Gustav

David

I swear finance bros just make up job titles sometimes smh

I don't think the difference between Photoshop and nothing is worth the price unless you were serious about it. Last I knew about it, it was something like $120 yearly normally--I justify it because I get it at a reduced rate of something like $30 and I also open it up for work reasons sometimes. I don't do a lot of sim league graphics anymore, so I would have canceled it by this point otherwise. Both of the alternatives at least work in basically the same ways, so if you ever found yourself on Photoshop you would find that a lot of what you built up elsewhere transfers well.

Welcome to the league @Xavier Dumont!

Yeah, one of the consequences of this was that the M now has 400-TPE goalies who aren't having their builds limited by the hybrid system going up against 400-TPE skaters who do have to deal with this and would be more like 180-TPE skaters under the old system. The differences even out a little at VHL TPE levels, but I'm not surprised that the switch caused lower scoring for this reason. It isn't something I necessarily have a problem with because the numbers don't need to be anything in particular as long as the league is working fine, but I'd understand finding it weird/hoping for a little more.

I've used Photopea a few times and I was always impressed by it for it being on a browser. It's close enough to Photoshop that you can actually import and work with .psd files there. It does hog lots of energy and it's practically unusable on my old laptop, but that doesn't mean much because I'd describe lots of things that way. I also started on Gimp and from what I remember it's very accessible as well. I've been fortunate enough to get Photoshop mostly paid for by school, and I easily like it the best--but I think both of the others are great free options and both have lots in common with the actual Photoshop experience.

I would be interested in seeing the data on it before I develop an opinion on whether we should do it. As of now, all I said was that I think it’s a cool concept. Anyone who shot it down just based on vibes is dumb. It’s interesting because if it aligns super closely with the standings, then there’s no real point in doing it, and if it ends up being really far off, then it’s probably too extreme. To me, success under this system would look like a.) teams get the best picks when they are clearly non-competitive but at least make an effort to assemble a roster and aren’t openly tanking, and b.) the VHL actually recognizes this and we see a decline in teams that are openly tanking. I see the potential for this to go wrong (let’s say openly tanking still gets you more assets so people do it anyway), at which point I wouldn’t really care about it. But if it went right it would be cool.

I really just skimmed this (for now), but it was the first time I've heard of Gold Drafting and I think it's cool.

