t perhaps as great as everything thinks. I had a media spot a couple weeks ago accusing Campbell of being a playoff choker; this held true until I realized that his playoff career totals in his hall of fame article were completely incorrect. So, I naturally had to take things one step further.
 
We all know that the league has the most activity right now than ever before. There are more players in the league, double the amount of teams we once had, and we are not even ten seasons removed from the two largest draft classes in league history (S66+S67). In the modern VHL, there are more good players, less minutes to be played, and less opportunities to score, problems that Campbell did not ever have to face. The biggest difficulty that players face now is that when they enter the league, most players have more TPE than them at the start. Since Campbell started in S1, he didn’t have this problem. He was always the best player, throughout his whole career. It’s clearly harder as a player to produce points in the modern VHL than it was in the beginning, but how can we prove this? Unfortunately, the only true way to find out how scoring has changed throughout VHL history is to collect every single player's all time stats, and sort them accordingly. This is going to be fun, right?
 
I split up VHL history into nine generations. Each generation was 8 seasons, the maximum length of a player's career. Every player with 200+ games played is a part of this data. I collected the points, goals, assists, points per game, and games played for forwards and defense, as well as save percentage and goals against average for goaltenders.
 
Data
 
Firstly, we are going to look at forward stat changes throughout the years. In order to find this, I took the average games played, goals, assists, points, and points per game and put them on a graph over time, to show how scoring has increased or decreased throughout VHL history. Here is the graph:

Blue: Games played \ Yellow: Points \ Red: Assists \ Orange: Goals \ Green: PPG (multiplied by 100, so it would show up on the graph)
 
Just from a first look at this graph, we can tell that everything decreases over time. The only thing that doesn’t noticeably decrease is games played, which was actually steadily increasing until it hit a low in the ninth generation. It’s very clear to see the trend; as more time went on, scoring became less common. We see this especially towards the end of the graph, which is where the ninth and final generation take over. Goals, assists, points per game, and especially points all clearly decrease, especially points. It takes a nosedive. This is the trend that I was hoping to find. Despite the total number of games played staying pretty steady throughout all of VHL history, the point totals have all taken a very noticeable dip, in two distinct four season groups.
 
The first four generations all saw average point totals over the point per game mark, a testament to how offenses would dominate in the early years. However, that then dropped to around 0.92 points per game for four seasons, and would hover around that mark until the final generation where it dropped all the way to 0.7.
 
Despite games played staying pretty consistent throughout each generation, scoring takes a very noticeable decline. Let's look at stat changes for defensemen.

Blue: Games played \ Yellow: Points \ Red: Assists \ Orange: Goals \ Green: PPG (multiplied by 100, so it would show up on the graph)
 
For defensemen, the trends are a little different, but still tell the same story. Defensemen’s careers actually got longer as time went on, yet all their other stats continued to decrease. If you look at the start and end points of the graph, it looks pretty even. However, that doesn’t tell the full story. Point totals peaked at around the fourth generation, and then continued to decline even though games played continued to increase. In the ninth generation, games played increased by one of the most noticeable margins, yet all offensive stats went down at the same time.
 
The two distinct four generation groups strike again, similar to how it worked for the forwards. The first four generations saw point per game totals around .85, peaking at .91 in the third generation (S16-S23). From the fifth to the eight generation, points per game all hovered around 0.75, and then in the final generation it hit its lowest point, at 0.68 points per game.
 
The biggest difficulty with defenseman was sorting out which defenseman were forwards for a portion of their career. All of the point totals would go up artificially, so I had to fix some things. If a player played half his career as a forward and then the other half as a defenseman, I collected their season by season stats and put their offense stats with forwards and defense stats with the defenseman. The only players this affected was Matt Bailey and Keaton Louth, who both played exactly half of their careers as a forward and the other half as a defenseman.
 
For defensemen, you can look at this graph in two different ways. If you take the graph as a whole, you can clearly see that games played continue to increase, while the rest of the stats stay the same or slightly decrease. You also could look at the graph’s from the peak in points. The point totals go way down after the peak, even though games played increase. Now it’s time for goalies.


 
I decided to add trend lines for the goalie graphs, to make it slightly easier to look at. The data is a little choppy, going up and down, so the trendline helps make it easier to see how the stats change over time. Goals against averages decreased over time, while save percentage increased over time. GAA was at 3.11 in the beginning of the VHL, which reached a low of 2.03 in the seventh generation (S49-S56). It has gone up since then, but the average is still very clearly decreasing.
 
