Gustav

You gain 3 levels and $311. While fishing you find: Poliwag lv 15 Poliwag lv 19 Squirtle lv 15

Far too good not to save somewhere

For some reason I read this as "this should whittle it down to a few Canadians" and was briefly very confused

Pikachu evolves into Raichu! While fishing you find: Poliwag lv 20 Poliwag lv 24 Magikarp lv 21 Raichu gains 8 levels; you gain $265.

Dratini is knocked out by Rhyhorn, but Venusaur comes in and finishes the job on both Rhyhorn and Electabuzz. Charmeleon beats Jynx in two moves. Venusaur and Charmeleon gain 2 levels, and you gain $358.

You find: Rhyhorn lv 22 Electabuzz lv 19 Dratini lv 20

You catch Abra with your first ball! Ekans gains 2 levels--and evolves into Arbok!--and you gain $229.

Umbreon indeed does not see it coming and gets one-hit KO'd by Alakazam. Espeon comes out with Psychic, but there's no such luck. Arbok gets the first move and wipes out Espeon after barely surviving one round of Psychic. Exeggutor easily finishes off Arbok, but is instantly KO'd by Agatha's Gengar coming out with a powerful Shadow Ball. Gengar is still at full HP, and it's all down to Alakazam... Orange Mocha Frappuccinos are enjoyed by all. Edit: I'm an idiot and didn't do the battles. Jynx beats the field easily. You gain $399 and 3 levels.

Hi it's me I'm finally doing my job Geodude wins and gains 2 levels! You gain $128.

I mean...best of luck to him? I still do have a soft spot for Davos and want to see them succeed. I've said many times that my #1 accomplishment with Davos--much more than wins and losses, which I agree came up short--was doing my part to improve the team's image and making them a place people wanted to come and play. Glad to see that's still the case

Week 3

It's been interesting to track London's progress this season from a fairly-distanced-AGM point of view. I'll admit I could have done more to be there for the team, but I'm still not feeling full-on GM mode anymore (and as the second-in-command, I don't think that's really my place anyway). It's been a season full of surprises and disappointments, and I can't say things have gone the way that any first-time GM would have liked. In particular, it appears that the team will have to deal with the departure of its assumed franchise netminder in Cole Pearce this coming offseason, as Pearce's agent has publicly declared his intentions to pack his bags and get out one way or another. I've done my best to not involve myself in any of the drama surrounding that situation, and I can say with sincerity that I hope we're all able to forget that anything ever happened soon enough. It's true that the team needed a bit of work anyway, but one big hole in net is yet another thing to worry about and could--and I'll emphasize could--lead to the team restarting its rebuild. Things will change. I don't know what yet, but they will and I'm here to do my best for it (especially when it comes to trying to keep London a good place to play through this whole thing and into the future). An interesting thing I'd like to emphasize here, though, is that London has a more-than-serviceable backup in the active Ed Nu. While not generally seen as a superstar-tier player, Nu is a first-gen and a consistent earner who could conceivably end up in a starting role next season, even amid the league's current goalie situation. And though that's just a possibility until the offseason's plans shake themselves out, even some good can be seen in the team's worst-case scenario as the opportunity to give playing time to someone who might not otherwise have it may present itself.

Love a good shawarma. Some members of my family HATE garlic, so I didn't grow up with it--but I enjoy it myself. I think it would be cool to see forward positions being adjusted for playing out of position like we see with forwards vs. defense. If you're a center, you should (realistically) get more benefit from playing C than either of the wing positions. I don't think that it would help the league much, though--we'd probably just see more drama from that than anything else, so maybe it's good that we don't have it. The Grateful Dead. Never existed at the same time as Jerry Garcia, and some older members of the fanbase look down on the younger ones a bit for that. Plus, live shows of theirs were huge experiences back in the day (one even ended up in a special collection of the Library of Congress!) and I'd love to have the opportunity to see that happen. 1. I've officially forgotten to do the bracket challenge. Do you have any tasks (fantasy, predictions, anything capped) that you can never seem to remember? 2. Do you think your player has a shot at any awards this season? 3. What's your favorite historical moment?

Imagine explaining out of context that you have over 500 posts here but you've never had a player. I love the league crossover we can get from these games.

Last time we had an interim GM (Jubo in Helsinki), that stayed the case. I'd bet it's the same deal here; I don't see a reason to swap out for someone else unless the interim GM isn't capable.

1,345 words, and I guess I don't intend to claim this beyond the doubles week? I want to but I realize that's generally not acceptable since I have 2 weeks left on last week's monster. Also pinging @DoktorFunk because this kind of came up earlier