Last season, the VHL decided to wait until I had exhausted my entire memory of everything that has ever happened to me in the VHL across my Gustav 30 in 30 series before asking us to write about "VHL lore," of all things, before theme week. It only stands to reason that this season, the VHL would wait for me to put out a really cool article that is highly specifically about the trade deadline, and then they would decide to make us write about nothing other than the trade deadline for our doubles week. Perhaps I should just shut up and take the compliment that the blues obviously read everything I write, but I will instead choose to believe that they hate me and enjoy watching me suffer over having to come up with two cool ideas in a row on the same topic. It's weird that they would do that--if you want to see me miss TPE, just post Fantasy Zone and wait for me to forget to do it. Luckily for you, and thanks to Mike's Hard Lemonade, I have another cool idea for you. Last week, I tried to make something that was a little more realistic, but since the blue team decided to do something truly unbelievable to me, I have something a bit less realistic for you. I shall not disappoint. One of the major complaints about the trade deadline is just that there isn't enough happening around the trade deadline. In some seasons, trades are very lacking, and some of you like to complain that this means the system is broken because not enough things that are exciting to you personally are going on. Because of this, I'd like to (non-seriously) propose some exciting rule changes that will be sure to spice up the trade deadline and make it the most exciting day of the season. Injured Reserve: you heard me right--if you've ever wanted to pull a Tampa Bay or a Vegas, here we are! We don't have injuries in the VHL, but they exist in STHS, and if we were to flip that switch, we'd have a system that you could game hard enough to really get people talking! Of course, we could also make sure that the salary cap is easily gamed as well by things such as these. Imagine being able to place a player on IR to free up a few million in cap space, use that cap space to trade for an 1100-TPA player from a team that's down on its luck near the deadline, and then have your injured player magically recover in time for the playoffs with it not counting against your cap hit! Teams that are loaded up are the cause of lots of deadline inactivity, because they want to compete but don't have the cap to get any stronger. Here, we could have it both ways. Half-Season Contracts and Deadline FA: Want to save money as a GM? Why not sign a player for half a season for half the cap hit? Players will like signing until the deadline because they'll have the choice to go to teams with a chance to win afterward, and teams with a chance to win will like it too because they'll be able to sign people for half off if they've got the space through some system like IR or something. If you're a bubble team, too, you might find that you can have more success in signing players in the offseason--you'll be able to promise people more of a leading role on your team over that first half, where they'll get the numbers they want, and at that point perhaps you'll be good enough to warrant a playoff run and a re-signing. I see nothing wrong with this. A Deadline Rule 5 Draft: In the MLB, teams can draft players directly from the minor league systems of other teams through something called the Rule 5 draft. Each team can protect a certain number of players, and it's inherently limited to serious prospects only because players who are selected need to be kept on the team's big-league roster for the whole year. My idea is to assign Rule 5 picks in the same way that Supplementary Draft picks are assigned in the NFL (you don't get them for free; you need to give up a regular draft pick for a pick there and those picks are assigned in the order they were in the regular draft). Teams opting into the Rule 5 draft in this way could then select from a pool of unprotected VHLM prospects from other teams, which would happen at the deadline because the deadline is boring. These players would then need to be kept on the roster and played in the regular lineup until at least the next season's deadline, thus discouraging teams from picking just anyone, and at this point good picks could enjoy their new home and bad picks could be cut or shipped out. Notice how that could also free up cap space around the deadline and make teams open for trades? I do too. No Changes to Cap For Retiring Players: This is somehow both the least weird and most radical idea on the list. Currently, teams taking on players on deadline day take 50% of the cap hit, still making it so teams who are right up against the cap can't take anyone more expensive. Originally, I didn't have the "for retiring players" in this section, but to keep it more sensible and just talk about those players, why not enable cup-chasing for that one last season? Teams who want to go all-in would still need to pay fair value for it; they just wouldn't need to crunch the numbers. I think that by putting my ideas in motion, the league could have much more exciting trade deadlines. Let me know if you'd like me to take any of my ideas to the Board of Gustav.

You guys also made LAST theme week about the article I wrote immediately before it. Stop making me come up with stuff after I’ve used up my ideas.

This is really cool! I’ll never have anything to show for it, but no one can take away the 300 wins at least.

OK but I get to be Meat Loaf.

The arrow is actually the outline of a fighter jet; Vegas has one of the more important Air Force bases in the US and a long history with it.

