Gustav

Honestly Vandelay was the first player where that didn't at least kind of happen. At least the other time was me bringing Garcia to Davos--I was sort of unofficial AGM in Malmo for a bit and ADV left that offseason--so I guess it's even. It's really appreciated! I think the league needs good content and I like making it. Hearing nice things about it is just a bonus but I'll always take that too.

What? Taro again? This is article #26--haven't the past seasons been exciting for you? It's not that they haven't at all. It's just that giving things time has shown me which memories deserved to last. Also, I guess I may have done the VHL equivalent of peaking in high school. But we don't talk about that. Imagine, if you will, an article where I talk about myself succeeding with STHS. Everything up to this point has indicated that I'm either unlucky, unskilled, or that Simon has a particular hatred for half-Italians living in the rust belt. You've already read my multiple articles dealing with my time as a GM, where I tell you all about how I created locker rooms I'm proud of and led them to consistently disappointing results. You've hopefully also read what I had to say about how truly awful my first player was for most of his career. The last we heard of Taro Tsujimoto, it was the end of S78 and he had finally established himself as the top forward in Davos. Also at the end of S78, Davos found themselves in a bit of a crummy juncture. I talked about this in my third Davos management article and go over the situation independently of Davos in my last one about the E, but as a GM at the time, I had the same issue everyone else had: clickers. My farm team was full of players who, if they made the big league roster, would not only not get to play much themselves but would strip time away from all my top players who wanted all the ice time in the world. So, I paid through the nose to do what no other GM in that offseason was able to accomplish in finding a trade partner for all of my low-earning prospects. Suddenly, the situation in Davos had resolved itself, and the makeup of our pro and farm leagues looked much like it did pre-S75. Although we didn't have as many resources, we were one of the few truly old school-style systems in the league at the time, and my player was at the forefront of it going into his fifth season. Taro responded by having a really weird year. Maybe it was because we were suddenly (literally) built different, but what should have been a defining moment turned into a career low in goals. He was still pretty good--a then-career high in assists gave him only a one-point drop-off in points from the previous season--but he wasn't the goal-scorer he was. With the first net positive rating of his career, though, he was finding his place on a team and learning to fit in as a leader. S79 was also Taro's first trip to the playoffs after just missing Davos' first competitive window. It had taken half a career to get to that point, but he put the team on his back the second he got the chance. Seattle and Malmo took 18 and 19 games to play through every round, but Taro managed to be third in goals among all players, scoring over a goal per game and clocking in at the highest point rate out of anyone by far. Until Lazlo Holmes led in blocked shots last season by virtue of simply *existing* on Prague, I didn't think I'd ever led a league in any category. Turns out I was wrong--Taro had 21 points in 10 games, which would have been on pace for 152 points over a regular season. S79 playoff Taro would have been a very sensible Kanou pick had things worked out. Unfortunately, seeing 10 games played should tell you that the playoffs didn't go exactly the way we'd hoped. It does tell you that we won a playoff series, which was a rare occurrence in my GM tenure. Something else that the list should also hint to you, in that the same handful of teams appeared multiple times on the leaderboard but there was no one else from Davos, was that Taro would learn to work extremely well on his own. It turned out that S79 would be the last time the league could ever consider itself normal. We were still on our old update scale, and as I talk about in my article about the meta, S80 was when things got truly insane. It was the first season of Vancouver's threepeat, and anything I thought was previously established about Taro settling into a primarily-assists role went out the window. Taro put up career highs in goals, assists, and, of course, points, while following one