The graphs show that the GAA for goalies have decreased over time, but we can really put these numbers into context. Throughout VHL history, 104 goalies have played 150+ games, the minimum number of games to qualify for this list. When you rank them in terms of GAA, the best first generation (S1-S8) goaltender to appear on the list is Matt Pogge. He ranks 37th, with a GAA of 2.48. He is the only first generation goalie in the top half of the list. Perhaps even more amazingly, Pogge (hall of famer) and Adrian McCreath (hall of famer) are the only goaltenders from the first generation that aren’t in the bottom 25. Out of 14 first generation goaltenders, 12 of them are in the bottom 25. Compare this to the most recent generation (S65-S75), where only one goalie is ranked in the bottom 25.  That goalie is Owen May, and it's almost not even fair to have him ranked in the bottom 25. In his five seasons as a starter, he spent four of them on expansion teams (Moscow and Prague), and then another season with the rebuilding Toronto Legion. Meanwhile, we have hall of fame goaltenders from the first generation ranked below May.
 
Save percentage is another trend that is clearly on the rise. In the first generation, the average save percentage wasn’t even above 0.91. Despite the decline in recent years, it still is clearly increasing, as shown by the trendline. When you rank all 104 goaltenders by save percentage, eight first generation goalies are in the bottom 25. However, we also see three goalies in the top 20. What does this mean? Does it mean that goalies in the first generation weren’t as bad as we think? Not necessarily.
 
The way I interpret it is that there were way more shots on net in the early days of the VHL. If the save percentages of the top goalies are holding up 75 seasons later, but their GAA’s are in the tank, it must mean that goalies were facing tons of shots per game. When we look through the all time stats, my claim holds up. Three first generation goaltenders appear in the top 10 for shots against. Dominick Stryker, Greg Goldberg and Anton Nygard are the three, and Nygard and Stryker are the two highest ranked first gen goalies by save percentage. Stryker is first in shots against, Nygard is sixth, and Goldberg is eighth. In fact, Stryker is over 2,000 shots ahead of second place despite playing 60 less games. Despite being ranked in the top 10 for shots against, Goldberg, Stryker, and Nygard own three of the four fewest games played totals in the entire top 25. Nygard only played 377 games and still sits 70 shots ahead of Norris Stopko, who played over 150 extra games than Nygard. Who is the goalie that also has one of the four fewest games played totals? Jonas Markstrom, a second generation goaltender. In the early days of the VHL, shooting was much higher than it is now, and that is reflected through goaltending stats.
 
Final analysis
 
So, what does all of this mean? Did I just spend hours combing through the all time VHL played and goaltending stats for nothing? That was a fear I had before I took on this project. What if I spent all this time researching, only to find that there is no trend at all? What if I found the opposite; that scoring is actually more common now? After a few hours worth of research, I luckily discovered that was not the case. Scoring has clearly gone down since the early VHL days, and it’s by a good margin. In the first four generations of VHL history (S1-S32), the average player scored at a rate above a point per game. Now, the average player doesn’t even score at a rate of 0.7 points per game. Shooting numbers have gone way down, while GAA’s have gone down and save percentage has gone up. But if you recall, the reason for doing this wasn’t to look at scoring trends throughout history. It all was about watering down Scotty Campbell’s success. How did he do it? He was so good, he was impossibly good. He played in the era with plumbers, players today are much stronger. It’s impossible to tell how a player from a different era would do in the modern game. This is true in real life sports, with real life players. It’s even more impossible to determine how older players would do in the modern era when they don’t even actually exist. However, I tried my best to do just that.
 
Julian Borwinn, the highest scoring player of the ninth generation. In 576 games, he had 325 goals, 380 assists, and 705 points. How can we compare him to Scotty Campbell? What I did might not be the best, most scientific way to go about things. In fact, it probably isn’t. But at the end of the day, I thought it was acceptable, so I went through with it. 
 
I compared Scotty Campbell’s stats to that of an average first generation player, and then compared Borwinn’s numbers to the average ninth generation player. Campbell scored goals 3.2 times as often as the average player, and also dished out 2.5 times as many apples. Borwinn, on the other hand, scored 2.8 times as often as a ninth generation player, and had 2.3 times as many assists. I took those numbers, where we compared Borwinn and Campbell to average players from their eras, and then flipped it all around. I took Borwinns rates of scoring, 2.8 and 2.3, and applied it to the average first generation player, and then I took Campbells rates, 3.2 and 2.5, and applied it to the average ninth generation player. What are Campbell and Borwinn’s new stat lines? Is Campbell still the VHL goat? 
 
