Gustav

Hello VHL! @Berocka informed us today of some technical difficulties on his end that have left him temporarily without access to a computer. As he is unable to submit lines at the moment, he's requested that we find someone new to run Saskatoon for the time being. This is an interim job posting and will not be considered a permanently filled position until further notice. Likely, we will evaluate in the offseason based on the circumstances we have to deal with at that point. That said, solid performance in this role would reflect well on your chances at a permanent one down the road, whether with the Wild or elsewhere. Please apply below if you're interested! You should be able to maintain a high level of activity, hold a passion for helping new players develop, and be able to work professionally and respectfully with other GMs. @VHLM Commissioner

Art Vandelay

TIL that I’ve seen every team win MVP (albeit barely, I joined in S65). Some names here take me back for sure. S68 Thompson was amazing.

What's up VHL. I don't need the TPE; I'm just bored. I thought about a few people last night who may not have been ultra-popular in their time in the VHL, but who were above all else unique personalities who distinguished themselves in their own ways. Whether we'll see anyone named here back in the VHL at some point is anyone's guess, but I'm up for the experience. You don't make this article by just being an asshole--you make it by being yourself to a greater extent than is typical in this community. @Peace - someone who stuck to his morals even if it meant that he didn't fit in, Peace always communicated very directly, very seriously, and with perfect punctuation (even on Discord). He led the legendary S69 Saskatoon team to a VHLM championship (sadly, over mine) and was GM of Toronto for a while after that point along with building a Hall of Fame player. And though it's true that there were times when Peace didn't quite go with the pack, I remember times when he opened up about some stuff that made me really respect him as a person. Having last visited the forum in November, I do hope he sees this and feels welcome at some point in the future. @Tate is very well-remembered for a long series of posts speaking out against league moderation, in ways that even I disagreed with most of the time, at a time when I had my own list of issues with it. This had quite a bit to do with something that had gone down a long time before that, and was kept up long past what most members would consider the statute of limitations on "we're cool." But if one thing could be said, it's that Tate had something he believed in and wouldn't let people tell him not to get it out there. I also remember that he was a very good speaker and made podcasts worth listening to--something that's always in short supply. Plus, he respected me and was always willing to have a real conversation after he raised his voice--and you get what you give as far as that's concerned. @BladeMaiden - never one to back down from an argument and never one to be afraid of fighting to get what she wanted, I first knew Blade as the first-ever GM of Philadelphia. At her best, she was one of the league's best members, and many who agreed with this sometimes came out to turn person-versus-person conflicts into all-out wars the likes of which I haven't seen in the VHL in years. In fact, Blade was almost a cult leader--I remember disliking some original Philly players, and them disliking me, for a while despite us having next to nothing to do with each other. There were certainly lots of feelings hurt along the way, but channeled correctly, Blade's energy was tough to match. @Hogan was part of my first VHLM squad and was one of three players in my first draft (and one of two Hall-of-Famers) to win four championships with Seattle in the VHL. For one, I can attest that he was great in the locker room, a legitimately good guy to talk to one-on-one, and was often really entertaining. That said, he quickly made himself disliked (often openly) by being really active on Discord and letting his sense of humor take full control in front of people who didn't always appreciate it. He did sometimes deserve pushback for sure, and crossed his share of lines, but was also publicly criticized, often blocked, had his whole posting history accidentally deleted, and was the target of one of the league's more controversial punishments. Even if he wasn't everyone's cup of tea, I actually liked him most of the time--and I think Discord has seen worse things go over better.

Art Vandelay

I think there are two sides to being able to recruit well. The first is that you can grow the league, for sure, but the second is that you get to decide what you want the league to look like--and that's something that doesn't necessarily include growing it. I will say that the league's general administrative policy is fairly against expansion for sustainability reasons, and I agree with that. I don't think we should keep expanding until we've hit the limit of what's physically possible to recruit, for example. That's just asking for contraction later. It's true, though, that the league needed this drive. We've seen a huge drop-off in the M over the past few seasons and it's best not left unchecked. Plus, it's awesome to know that good drives aren't just a remnant of Reddit working and the world being online.