The trade deadline is upon us! For many, it's time to retire and recreate--and for many teams, it's time to decide how to go about the rest of the season. It's true that lots of teams enter the season with one expectation or another in mind, but it's also true that this doesn't always line up with reality. Plus, holes in the roster can present themselves throughout the season, and the opportunity to disturb cap less as the season rolls on is also an opportunity to fix those issues. Deadline day in particular is interesting because teams trading for players only have to take on 50% of that player's cap hit, enabling moves that would have been impossible up to that point in the season. It's not necessarily a busy day in the VHL, but there's always the possibility that it will be for a few teams if they can get the right plans in place and agree to them with the right people. Which is where I come in, of course. Deadline trades can be hard to coordinate, so I'll nudge some teams in the direction of each other as I've done in a few articles in the past. Have fun looking at a few deals that I think could make sense. receives: Diego Machado S99 TOR 2nd receives: Maxim Anisimov Here are two players of similar TPA, just separated by one season, who don't represent a straight buy or sell for either team but who could make sense either way. Looking at both rosters, it's evident that Toronto is going all-in for a win this season--they're out of picks in S100, and they have three S89 forwards who will be out after this season. They're on the bubble, but they're very locked in to continuing to compete because the idea that they might be able to bail out by selling is unrealistic with this little time. So, they keep the roster the same but make one of those top S89 forwards a S90 forward, carrying over a super important asset into next season and only suffering two big retirements up front. With this, it's realistic that Toronto could stay competitive next season as well--after all, the rest of the roster is serviceable and it might be sensible to not enter a rebuild until there is some amount of draft capital on the horizon. Plus, with the deal not having much of an effect on either team's current roster, the NA playoff race is kept tight. receives: Ray Stanton S99 RIG 1st receives: YaBoi Oven S99 CHI 3rd Projecting Chicago to sell is a bit weird on the surface because they're currently 4th in the NA conference, riding a 3-game win streak and a goal differential a bit above third-place Seattle. All the thought that goes into this move comes from speculation from looking at the Phoenix roster--no players are signed yet for next season. I have positively no idea what this means. Of course, I'm aware that GM Cole is well-liked, so I wouldn't chalk this up to an inability to retain players. But if it's a sign of instability moving forward, it might be smart to cash in on that early. With Stanton, the Phoenix would get a younger player, and if longtime Phoenix player Oven is considered a tradeable commodity, Riga gets a #1 defenseman that could very well push them into the top levels of the league. Were this trade to happen, it's still very possible that Chicago could hang on for the rest of the season and sneak into the playoffs, and having a late 1st that they didn't before would be a decent reward for it. receives: Celise Pereira S98 DCD 3rd receives: Jussi Jokinenegg Vancouver has the top spot in the NA conference and $500,000 left in cap room for this season--meaning that they can take on $1 million in yearly salary. This move spends exactly that much to upgrade their weakest forward position by 200 TPE, moving an inactive, retiring player out of Vancouver for the sake of an active player from S90 who realistically wouldn't have the chance to contend for a Cup on Prague. The return is limited, especially given Vancouver's draft capital, but Prague's prospect pool is deep and they won't miss a player who won't exist anymore when they finally turn the corner to being highly competitive. This might make a little bit of a "being nice" factor on Prague's end to equalize the value, but there's benefit either way when seen through that lens. We don't know what the trade deadline has in store for the VHL. Some teams are right up against the cap and couldn't make many sensible moves even if they wanted to--but some others are in surprisingly good shape. I don't anticipate a super active trade deadline, but lots of possibilities exist and it's easily the case that someone managing a team would have thought about that team much harder than I did for the purposes of this article. As far as I know, no one has ever taken my advice to heart when I write one of these articles, and I wouldn't be surprised if no one did here either. I guess we'll see what happens on Monday, and we'll see how that affects the rest of the season and the playoffs after that.

I grew up watching lots of really bad sports. Mainly, my NFL team didn't make the playoffs for my entire life until I was 17--I even got picked on for liking them in middle school even though they were local. The Sabres...are still the Sabres, I guess. We don't talk about that. Even recently, I played on a rec league soccer team that got absolutely destroyed every game because half of us had never played before. Something that's changed recently is that I have watched a team I follow in real life even make it to a championship for the first time ever. The closest I've ever seen from any team that I like is a semifinal, but all that changed when the very solid college football team I now have the privilege of having a reason to watch won their semifinal game the other day. For the first time ever, I'll be watching a championship of any sort with a real vested interest in what happens in it--go Bucks. Plus, my once-perpetually-below-average NFL team won a playoff game today and they are still in the running. We're still far from the Super Bowl with a really tough matchup coming up, but could you imagine if I somehow ended up with two #1 teams within a few weeks of each other? The Sabres are still the Sabres, but my head would explode. I've seen my teams make it to the finals in the VHL. More specifically, I made it all the way once with both of my first two players. Both times, though, my team got swept, so I can't say that I've ever won a game in the VHL finals. I do have to say that seeing a real team of mine make the finals makes me think a little bit--why can't I see three big wins within a few weeks of each other? A curse of mine has finally been broken in some way already. As of now, I don't think there's a clear #1 in the league, so Seattle has a chance as one of the decent teams left. We're third in the NA, but only by one game, and we've already made a big in-season move by bringing in Theo Allard from DC. My player is still coming into his own, but I'm over a point per game and on pace for a solid season on either end of the ice. I guess I'm just feeling it a little--I don't tend to wonder "what if I win the Cup this season," but I've just had that sneaking at the back of my head now that I'm seeing similar possibilities approach in real life. It's not at all likely that I'll see all of my teams come away as #1, and it's in fact very possible that I'll just have my heart broken a lot over the next month or so. Whatever happens will happen--but more than ever before, it has the chance to mean quite a bit for me both in and out of the VHL.