Campbell, when adjusted for ninth generation scoring rates, had a career where he scored 372 goals, had 410 assists, and 782 points. Hall of fame worthy career? Absolutely. Greatest of all time? No way. But what about Borwinn? The reason Campbell is the GOAT is because of his sheer dominance, and if Borwinn can’t put up seriously elite numbers, it will simply prove Campbell is worthy of his GOAT status. So, what did Borwinn do? When compared to first generation scoring rates, Borwinn put up 524 goals, 593 assists, for a whopping 1117 points. It isn’t the same as what Campbell put up, but it still is an incredible total and would make Borwinn only the second player to ever reach 1000 points. This study doesn’t even take into account the change in shooting numbers. Campbell took over 1500 more shots than Borwinn in the same amount of games. If Borwinn shot the puck as much as Campbell, perhaps his adjusted numbers would be even better than Campbells. 
 
So, after a ton of research and lots of writing, what conclusions can we draw from this? Firstly, Campbell is still the GOAT. Even though he played in an era where it was much easier to score, he still dominated at an unprecedented level. However, it also shows us why many of his records are considered unbreakable. No one will ever reach his point total, or even come close, just because it’s much harder to score in the modern VHL. Scotty Campbell will always be the GOAT of the VHL, but it’s impossible to deny he had a much easier time scoring than any current players would.
 
2378 words

Review: I'm a big fan of stat based articles so I excited for this one. I think it would have been easier to read if you had put what each color stood for on the graph as opposed to below it.  That being said you did a great job explaining the significance of the graphs and your final analysis was clear. I am glad that scoring went down as I enjoy more defensive games. I don't think we can compare eras due to the scoring change so I think it's important to compare players to other players of their era and not other eras. 9/10

Review: Well done in taking on such a huge task in producing this media spot. Having the graphs in there to show the reader how the different stats changed over the years made it easier to understand the point you were trying to make. You made some good points, especially about how the VHL has a lot more top quality players now compared to when it first started. This piece was split up well and it was clear that you put a lot of effort into writing it. Top job. 10/10

Scotty Campbell, very clearly, is the VHL’s greatest player of all time. No one even comes close. He is the only player to have a point total in the quadruple digits, as well as the only player to average over one goal per game through their entire career. He is the undisputed GOAT of the VHL. However, it’s impossible to deny he had some help. I have been tirelessly trying to find ways I can to prove that Campbell isn’t perhaps as great as everything thinks. I had a media spot a couple weeks ago accusing Campbell of being a playoff choker; this held true until I realized that his playoff career totals in his hall of fame article were completely incorrect. So, I naturally had to take things one step further.
 
We all know that the league has the most activity right now than ever before. There are more players in the league, double the amount of teams we once had, and we are not even ten seasons removed from the two largest draft classes in league history (S66+S67). In the modern VHL, there are more good players, less minutes to be played, and less opportunities to score, problems that Campbell did not ever have to face. The biggest difficulty that players face now is that when they enter the league, most players have more TPE than them at the start. Since Campbell started in S1, he didn’t have this problem. He was always the best player, throughout his whole career. It’s clearly harder as a player to produce points in the modern VHL than it was in the beginning, but how can we prove this? Unfortunately, the only true way to find out how scoring has changed throughout VHL history is to collect every single player's all time stats, and sort them accordingly. This is going to be fun, right?
 
I split up VHL history into nine generations. Each generation was 8 seasons, the maximum length of a player's career. Every player with 200+ games played is a part of this data. I collected the points, goals, assists, points per game, and games played for forwards and defense, as well as save percentage and goals against average for goaltenders.
 