plus rating with another. The only number that dipped (by over 100) was hits for some reason, but who cares when you do so much better with everything else? The thing was, so did everyone else with it being the meta season. I finished up nowhere near the top of the points list and didn't think that S80 would mean much in the grand scheme of things. After all, the big news was in Vancouver and the even bigger news was the controversy that was stirring up. Taro put up a goal per game in the playoffs again, but this was only in one five-game series loss. Oh well. So, imagine my surprise when I did my usual award voting and saw myself in the running for MVP, and imagine a little more how it may have felt to see the top post in that thread made by @fromtheinside and reading as follows: That was unexpected, to say the least. It was a really weird ballot, to be fair. S80 saw eight whole nominations, with two nominees from each of three teams making up six of those. From experience, I can say that the BoG doesn't tend to like voting for players that aren't unquestionably the MVP of their team, so having two on one team was already a disadvantage for most. In terms of most outstanding, the other player on the ballot who was getting attention was @OrbitingDeath 's Duncan Idaho, who had me beat by a mile. He'd recorded four fewer points, but had scored eight more goals and more than doubled up on my hit total. By the same argument that was put forward for me to win, though, he trailed--Moscow was a better team than Davos, and Idaho's share of his team's points was lower. I don't like to influence awards when I'm in the running for them (which is a lesson that I think BoG could do well to learn sometimes). I decided that my best course of action would be to say nothing in that thread and vote for Idaho when the form opened. That way, I'd have nothing to do with the discussion and could feel like I really earned it if I ended up winning. So, that's what I did. As it turns out, I could have voted for myself and been the only winner of the award in S80, but instead, it ended in a tie. That's not something I'll complain about at all--I think the outcome was actually pretty fair, all things considered, and I'd probably also have felt weird if I made a point to bias voting away from myself and lost by one. I wrote this article after the fact, still, because the use of point shares as the main argument was very new and I didn't know how to feel about it. Anyway, I'd just won my first individual award ever, and it was the biggest one the VHL has to offer! It was time to turn to S81. I'd be lying if I said that S81 was one I approached with optimism. I'd considered stepping down as a GM both that offseason and the one before, and took the team through the offseason without doing anything at all for the first time in quite a long time. Davos did have a few good players at that point, and some were from pretty recent draft classes, making us playoff contenders. That said, the meta was in full swing at this point, and we were not a meta team. Taro had arguably his third weird season in a row, again putting up a career high in goals (and hitting 50 for the first time) while taking a dip in points. The physical game that had dipped a bit in S80 surged back strongly in S81, though, and I broke 300 hits. Finishing below 100 points in a meta season, though, was never something that would be noticed by anyone, and my 98 points then meant essentially nothing despite respectable placement on the goals leaderboard. Davos squeaked into the playoffs again and lost in 4 games, with Taro again turning up the scoring a little bit but just not impressing enough. After S81, I'd had enough. The E was on its way, as was the need for a rebuild thanks to my predisposition to trade all my future resources for aging players. I didn't feel motivated to deal with these things on my own and just felt that the GM would be in a better place with someone who cared about them. So, I was out as a GM and handed over the team to @Alex, who's been GM ever since. If I remember correctly, he did give me the option to stick around for my last season, but I let him do whatever he wanted to get value out of Taro with a rebuild on its way. I don't remember if I had anywhere I didn't want to play for at the time, but I do remember I was fine with playing for Seattle. The deal went through, and I became completely disassociated with the Davos franchise for the first time in a couple years. S82 saw Taro in a different