I've always felt like the giant block of "PHOENIX" text over the Chicago logo is stupid and unnecessary. I'd highlight this by moving them to Phoenix and keeping the logo the same; maybe I'll call them the Firebirds or something. If people think that's stupid, then I'd agree (even though I do think it's funny) and point out why. Depends on a couple things. I personally feel like STHS is super random and having the lines set up in a certain way isn't necessarily what leads to players performing certain ways; a lot of it is really just randomness. The things it does depend on are overall team performance and player satisfaction--if I have nothing to worry about with either of those, then I don't care what the lines are doing specifically. Not at all because sleeping during the day just makes me feel tired and sometimes it makes my eyes hurt. I really just make sure I'm hydrated and that I've stretched out so I don't hurt anything. 1. What's a mistake that you have made in the VHL? 2. What do you think is the most valuable piece of hockey equipment and why? 3. What is your best personality trait?

Sounds like a future installment if I ever get to it Also Art Vandelay

I should have put the "make @Beaviss recreate" holiday auction over the line and put some nice borderline hate speech in his player name so I could watch him come back just to get banned for it.

"...the most wins out of any goalie not in the Hall of Fame and the only player (so far) to ever break 300 wins and not get in." -Me referring to Alexander Pepper in HoNB #1 "Vandelay was the face of the franchise for most of his career, and similarly to Cooke, spent it all with Los Angeles. In S90, they managed to set their career high in wins with 45 and were it not for surefire Hall of Famer Lachlan Summers, they would likely have had a shot at earning themselves some individual hardware." -@sadie, VSN Presents: The Longest Cup Droughts and When They Started "Art Vandelay" -everyone Imagine, if you will, a world where your team's goaltender records eight seasons above a .920 SV%. Imagine a little bit harder that the same player breaks the VHL's holy 300-win mark while leading your team out of a rebuild and into six consecutive playoff appearances. Also imagine that he shatters virtually all of your franchise records at his position, has his number retired, is in the conversation for league MVP twice, and is instantly known by name around the league. If you were a GM in need of lots of future star power, that seems like a very good place to start as you attempt to build your team all the way from the ground up. It is not enough for the Board of Gustav to even consider you for induction into the Hall of Fame. I knew that my player, Art Vandelay, was never on the ballot, but I found it interesting that there wasn't even a single search result for his name in the voting section of the forum. I'm going to deviate a little from my usual HoNB format and say right up top that I don't dispute this point--Art Vandelay is not a Hall of Famer. But we're still talking about someone who recorded the 10th-most wins of all time, more than any other player created in my entire time in the VHL. We also have all that face of the franchise stuff I just mentioned. Plus, it's my own player and I get to write about him, so that's what I'm going to do. In my opinion, again, Vandelay is not a Hall of Famer. That said, I think it's worthwhile to put him into the HoNB anyway. We're going to ask not "is Vandelay a Hall of Fame player," but "why is Vandelay not a Hall of Fame player," because the answer to that question is a massively interesting documentation of a fascinating part of VHL history. There are surprisingly way more players than this that would be possible uses for this article, but I think the most fair list would be: Jesse Teno: a Hall of Fame player. Teno was a first-gen from S85 who spent an entire career with London. First-gen picks are always risky, but it's very safe to say that this one paid off--winning the Shaw in S91 and the Cup in S88, Teno made manager @Aimee proud in showing off both regular- and post-season success. Clueless Wallob: NOT a Hall of Fame player. The last player created by @DMaximus, Wallob was a promising vet who lived up to his earning potential, breaking 1500 TPE and earning a Shaw of his own in S89 after a move from Prague to Moscow. After that, he would play for three more teams, not necessarily making it into the conversation of the league's top goaltenders but providing a reliable starting piece across the league. Brandt Fuhr: NOT a Hall of Fame player. Fuhr is arguably the closest comparison to Vandelay, being the only other goaltender in league history to play nine seasons. In fact, that's the reason why I've put him in the title as well. The label that's attached to both of these players can't be attached to any other player, ever, and there's something in that. Fuhr was picked 2nd overall by Vancouver and spent eight of those nine seasons there, moving to New York for a relatively unseen final campaign. Interestingly, the general consensus around the league was that he was on a HoF trajectory early on in his career, with a Cup and a Kanou four seasons in and a Shaw campaign the season after that where he won 44 games with a .931 SV%. Activity and performance declined later on in his career, though, and @Tate and Fuhr crept across the finish line with less than 700 TPE and questions of what could have been. Cole Pearce: NOT a Hall of Fame player. Pearce was one of the first goaltenders of the E era to go straight to the VHL, being drafted by London in a bizarre S82 where he would record 40 wins despite a GAA of 3.61. By S86, he'd put up the league's lowest GAA with Chicago, and there would be a handful of very