Just wanted to say that I've always really respected that we were cool with each other after that point. I could tell you were upset the first few times we interacted, but you never took that out on me and I think that says a lot. Making fun of someone is awesome if they're cool with it--I have a couple friends who I absolutely rip into, but it's with the understanding that I don't come at things that are personal to them and that I can take the same in return. I think that's the general line here as well, and sometimes "everyone is doing it" becomes the collective excuse to cross it.

Art Vandelay

I don't really care to write out another media spot here but this is sort of the main point of contention for me. It's not "how it always worked" for good earners because staying down was not how it always worked (at least, in the frame of reference I'm using where we spent a few years after the weekly cap became 12 and going up was generally normal if you knew what you were doing and earned well). There is no "always" under the current system because we have players going up and we have players staying down--those going up aren't some rare case and those staying down are, in my opinion, abusing the system because the way it was created lent itself to abuse. And that's what I have a problem with. The system itself was flawed from the start when we decided to set it up the way we did--that to me is the "always" rather than "the intent is for people in general to play a season down" (which is already achieved, in general, with a high cap). Nothing about this has to do with hating the E (although I do); it's just very much tied to the same circumstances. I'd say the same if it pertained to the M.

My Internet is slow and my sleep schedule is already ruined for the week. Who knew that being up until about 3 in the morning over my long weekend would make me want to continue doing that into my work week? Time for some VHL and chill. In light of @Fire Tortorella and @eaglesfan036 dropping some of theirs this week, you can consider this my own random VHL thoughts. I don't know why I love their format so much, but it works for both writing and reading--if you have a lot to say, you can do it quickly and end up with something that's full of things worth saying in just a couple minutes. And, of course, you can read a lot of things worth reading in that time as well if it's written well. It's been a hot minute since we had some super motivated first-gens from a recruitment drive. It used to be typical to see people like @LucyXpher or @Noodle Enjoyer or @Nathan_8 or @UghSike or the rest of you that I'm sure are reading this but who I can't name off the top of my head after a recruitment drive, but that hasn't happened in a while. Perhaps it's becoming typical again--and I hope I get to rule over you as my VHLM GMs one day! You may have noticed that I've been more active lately. That's because I've been more bored lately. The end of the year in my program is a common time for people to go home, in some cases across the world, and that happens to include some of my friends. For me, it also happened to be a time when I finished up a time-intensive project, and now I'm putting my energy into things like this because I'm not sure what else to do with it. When I stop dropping a new Hall of Not Bad every week, you'll know I'm enjoying life a little bit more. Art Vandelay is currently 11-1, and my chances of reaching 300 wins are looking very good. It's ironic that I've spent a lot of time in my VHL life ripping on @Rin for hitting that milestone and not making the Hall of Fame, and now it looks like I'm headed that way as well. Speaking of Hall of Not Bad, though, I think I'm a prime candidate and I'm going to have fun with it. I hope Art was at least an inspiration to some younger members looking to build their own goalers. Please, for the love of Gustav, do your own damn point tasks. Most of the enjoyment I get out of this league comes from putting work into things, watching people enjoy those things, and being proud of them. That's way better than the TPE I get out of it and I feel that it's such a loser move (and one that wouldn't make me feel that radiant VHL glow) to have some website do it for you. 500 words goes by way, way faster than you think (at least, it does for me because I'm great at using too many of the stupid things), and if that's too many, 150 words goes by faster than you think as well. No one wants to read your GPT output. Go write something people will want to read and you'll be better off for it. As an add-on to that last point, I've gained some real-life skills through the VHL. I'm decent with Excel in part because I've done a lot of sim league nerd stuff, and I'm decent with Photoshop because I've spent time trying to get into graphics. Plus, do you have any idea how many words I've typed into this forum? I have no clue, but I'm positive that it's made me a better writer. The only exposure I'd have to writing otherwise is through some class projects, and I went through those projects watching lots of other people have a way harder time writing their parts of the project than I did. I don't think I was naturally smarter; I think I've just done a lot of organizing my thoughts and putting them down for other people to read...because I do that every week here and I put effort into it. Who knows--would I even have done well on the things I applied for after graduation had I not built that up here? Sometimes I look at my old articles and laugh a bit, but it's a little less funny if I try to picture my old statements of purpose written the same way.