uniform for the first time ever, and I'm sure that seeing his name associated with anyone other than Davos was a shock to a few casual members here and there throughout that season. This was the last season of the meta before hybrid attributes rolled in, and it was also Taro's last shot at anything meaningful. Aside from the award win in S80, it was looking like he'd end up as an installment of my not-yet-conceived Hall of Not Bad series. As it turned out, S82 would be nothing short of magical for Taro's legacy. I've noticed over time that Seattle has always been a little bit weird when it comes to individual player stats--sometimes, we'll go looking for an MVP or even just a team scoring leader and we'll have trouble coming up with players from the Bears, even when they're good. That's not true all the time, of course, but it was true for most Bears players in S82. Except for none other than Taro, who recorded new career highs in goals (53) and points (139) and put up numbers that were even impressive for the meta era. Seattle made the playoffs, as usual, with Taro as the unquestioned face of the team that season. Just how unquestioned was a thing of history, by the way. Taro would finish S82 with 52 more points than the next-highest total on the Bears, a mark that was still by far the record as of @DMaximus ' last installment of the Unofficial VHL Regular Season Awards. That, and the same offensive share argument as before, popped up in BoG in award voting, and even though I handled it on my end the same way as I did in S80, I didn't write any article disputing the award win this time because I agreed with it. The playoffs were Taro's last chance ast success, but with the meta still in effect and Taro now playing in the NA conference, the conference champion was all but decided. Seattle did manage to make it to the conference championship series, but got knocked out by Vancouver on their way to another championship. Taro again put together a top-tier playoff performance, but one player can't do it all and his career faded off into nothing. The next season, Taro was voted in to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. Looking back on it, he was pretty clearly the best player of S75, a draft class that will forever define league history. With two MVP wins, too, he certainly had the award cabinet to match the vote, as confusing as those wins may be given a complete lack of other awards. The response to my induction was pretty well deserved. I don't know if I'll ever have as much fun with a player as I did with Taro, and I find it hard to believe that I'll come up with any other player who I get to make as much the face of a franchise or as well-known leaguewide. I was Davos for a time. I was one of the players who succeeded without a full meta build, and I was one of the players who got attention consistently in league media without needing to be on a meta team first. I heard lots of good things about Taro when I was building him, and I like to think that he made an impact on the league outside of the sims. Maybe the day will come when I match the Taro Tsujimoto experience, and if it ever does, I'm sure I'll love it. Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience: #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name #2: Can't We All Just Get Along? #3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway? #4: The House That I Built #5: Can We Fix It? #6: American Beauty #7: The Kids Are Alright #8: Dogs In A Pile #9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake #10: This Old House #11: Go Directly to Jail #12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball #13: How I Messed Up Davos #14: Ello Gov'nor #15: Weewoo #16: Jolly Kranchers #17: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 2 #18: I've Been Everywhere, Man #19: The Sun Also Rises #20: Ripple In Still Water #21: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 3 #22: I Hate the Meta #23: I Hate the Mods #24: I Hate Bureaucracy #25: I Hate the VHLE

I can’t believe you drop this when I’m building Holmes after you wrote the one about how goalie numbers were inflated when I still had Vandelay. I think you’re just jealous of my ability to build pretty good players who still kind of suck.

To be fair, it’s deserving of inclusion in the series for that same reason. I can’t just decide NOT to talk about it, especially since I’m also spending this part talking about things I had issues with. But 5 more to go, and I think they’ll be worth your time.