solid performances with various teams otherwise. @N0HBDY retired Pearce before his ninth season hit, keeping the number of players who have made a truly full career in net limited. Let's get into some of the numbers, and it will start to become clear where the differences lie between our players. You've heard me talk a lot about wins, and everything about Vandelay's career total as compared to other non-HoFers is objectively true. That becomes deceptive to some extent when we consider that the S80s were the first time that 9-season careers were possible. Vandelay with just his first 8 seasons has 264 wins--below Pearce's 8-season total and very comparable to the rest of the list. I think it's absolutely worth noting that Vandelay deserves credit for putting up his career total. After all, it is more wins than most others have ever put up. It also beats Fuhr--only two players have ever gone nine full seasons in net, and Vandelay came away with more wins. But it becomes clear that the high total is purely reflective of a high total. It doesn't erase the meaning that Vandelay put up numbers and gave his team a chance for a longer time, but it does mean that it doesn't necessarily mean that he played more dominantly. For those of you who don't know what normalizing is, I've explained it in my other articles. But since it's been 11 months since the last HoNB, I'll do it again--0.00 represents Vandelay's career total, and everything else is relative to that. For example, a -0.01 means that someone was .01 below Vandelay's total (i.e., recorded a .915). Vandelay is 20th overall in career SV%, and he moves up to 16th all-time when we leave out four players with considerably lower games played. Those also seem like HoF numbers--after all, it's not all the time we see those numbers. Unless, of course, it's the S80s. Vandelay again finishes just a little bit above Fuhr, which is great, but he's below Wallob, who suffered the single worst season of the whole group, and barely overlaps with Teno before either of those players hit their prime. I include the individual seasons here as well so we can break it down better--HoNB #3 makes a case for Jakab Holik on the basis that an awful rookie season negatively influenced all of his career totals--but we can't do that with Vandelay here, who's actually remarkably consistent across the board. This extends beyond just our list. Google Sheets is stupid and doesn't let me put a legend directly on this graph (that I know of), but I'll explain: Hall of Fame players and Vandelay are labeled pretty clearly. The others in a lighter red are non-HoF players who played in other, similarly weird eras--one player from S3 and one from S49, times when numbers all over the league were crazy in general. The players in blue? All of them are S80s goaltenders. They might be recognizable to you, too--Augustus Kennedy, Matt Murdock, Boris Tsezar, Ash Sparks, Bubbles Utonium, Dusty Wilson, and Henry Tucker Jr are all on this chart, and in terms of career averages, Vandelay is just one of them. Of course, there were others in the S80s who don't make the list. Vandelay was by no means a bad player, it's just that he wasn't alone. And the S80s were evil. GAA is Vandelay's stronger career-average stat. Look up on the top and you see that he's second-lowest (although with a clear gap between his line and Teno's). Look at the individual graph and you'll see a cool feature of these individual graphs--more bars are above average than below average. So, the average season from someone on our list had a higher GAA than Vandelay's average. We see a few other things worth looking at--based on this stat, we can probably justify making Vandelay our primary subject over Fuhr. Vandelay is also remarkably consistent in this matter--three of our four comparisons have both a better best season and a worse worst season, despite Vandelay playing for both notably good and bad teams. This stat isn't horribly warped by the S80s, thankfully, so it's nice that I get to say that he beat a lot of other players in ways that we can't just attribute to the era. We can skip the discussion about playoffs, I think, because Vandelay was always mediocre in the playoffs. My players like to do great in the playoffs, but for some reason he just didn't show up. Art Vandelay is not a Hall of Fame player. I had always intended to write a HoNB article for Vandelay, just because he was my own player. I had always known that he was the winningest player outside the Hall of Fame, that this was strongly influenced by the S80s being what they were, and that he had interesting numbers that weren't fit for induction for era-related reasons. I did not know that I only had Fuhr to compare him to if I wanted 9-season careers, and I also didn't know just how swamped I was in the all-time list in some categories. Vandelay does deserve recognition for his career, and he did quite a bit that we can't claim to be exactly replicated until someone else comes around and decides to give 9 seasons a go. It's just also fair that the Hall of Fame might not be the best place to do it. The S80s were one of the most unique statistical nightmares that we've ever seen in the VHL, and I hope we don't end up with anything similar to it in the future. I played as a goaltender for as long as I possibly could have, and over that time I watched my player put up real, legitimate Hall of Fame numbers. The problem? So did everyone else. Art Vandelay has never made a Hall of Fame ballot and never will. It's likely that he's the answer to a few good trivia questions, and was unquestionably a player that could cause trouble for other teams. Not bad, perhaps. 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 Volume 8: Brendan Telker Volume 9: Skylar Rift