I don't regret 9 seasons either, even if I didn't handle depreciation perfectly. But even so, the question of depreciation means that I had two choices in my first season. I could have gone up and progressed my way into the VHL and had my "shot at a cup," or I could have stayed down, avoided a season where I went 19-37-7 on a team that had zero shot at winning a championship, and also avoided losing over 300 TPE (!) this season altogether while keeping my TPA up straight through my capped years. This would have been great for me and LA during that time. I think the cup-chasing argument sort of loses itself when you consider that a) many top players are drafted early to not-top teams and don't even have that opportunity to cup chase in their first seasons, and b) there should be more than that reason to go up when your team isn't great. I've heard a stat-padding argument as well, but what do you even stand to gain if your first season--as it likely will--doesn't go so well? Your career totals could end up higher, but they could also end up averaging out to making you look worse. That plus we've got some stuff that suggests that you're throwing away some stats, and I'd reject the argument entirely. "You get an extra season of stats" means a lot more to the people who make that argument if it's made under the assumption that everything outside of that season will be the same. What reason exists for going up if you know you're not winning that Cup and you have good reason to believe that your performance will be worse? I think the shot at a Cup is really the only benefit I can think of that isn't attached to some "yeah but" and that isn't even something that's accessible to a lot of players based on where they're drafted. I think this is something that can separate fact from opinion a bit. A lot of what I talk about is opinion and is just based on "this isn't the way the league should work"--and I think it's fair to say that things I've said before about how dropping your max TPA to play up will likely hurt you was based on my own opinion (or, rather, my own educated guess). I think this article largely backs up that statement. Saying "I believe that high earners are negatively impacted by playing up, this is a reason why I believe they are being rewarded for staying down, and I believe this is bad for the league" is one thing, but I also believe that getting to the point where we have factual evidence that can take away all of those "I believe"s makes that thing more of a thing. Unless your sole objective is cup chasing, which I'm not sure even describes many players, your player will be penalized if you don't game the system, so why would you not game the system? It still makes absolutely no sense to me why more people don't see it that way. And even if you don't, what is the downside of having a depreciation system that works exactly the same way for 8- and 9-season players? I think if we find one that works well, we could remove this whole stupid debate. And at that point, we would probably see more people playing up--because staying down isn't the natural choice and we all know damn well why lots of people do it.

Art Vandelay

Yeah, I mean, I'm not at all opposed to the idea of setting up depreciation in a way that makes the VHL more accessible to those who naturally take longer to reach it. I just also hate the idea that intentionally staying down when you have every opportunity to go up will benefit you in the long run. It's one of my strongest-expressed opinions surrounding everything VHLE and even just player development in general. Ask yourself, what's wrong with a system that makes depreciation the same for both 8-season and 9-season players? Why should a max earner with every bit of ability to play up choose against it to game the system? I really don't understand why many people see absolutely nothing wrong with that or even why I've seen people saying that it doesn't make a difference when the depreciation/TPE numbers are right in front of them--shouldn't it now mean something that we've got numbers that discourage going up? There's really not much you could tell me that would change my mind on that, and please don't try to tell me it's a fair debate. Intentionally keeping yourself down will lead to higher peaks and developing as should be intended will just hit you harder.