Well sure, a dead locker room is a concern. I'll defend VHL locker rooms a little bit because they suffer from lower player turnover than the other league(s), plus everyone is less new so there's not only less pressure to go out and make oneself known and draw connections, but there aren't as many people who need help and all the conversations started by questions about the league just don't happen in the first place. My line is whether that inactivity is the GM's fault. Personally, I've been in some "dead" locker rooms that are dead in the sense that there isn't much conversation, but I personally have never been in one where I felt that the GM was making no effort to create it. Both of these things would never be true in a typical M server, for example, but they can be true in the VHL and that's where the distinction between lack of activity and lack of GM activity needs to be drawn. I'm not saying that a lack of GM effort doesn't exist in the VHL, and I definitely know of cases over the years that I'd identify as such (which you can, in fact, see me talking about in BoG if you know where to look). I have also never identified all VHLE GMs as being part of this problem (I've only ever had one GM in the E, who was @Doomsday and he was great). But what I will say is that I consistently came across far more complaints of this nature that were related to the VHLE than the VHL. Not all of it was the GMs' fault, but I don't think that anyone would agree that "my GM doesn't respond to my Discord messages and hasn't said a word in our server in months and never scouted me or told me I was being traded" (as a real example I've come across) is an ideal situation. TBF your screenshot deals with a different issue, which is the longer pathway up to the VHL and my personal disagreement with how depreciation works in relation to it. It's a good representation of how we feel about that but doesn't really have anything to do with the statement it quoted. If we're talking about the issue of "placating to clickers" and whether that was the goal, I think that's a topic that can mostly be talked about independently of my E hate. I do think that thread was full of a lot of acting like we were doing something really nice to clickers, and there was a lot of mention of "giving" them a "competitive environment" that they can enjoy and whatnot. Honestly, I'm not sure that was ever anyone's intent but it was certainly something that was brought up as a selling point for the idea whose ultimate purpose was really to clear up VHL rosters and make clickers none of a GM's concern. This was exactly what my "do nothing" approach was and I'll still defend it that way. Let's say there's a season where we have an ad REALLY blow up, like far more than in S75. Are we then obligated to change the entire league structure to accommodate this if we see that ad as a one-off? Or would it be better to accept that the league as it is can't satisfy all those sudden and unexpected needs? Besides, with most people that join big drives going IA soon after, one would expect that the league could naturally ride the wave. Players that are resilient enough to earn well through that should have no issue staying on rosters and would likely be the ones who we would have gotten to stick around anyway. I guess that's an extremely capitalist/survival of the fittest sort of thought process, but I feel like there would be very limited harm done to people who are currently members and I'd rather protect their interests before catering to those who haven't done anything yet.

The biased source is happy to be taken seriously in any case. I won’t act like I closely read through ALL of the thread but you were the first to mention a third league and there was some question as to its format at first with junior/affiliate terminology being thrown around. I also won’t act like I understand all the nuances of how those systems work IRL either so I’m probably not the best source on what to call any given proposal.

Let's be real, you knew this one was coming. This has been me for years on end about this topic. Something that really ground my gears over the later half of the S70s was the addition of tons and tons of new players to the VHL player base. This was something that was great when we first saw it in the S60s, but as with all beneficiaries of VHL systems, I prefer to take my help and slam the door in the face of anyone who comes looking for it afterward. I'm kidding about that last bit, of course. But if multiple expansions in the S60s, followed up by four teams being added to the league in S72, wasn't enough of an indication that times had changed, some other things should have been. For one thing, the league's efforts to tap into different sources had taught us that those different sources will yield different responses from one group or another. For example, we learned that paid Reddit ads (as opposed to making posts in one community or another) did literally nothing and gave us literally no one. @Matt_O learned that attempting to recruit even through comments on PornHub was more effective than that, but only in that we got someone who didn't stick around to create an account. Most importantly, though, we learned just how much of a different beast that YouTube could be. We've had YouTube drives that worked well, for sure, but we've also had some that didn't. The difference in that, though, is that sometimes YouTube drives don't work and really mess with league numbers. An example of this was in one of our first YouTube drives in S69, where we advertised with @TheFinnFTW and got basically no one who stuck around, despite way more players than we wanted being created and way too many of those being goalies (curiously, the second time we went to that channel, it worked pretty well). We've had some others work the same way. Most recently, the S93 class was filled up pretty nicely by a drive that led lots of us to believe that