Data
 
Firstly, we are going to look at forward stat changes throughout the years. In order to find this, I took the average games played, goals, assists, points, and points per game and put them on a graph over time, to show how scoring has increased or decreased throughout VHL history. Here is the graph:

Blue: Games played \ Yellow: Points \ Red: Assists \ Orange: Goals \ Green: PPG (multiplied by 100, so it would show up on the graph)
 
Just from a first look at this graph, we can tell that everything decreases over time. The only thing that doesn’t noticeably decrease is games played, which was actually steadily increasing until it hit a low in the ninth generation. It’s very clear to see the trend; as more time went on, scoring became less common. We see this especially towards the end of the graph, which is where the ninth and final generation take over. Goals, assists, points per game, and especially points all clearly decrease, especially points. It takes a nosedive. This is the trend that I was hoping to find. Despite the total number of games played staying pretty steady throughout all of VHL history, the point totals have all taken a very noticeable dip, in two distinct four season groups.
 
The first four generations all saw average point totals over the point per game mark, a testament to how offenses would dominate in the early years. However, that then dropped to around 0.92 points per game for four seasons, and would hover around that mark until the final generation where it dropped all the way to 0.7.
 
Despite games played staying pretty consistent throughout each generation, scoring takes a very noticeable decline. Let's look at stat changes for defensemen.

Blue: Games played \ Yellow: Points \ Red: Assists \ Orange: Goals \ Green: PPG (multiplied by 100, so it would show up on the graph)
 
For defensemen, the trends are a little different, but still tell the same story. Defensemen’s careers actually got longer as time went on, yet all their other stats continued to decrease. If you look at the start and end points of the graph, it looks pretty even. However, that doesn’t tell the full story. Point totals peaked at around the fourth generation, and then continued to decline even though games played continued to increase. In the ninth generation, games played increased by one of the most noticeable margins, yet all offensive stats went down at the same time.
 
The two distinct four generation groups strike again, similar to how it worked for the forwards. The first four generations saw point per game totals around .85, peaking at .91 in the third generation (S16-S23). From the fifth to the eight generation, points per game all hovered around 0.75, and then in the final generation it hit its lowest point, at 0.68 points per game.
 
The biggest difficulty with defenseman was sorting out which defenseman were forwards for a portion of their career. All of the point totals would go up artificially, so I had to fix some things. If a player played half his career as a forward and then the other half as a defenseman, I collected their season by season stats and put their offense stats with forwards and defense stats with the defenseman. The only players this affected was Matt Bailey and Keaton Louth, who both played exactly half of their careers as a forward and the other half as a defenseman.
 
For defensemen, you can look at this graph in two different ways. If you take the graph as a whole, you can clearly see that games played continue to increase, while the rest of the stats stay the same or slightly decrease. You also could look at the graph’s from the peak in points. The point totals go way down after the peak, even though games played increase. Now it’s time for goalies.


 
I decided to add trend lines for the goalie graphs, to make it slightly easier to look at. The data is a little choppy, going up and down, so the trendline helps make it easier to see how the stats change over time. Goals against averages decreased over time, while save percentage increased over time. GAA was at 3.11 in the beginning of the VHL, which reached a low of 2.03 in the seventh generation (S49-S56). It has gone up since then, but the average is still very clearly decreasing.
 
The graphs show that the GAA for goalies have decreased over time, but we can really put these numbers into context. Throughout VHL history, 104 goalies have played 150+ games, the minimum number of games to qualify for this list. When you rank them in terms of GAA, the best first generation (S1-S8) goaltender to appear on the list is Matt Pogge. He ranks 37th, with a GAA of 2.48. He is the only first generation goalie in the top half of the list. Perhaps even more amazingly, Pogge (hall of famer) and Adrian McCreath (hall of famer) are the only goaltenders from the first generation that aren’t in the bottom 25. Out of 14 first generation goaltenders, 12 of them are in the bottom 25. Compare this to the most recent generation (S65-S75), where only one goalie is ranked in the bottom 25.  That goalie is Owen May, and it's almost not even fair to have him ranked in the bottom 25. In his five seasons as a starter, he spent four of them on expansion teams (Moscow and Prague), and then another season with the rebuilding Toronto Legion. Meanwhile, we have hall of fame goaltenders from the first generation ranked below May.
 
Save percentage is another trend that is clearly on the rise. In the first generation, the average save percentage wasn’t even above 0.91. Despite the decline in recent years, it still is clearly increasing, as shown by the trendline. When you rank all 104 goaltenders by save percentage, eight first generation goalies are in the bottom 25. However, we also see three goalies in the top 20. What does this mean? Does it mean that goalies in the first generation weren’t as bad as we think? Not necessarily.
 