"I'm not sure I have seen anyone put forth an argument for Atreides, Telker, and [John] Merrick which to me suggests their days are numbered." -@Victor, S87 HoF Discussion "I'll go with Brendan Telker! Had some great moments with him in Malmo! He is a really great guy and a solid teammate to boot!" -@fromtheinside, Chicago Phoenix Press Conference (the league doesn't quite have the public HoF discourse it used to) Let's take a trip back to S67. A whole new generation of VHLers, each making their draft class better than the last, was busy making the league look nothing like anyone had seen it in the late S50s. Previously in danger of collapse, the league began to see a period of rebirth that seemingly went on with no end in sight until the S80s. S67 was the first time in three seasons that the league had not expanded--first to Moscow in S65 and next to Malmo in S66--and it would only be another season until Prague and DC came onto the scene. It also happened to be a new time for me, and as the league was figuring itself out, so was I. As the VHL expanded, so did the VHLM, adding three new teams in S66. Having spent only one season in the league at the time, I was appointed GM of the Mississauga Hounds, and I found myself tanking for better draft stock after just once trying to compete with the best. The roster was gutted, my success depended on waivers, and one of those waivers was a first-gen player named Nate Telker. Now, Nate Telker was a fairly nondescript VHL player. Named after his creator, @Telkster, he spent a season down in the M and then a full career in Moscow. During the later half of his career, he put up a consistent 60-some points per season, but never reached the point-per-game mark that many members strive for and had most GMs thinking that any recreate coming out of the agency would live up to Nate's reliability as a second-liner but likely not much more. Something had clearly changed by Round 2, though, as Brendan Telker was 4th in TPE in the S77 draft class. Selected 5th overall, not too far off from that ranking, he started his career in Malmo and racked up his first six seasons there, including three in a row over 100 points, a Funk in S78, and a Cup-winning S79 where he led the league in goals. A pure scorer and a solid member in the locker room, Telker never missed the playoffs in his career and was highly valued everywhere he went. Though his agent left the league on short notice early on in his next player's career, I wouldn't be surprised if members who have shown up sooner than that are familiar with the name, and I certainly don't mind contributing to that. The last HoNB covered the earliest player I've talked about (and will likely ever talk about) in S14's Voittu Jannula, and here we're expanding our scope to the latest. I like this for a couple different reasons. First, it covers a time where I was actually in the league, can remember it, and can write about things with more familiarity than I'd have from just reading over old posts. As applies to this one, though, I'm excited to look at a player from this era because it's incredibly difficult to fairly evaluate players from the league's Meta Era. This is discussed briefly in my guide to building and at greater length in a different article of mine, but the first few years of the S80s were the culmination of an understanding that had slowly built itself up through the later S70s. The reason why we have our attributes laid out the way we do is not because we want to inconvenience you but because it became necessary to stop players from following the "meta"--a TPE-efficient build that gave the league a few players every season that had perhaps unfairly inflated numbers. Beyond this, entire teams' statlines were called into question, numbers recorded even just a few seasons before or after paled in comparison, and those who weren't part of "meta" teams were quick to express their gripes with the ways that the league had reduced itself to one and only one strategy. Players from Vancouver (who threepeated right before league attributes changed) took most of the heat, but others were involved as well. Moscow, Warsaw, Chicago, and Telker's own Malmo come to mind as teams who (I think) did their best to follow in the Wolves' footsteps, and this raised a great deal of justifiable debate over how to treat some players that had higher point totals than those in the seasons around them. Luckily, players both in and out of the Hall of Fame from the league's Meta Era have higher totals than some others I considered for this installment. I can only take a window of plus or minus a couple seasons from Telker here, but in that time, we can compare his career to: Taro Tsujimoto: a Hall of Fame player. I'll always know everything about Taro before I can tell you about anyone else in this article, and that's because he was my own player. Taro was part of the last class (S75) that allowed GMs to claim their own players, and I was able to shape his career entirely on my own terms as GM of Davos. Earning for Taro also helped the players that depended on me for wins, and that was enough to develop him into my team's top forward and the face of a struggling, and proudly non-meta (I wonder, could those things be related?) franchise straight through one of the weirdest periods in league history. Taro got into the Hall of Fame with strong play and probably a little bit of team-related recognition as Davos' best, but he also may have one of the weirdest trophy cabinets the league has ever seen--two MVPs and nothing else. Interestingly, that's the extent of all my players' awards as well--I've never won anything else with anyone else. Duncan Idaho: a Hall of Fame player. I usually tend to keep a player out of HoNB analysis if they offer absolutely zero room for fair debate with the subject, but we're working with a stupidly small window of accuracy here and Idaho was the best player of the S77 class. Going third overall to Moscow, @OrbitingDeath is no stranger to creating all-time greats, and Idaho was no exception. Like Taro, he would win two MVPs (even co-winning with Taro in S80), but even more impressively, he won the Boulet five consecutive times from S80 to S84. Whether one considered Moscow a very meta place to be is almost beside the point--Idaho was the league's best two-way forward by far, a consistent threat to end up near the top of the scoring charts, and my pick for the best player of the Meta Era. Jerome Reinhart: a Hall of Fame player. Speaking of meta, Reinhart was the heart and soul of it in Vancouver and frontlined the Wolves' threepeat. The most distinguished create of @MexicanCow123, he came screaming out of the gate in S79 with three 110-plus-point seasons in his first four on the league's most "meta" team before switching to defense in S83. Perhaps saving him from being dismissed as just another product of gamesmanship was his post-meta career on defense, where he still recorded a 100-point season and even won MVP in S85 with London. I don't intend for his charts to be a direct comparison to Telker's as a forward; I have him in here more so to illustrate how drastically the meta era changed some careers. But whatever conjecture