When you don't know you get a doubles week AND the birthday bonus as two separate perks until you're hired as an updater Some of you may remember a status update of mine from last week where I teased an article series. And, as you may have guessed, this is that article series. If you're reading this article, I'm going to venture a guess that you took a glance over my 13,000-word article from last week where I went over the best player from every draft class ever, and after spending more time than I'd like to admit writing that, I had the idea to continue looking over old draft classes, seeing who did what, and digging up names both familiar and unfamiliar to myself. In particular, I'm going to highlight good players who have not made the Hall of Fame. It's one thing to put together a bad career, but it's another entirely to find success and end up forgotten. I hope these articles bring back some memories for some and teach others about players that they missed. Speaking of doing that last bit, I chose to lead off this series with an overview of Pepper because his agent (Sonnet, who's no longer with the league) was my first-ever VHLM GM in S65. I used to make fun of him for Pepper being the prototypical Hall of Not Bad player--a championship, a top-of-the-league season, and the feat of reaching 300 wins, but not quite being worthy of induction. The thing is, I'm not sure if I knew why he didn't deserve it, just that I knew that more established members had said so. Because of that, I chose to look into that question of why--something that you're about to find out as well. S63 was a historically good draft class for the time, leading to a great number of active players in a period of league history where that still wasn't expected. Pepper was no exception--as a high-earning player going 10th overall, the Titans were getting more than what they'd usually hope for at that spot at the time, and knew it perfectly well. As one of the league's most dedicated, ambitious, and at times divisive first-gens of the time, Sonnet would craft a career that would take his player through S70 with the same team. An overview of Pepper's career is as follows: 302-169-40: 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. .917 SV%/2.59 GAA/30 SO Career bests: 49-13-2 (S66), .922 SV% (S67), 2.39 GAA (S65), 7 SO (S64) Continental Cup (S66) Daisuke Kanou Trophy (S66) Aidan Shaw Trophy (S66) Player Page Here Overall, Pepper's career is surprisingly consistent, something we'll see coming up later. His best-ever SV% was only .005 above his average, and his best-ever GAA only 0.20 below. His defining season was, of course, S66, which was his only definite claim to fame as the league's best. After that point, he would spend the remainder of his career trying to reach his peak again and (mostly) inevitably losing to Riga in the playoffs. Which brings us to a comparison. What justifies Pepper making (or not making) the Hall of Fame? To figure this out, we're going to compare Pepper's career to three other goaltenders who started their careers in the S60s... Kallis Kriketers: a HoF player. The face of Riga, and the league's best goalie for most of the decade, Kriketers finished his career with better overall numbers than Pepper in every category and took home a great number of awards, including the Clegane four times, the Shaw three times, a Slobo, an MVP, and a Cup in his rookie season. Raymond Bernard: a HoF player. Bernard put up similar overall numbers to Pepper (and at a worse record), but reached a higher peak than Pepper and for a longer time. Winning the Shaw twice and MVP once, along with his own Cup and Kanou, Bernard compensated for poor team production early on with some of the league's best play later while Pepper almost always played for a decent team. Brick Wahl II: NOT a HoF player. Finishing with a worse record than Pepper and slightly better career numbers in SV% and GAA, Wahl is also a deserving candidate for the Hall of Not Bad. Consistently in decent-but-not-great territory, it's understandable why Wahl will never make it as he never quite stood out enough--save for an MVP-winning campaign in S71 with Prague that one-ups Pepper in awards. So, let's look at the numbers over the course of Pepper's career and see how they stack up to the others. Wins are the defining stat of Pepper's career, and really present his strongest case for the HoF. He doesn't have enough of an award cabinet to get in (as evidenced by Wahl), but the win total says something. I've separated these stats by season, by the way, to show where each player was over the course of their career--overall numbers are one thing, but plenty of players in the HoF spent a few seasons being unimpressive before surging to the top, something that isn't reflected well as an overall stat. Here, we see that our crop of goalies and their ranking is fairly consistent, and this graph puts Pepper on top. Here, we see that Pepper kept a higher SV% than Kriketers for the majority of his career. So, in fact, did Wahl, while Bernard had a long uphill battle to fight to get back with the group. At the end of each player's career, though, they were very much within reach of each other. That is, until we look at each individual season put in by each individual player. Remember what I said about some players really taking off later? This chart clearly shows that Bernard's peak was far above Pepper's (and it also shows what Bernard had to get through to reach his final total). And while I agree with the general consensus that Wahl isn't quite HoF-worthy, Wahl's peak was above Pepper's as well. I'm somewhat surprised that Kriketers isn't more present on the left side of this graph, but he likewise had more dominant seasons than Pepper, who stayed almost woefully consistent. The surprise that Kriketers isn't separate enough goes right out the window on this chart, though, which shows each player's GAA over the course of their career when compared to Pepper's career total. Kriketers is far and away the best of the bunch, while the other three stay pretty close together. ...and here's something truly amazing. Every Kriketers season has a lower GAA than any season from every other player here, and it's not even close. And while Pepper did start off with the worst season out of them all, coming back from that really didn't result in a peak like we saw from Bernard and SV%. In fact, Wahl and Bernard both managed to beat Pepper's best (Wahl three times). So, what does this tell us? Brick Wahl (at least the second iteration of Brick Wahl) never even made the HoF ballot, let alone received any votes. And if Wahl isn't a HoF player (for a more mediocre record--only 3 players with fewer wins are in, and they played significantly fewer games--and the fact that only one season was truly special), then Pepper definitely isn't. The record is there, but he's beaten pretty clearly in other categories by players both in and out of the Hall. So, is Alexander Pepper a Hall-of-Fame Player? NO. I hope to keep this series going when I have time for it--maybe I'll dig up someone who should be in at some point! Let me know what you think. Alexander Pepper made the ballot for the Hall of Fame in S76, six seasons after the end of his career, and remained on it until being removed in S83. He would receive only one vote for induction, coming in S79. Mentioned: @hedgehog337 @Mr_Hatter @BladeMaiden

...this is literally the article series I posted a status update about last week. First one should be dropping later today and Greene might be part of the series at some point.

I don't think I can guarantee I'll be around next week (will be out of town) but want to help out. Sign me up as a moderator because I don't think you want to deal with that as a player.

Art Vandelay

Well, that's great then. Reddit used to be our best source of recruiting and we once got more or less blacklisted from posting (long story). Every time I asked I heard that that was still the case--good to see it isn't anymore.

Wait, is Reddit recruitment back up again? First I've heard of that.

This is my longest article by far but you should have seen me in my first summer here when I had nothing better to do and would write a giant article whenever it came to mind--sometimes more than once a week. I'm glad I've (mostly) moved on from doing that. Week 2 claim