The way I interpret it is that there were way more shots on net in the early days of the VHL. If the save percentages of the top goalies are holding up 75 seasons later, but their GAA’s are in the tank, it must mean that goalies were facing tons of shots per game. When we look through the all time stats, my claim holds up. Three first generation goaltenders appear in the top 10 for shots against. Dominick Stryker, Greg Goldberg and Anton Nygard are the three, and Nygard and Stryker are the two highest ranked first gen goalies by save percentage. Stryker is first in shots against, Nygard is sixth, and Goldberg is eighth. In fact, Stryker is over 2,000 shots ahead of second place despite playing 60 less games. Despite being ranked in the top 10 for shots against, Goldberg, Stryker, and Nygard own three of the four fewest games played totals in the entire top 25. Nygard only played 377 games and still sits 70 shots ahead of Norris Stopko, who played over 150 extra games than Nygard. Who is the goalie that also has one of the four fewest games played totals? Jonas Markstrom, a second generation goaltender. In the early days of the VHL, shooting was much higher than it is now, and that is reflected through goaltending stats.
 
Final analysis
 
So, what does all of this mean? Did I just spend hours combing through the all time VHL played and goaltending stats for nothing? That was a fear I had before I took on this project. What if I spent all this time researching, only to find that there is no trend at all? What if I found the opposite; that scoring is actually more common now? After a few hours worth of research, I luckily discovered that was not the case. Scoring has clearly gone down since the early VHL days, and it’s by a good margin. In the first four generations of VHL history (S1-S32), the average player scored at a rate above a point per game. Now, the average player doesn’t even score at a rate of 0.7 points per game. Shooting numbers have gone way down, while GAA’s have gone down and save percentage has gone up. But if you recall, the reason for doing this wasn’t to look at scoring trends throughout history. It all was about watering down Scotty Campbell’s success. How did he do it? He was so good, he was impossibly good. He played in the era with plumbers, players today are much stronger. It’s impossible to tell how a player from a different era would do in the modern game. This is true in real life sports, with real life players. It’s even more impossible to determine how older players would do in the modern era when they don’t even actually exist. However, I tried my best to do just that.
 
Julian Borwinn, the highest scoring player of the ninth generation. In 576 games, he had 325 goals, 380 assists, and 705 points. How can we compare him to Scotty Campbell? What I did might not be the best, most scientific way to go about things. In fact, it probably isn’t. But at the end of the day, I thought it was acceptable, so I went through with it. 
 
I compared Scotty Campbell’s stats to that of an average first generation player, and then compared Borwinn’s numbers to the average ninth generation player. Campbell scored goals 3.2 times as often as the average player, and also dished out 2.5 times as many apples. Borwinn, on the other hand, scored 2.8 times as often as a ninth generation player, and had 2.3 times as many assists. I took those numbers, where we compared Borwinn and Campbell to average players from their eras, and then flipped it all around. I took Borwinns rates of scoring, 2.8 and 2.3, and applied it to the average first generation player, and then I took Campbells rates, 3.2 and 2.5, and applied it to the average ninth generation player. What are Campbell and Borwinn’s new stat lines? Is Campbell still the VHL goat? 
 
Campbell, when adjusted for ninth generation scoring rates, had a career where he scored 372 goals, had 410 assists, and 782 points. Hall of fame worthy career? Absolutely. Greatest of all time? No way. But what about Borwinn? The reason Campbell is the GOAT is because of his sheer dominance, and if Borwinn can’t put up seriously elite numbers, it will simply prove Campbell is worthy of his GOAT status. So, what did Borwinn do? When compared to first generation scoring rates, Borwinn put up 524 goals, 593 assists, for a whopping 1117 points. It isn’t the same as what Campbell put up, but it still is an incredible total and would make Borwinn only the second player to ever reach 1000 points. This study doesn’t even take into account the change in shooting numbers. Campbell took over 1500 more shots than Borwinn in the same amount of games. If Borwinn shot the puck as much as Campbell, perhaps his adjusted numbers would be even better than Campbells. 
 
So, after a ton of research and lots of writing, what conclusions can we draw from this? Firstly, Campbell is still the GOAT. Even though he played in an era where it was much easier to score, he still dominated at an unprecedented level. However, it also shows us why many of his records are considered unbreakable. No one will ever reach his point total, or even come close, just because it’s much harder to score in the modern VHL. Scotty Campbell will always be the GOAT of the VHL, but it’s impossible to deny he had a much easier time scoring than any current players would.
 
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