may have been present about his circumstances, Reinhart left the ice after S86 with no doubt about whether he deserved to be recognized for it. Paul Atreides: NOT a Hall of Fame player and actually the player I originally selected as this article's primary focus. @Mr_Hatter made the Hall of Fame as a Moscow lifer with S68's Raymond Bernard, and Atreides followed up with strong expectations. Going first overall in S77, Atreides and Idaho swore to play together for a good part of their careers and both ended up in Moscow for most of their time in the VHL. Atreides' best season came after a move to Toronto in S83, where he led the league in goals, but he's best remembered as part of the Menace and a combo that worked out very well with Idaho. Finishing his career incredibly similarly to Telker on the stat sheet, he never managed to win a Cup and missed out on Telker's Most Improved campaign--factors that, along with "wasn't the face of the franchise," just barely put him into secondary status as far as this article is concerned. There's a lot of "talking about" so far, and not so much "thinking about." Let's change that. One might think I'd be writing this article about Taro without any further context. Clearly, Telker would have made it had he maintained his early-career pace, and these are certainly some of the weirder-looking graphs we've analyzed. Curiously, Telker's line starts to level off a season before the end of the Meta Era, and also curiously, Idaho and Atreides seemed very unaffected by changes induced by the hybrid attribute system. I'll also note that Taro seems to pick it up a little bit at the start of the Meta Era, which is interesting because I know for a fact that Davos wasn't set up to be a meta team--perhaps STHS saw increased scoring in other places and decided to compensate a little, I don't know. In any event, I see a situation that is difficult to parse out numbers-wise. If we assume that everyone played under the same conditions and ignore awards, Telker probably makes it in and Tsujimoto doesn't. But with Malmo as a whole being a little crazy on offense, with a noticeable post-meta decline on Telker's part, it's fair to kinda-sorta apply an asterisk to his early career--though not as much as it would be to apply one to Reinhart's. Besides, if we look at awards, I think two MVPs on Taro's part (won largely for controlling a share of his team's offense--as of the last unofficial regular season awards, he still held the largest point difference from his nearest teammate). Everything is a bit foggy so far, so let's look at some other stuff. I always say that hits are complicated to evaluate in these articles. A player who hits a lot deserves to be recognized for it, but a player who doesn't isn't necessarily missing out. It's difficult to hold that opinion and not treat players without a lot of hits negatively, but let's try to do that anyway. Idaho absolutely deserves to be recognized above the others here. He had more hits in his first two seasons than our subjects did over their entire careers, and it's not fair to say that we should just ignore that in his case. I'd also say that Taro was two-way enough for it to be positive--perhaps a more fair interpretation here is that smaller differences in hits (like the one between Reinhart and the others) don't mean a whole lot. I'm not throwing anyone out, or to the side, or, in fact, anywhere because of this chart. It just so happens that a huge two-way game can often be a reason to vote for someone, and we've just established that it isn't a viable avenue for Telker. I'm not sure I can do the case for/case against thing in general here. Because we're dealing with players who dealt with each of their own unique circumstances in their own right, I think I have to look at them individually. Telker vs. Tsujimoto: Telker distinguished himself much more early on while Taro was busy not living up to his hot-prospect status. This means that Taro spent most of his time catching up--but does that matter one way or another? I think there's something to be said about starting off strong, but that loses itself to some extent when you realize that Telker had the worst "peak" out of anyone else and wasn't able to fully sustain his production after the meta changes were put into effect. There's also a noticeable enough difference in hits to make a difference, and Taro also easily wins the awards race as far as this is concerned. Flip the awards, and we probably have one in and one out, but I don't think there's an argument to be made over Taro. Telker vs. Idaho: Yeah, no. Idaho wins in every category. Telker vs. Reinhart: This one is next to impossible to compare directly. Reinhart's early career was strongly effected by the meta, and his later career was played at a different position. That said, I think the reasons why Reinhart is in are pretty clear. Regardless of what we think of meta, Reinhart still was the top scorer on a team that won three Cups in a row and was objectively a driving force behind a major event in league history. Telker was good, but he wasn't that and still finished up with a significantly lower point total. Telker vs. Atreides: You'd be hard-pressed to find two more similar players. Both were picked early in S77, both played clean, low-hitting, high-scoring games, and both won a Brooks. I think Telker wins despite slightly higher offensive output from Atreides because he was able to win a championship and Atreides spent most of his career at secondary "fame" levels to Idaho, but it's very close. In this case, the difference is close enough that it might be a negative--saying that Telker was good enough, with not much of a line between him and the next-best, also implies that Atreides is good enough. And maybe people would argue that, but it's harder to take that stance than the other one. We're also not mentioning a handful of other S70s players that could have been in here had we expanded a little bit. I didn't mention (potential future HoNBer) Lee Xin or HoFer Aloe Dear here, both S74 players with similar or higher totals. I'm also not talking about anyone S80 or later, where 9-season careers add another layer of weirdness that I'm sure I'll have to unpack in another one of these articles. I think it's fair to say that Telker was the best non-HoF forward of the late S70s, but was he good enough to make it? I don't really think so. There will always be layers of "what do we think about the meta" to roll back, but Telker is the definition of Hall of Not Bad. At the very least, he deserves to be remembered as a good player and a good community presence that helped make his team and his league great during one of its most uncertain times ever. Brendan Telker was removed from the HoF ballot in S89, having never received a vote since becoming eligible four seasons earlier. For those curious, Atreides did get one vote for induction in S88 but was removed in S91. With both off the ballot, likely for good, their time for the Hall of Not Bad has come. Previous HoNB articles: Volume 1: Alexander Pepper Volume 2: Shawn Glade Volume 3: Jakab Holik Volume 4: Bo Boeser Volume 5: Tyson Kohler Volume 6: Lasse Milo Volume 7: Voittu Jannula