G - Soju @Alex I think?

I had a cooler media spot thought up, but it's Sunday night and I don't really care to do all that right now. So, I'd like to bring the community's attention to the fact that the year is almost over. 2024 was a cool year, I think--after all, I recreated, we killed the E, and I finally got inducted as a Hall of Fame builder after a little bit of being FISTED ANALLY BY A CIRCUS MONKEY on the grounds that I haven't disappeared from the league yet. On the surface, that argument is usually brought up as "OK, well, [inactive member] has done everything and can be summarized in a portal article, but [active member]'s induction may end up not recognizing things that haven't happened yet." I, however, prefer to think of that as an unwritten rule that we're supposed to avoid being happy for people that will see it, lest they start ego-stroking (or something of that sort). Anyway, the year is almost over. Assuming that I won't disappear in 2025, what would I like to do around the league? Bridge the gap between recruitment and the VHLM: it's not a secret that Recruitment has had some trouble lately with hiring people. In a league that depends on people to keep itself going, that's pretty shocking! Aside from pushing you to go join the team (which I'm doing here; go do it), I think that there are solutions that don't involve trying to motivate people in that direction when it clearly isn't working. I think that the VHLM, with its greater need for steady inflow inherently motivating some level of interest in maintaining it, could serve some purpose in cases where Recruitment is a bit short-staffed or wants some extra stuff done around the league. I think I'll be recreating again. I think I'll end up finishing Holmes' career in 2025 (though it might take most of the year or even all of it), at which point I want to think I'll be good for another round. The timeline of all that might put me in a really busy spot in real life, but who knows? It doesn't take all that much time to keep up with this place, after all--the bigger question is whether I still want to run the VHLM at that point. But who knows about that, either--time will tell and I'll leave the role whenever I feel like I can't serve it well anymore. Make a better effort on Discord: I feel like I used to know and love everyone who bothered to show their face around the league, but I'm not really at that point anymore. I think it's possible to improve in this regard and get back into meeting people and having conversations without it turning into a giant waste of days of my life like it once was. Make Town of Salem great again: I still love Town of Salem! I've got a couple issues that have come up lately that mostly have to do with limited sign-ups and quieter threads than there used to be. I think that if we can get our player numbers back up to 20-ish instead of 15-ish, we'll naturally have a much more fun game because there will just be more people to talk and more questions to be answered. If you see my threads, join them! It's still a very fun time and I think it's possible to bring it back to its former glory. Leave a new mark on forum content. It's no secret that I pride myself on writing things worth reading. In the past, I've dabbled in mock drafts, I've written articles projecting trades for every team, I've spent 13,000+ words on one media spot about league history, and this past year I put out my most ambitious work ever in the entire (and complete!) Gustav 30 in 30 series. Outdoing Gustav 30 in 30 is something that I am not in any mood to attempt, but I think that the well has certainly not run dry and that I'll continue to be very much worth reading over the next trip around the sun. I just have to come up with ideas for what I'm writing about. That's all for me, and now it's time for me to retreat back into late-night binge-watching. What would you like to see me do in 2025?

F - Spanish Moon Moth D - Lazlo Holmes @Agito

D - Guntis Gavrilovs F - Logan Ninefingers @Agito for 2

12 for 12 for my first time ever