Cool! Hi @leandrofg

G - Fuukka Rask @Knight

Glad you are too! I'm not sure when I want to run a game next, but I haven't forgotten

Glad you're back and I always appreciate these articles. Something about them is on-topic enough to be relevant but also real enough to be engaging.

Honestly, I see where you're coming from because there were certainly times in my GM tenure when I felt that I was taking negative pushback unfairly. I remember times I made trades and got laughed at for them, opened up Discord to some "at least we're not Davos" comment in the middle of a run of bad luck, and dealt with angry DMs from my own players over things I either had no control over or didn't know were issues to begin with--I have a small handful of things that I dealt with in private that I won't describe here but that taught me that GMing is hard and that sometimes people take your being GM as a free pass to pile onto you if you're not perfect. That's especially true if your team becomes a meme and the first word to come to mind when someone wants to say "lol [team] bad" in genchat. Perhaps what got to me the most was something that was a bit unique to my situation. If you ask around, you'll find more than just me saying that I was great as a VHLM GM in my first seasons with the Hounds. Enough that there were some people who believed from the very beginning that my move up to the VHL was a mistake. Hell, there are posts in BoG advocating against ever giving me a VHL job. And though I'm sure that was meant as a compliment, I'd come across comments alluding to it here and there at various points in my VHL GM career. I was really proud of what I did in the VHLM, and I also wanted to be proud of the work I was putting in on the next level--and it hurt sometimes when I'd see that some thought that maybe I shouldn't be or that I didn't belong. I wasn't very good at winning games with Davos and I think that made some people look at my time very critically. But I think that if you ask the vast majority of people who played for me in Davos, you'd find that they didn't regret it. When I took over, we were easily the league's most dunked-upon team, and to some extent, there wasn't much I could do to stop the dunking. That's just because everyone thought it was funny. What kept me going, though, and what I'm proud of, was knowing that I was able to give lots of people a fun time and a very active place to talk at night. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I was being dunked on in "every thread," but just knowing that the people who were doing that had nothing better to do with their lives (and were missing out on a lot by not playing with me) was good enough to push most of it aside.

I know I'm not at this point but I still feel new sometimes. It's all relative and I certainly remember hearing from people who joined 20 seasons or so before me and wondering what was up with that.

Art Vandelay

F - Mac Atlas @rory

Art Vandelay