we'd just ended a period of stagnant recruiting, but the vast majority of those who flooded in never ended up being substantially active. But, the emergence of YouTube recruiting and the fact that it DID work okay enough sometimes was enough for @Beaviss and the rest of recruitment crew to consistently try to prove the point that the never-before-thought-sustainable levels of recruitment that we'd seen for a bit could in fact be kept up. And most of the time, this actually worked as intended. Those too new to see it would be super impressed to see it today, and it's my opinion that some of what happened then is still an influence on the memories of some who complain about the state of recruitment today. The thing was, that just kept on growing the size of the league. This would go from a great feature of the times to a huge issue practically overnight when things went off the rails and a last-second drive was shoehorned into S74, right before to the trade deadline. The player turnout was the player turnout to end all player turnouts. The S75 class was (and is) the largest of all time thanks to an effort to prove a point that we had nothing to worry about. Very quickly, VHLM rosters filled to the point where the league had completely filled up, sparking the decision to develop a never-extensively-used framework by which teams could place players in their junior lineups in STHS. We hadn't seen a recruitment drive, nor a draft class, of that magnitude ever, and it bring sprung upon an already full league was nuts. But oh well, we'd just added a whole bunch of teams to the VHL, and most YouTube recruits drop off quickly anyway. Give it a couple seasons and we're probably fine. The sheer size of the S75 class somehow also unfortunately coincided with a large amount of a particular VHL demographic. I'm sure you've come across players in your life who may as well not exist on Discord or the forum, who don't earn TPE outside of a weekly check in on the portal. It wasn't just some new players around this time; it was lots of them. I had warned about this much earlier on when we first moved Practice Facility to the portal and noticed a worrying trend of players who only clicked the Practice Facility button every week and nothing else. In just about all of these cases, the player was completely uncontactable on the forum and sometimes hadn't even visited the forum since creating. It was almost as if (and I didn't entirely doubt that) these were people who had no idea the forum even existed and were just checking the portal every week until they eventually disappeared. Well, by the later half of the S70s, Welfare was also on the portal, and the earning potential of players who never left the portal had tripled. The term "clicker" arose behind the scenes for players like these, in reference to all of their activity coming from clicking buttons, and we suddenly had an army of clickers on our hands who also suddenly had the capacity to break out of the M. It wasn't just pure clickers, to be clear--high earners never had anything to worry about, but we had an army of low- and middle-earners on top of this that VHL GMs wanted nothing to do with. A few seasons later, we had players with multiple seasons of VHL experience going completely unsigned, GMs letting rookie contracts expire rather than giving roster spots to their players, and VHL-ready prospects having no place at all on their rosters. The roster spots that were available, as a consequence, were practically nonexistent, and I can speak to the trade market being very deadlocked at the time with most rosters right up against the cap. Clearly, something needed to be done. This time, it was once again Beaviss asking the league to do something about it, but this time it was something other than just asking for expansion. Something that Beav had always argued for aside from expansion, and something that he deserves more credit for than he gets, was larger team rosters. I don't disagree with this myself--more people on your team means a more active server and a stronger team community. His post had mostly to do with this at first, but there are also obvious challenges to trying to create larger rosters. There is no world in which GMs will not just want to run with their highest TPE players on the ice as much as possible, and expanding the cap will just make it so top teams can keep more top players (rather than encouraging rosters themselves to fill). Plus, a system that attempts to enforce larger rosters sort of loses steam if those larger rosters can't be maintained by the size of the league. For better or for worse, the BoG decided against it, but the problem still existed. It was originally @Victor who put forward the idea of a third league, but it was more of a junior league/farm league system than what the VHLE eventually ended up being. It's a very long thread, and I'll really only cover the highlights, but you already know that the long story short is that the E ended up morphing into its eventual state by the end of it. From the start, I wasn't crazy about the E league, and I remember @Fire Tortorella probably being the BoG member who was most on the same page as me. For my part, my initial objection wasn't necessarily to the third league itself--because I did see how it created a space for the people who were past the VHLM but couldn't make it in the VHL--but I hated that it made the path up to the VHL longer and more difficult for everyone. To me, it was unacceptable that players would take longer (in some cases far longer) to make it to the VHL, in a league structure that supposedly prided itself upon player development. In fact, there was a point back in the day when the VHLM cap went from 200 to 250 and I hated it. I proposed lots of alternatives, from trying to adapt Beav's original proposal to even just doing nothing and letting people disappear until we were back to OK--objectively a bit of an asshole move, but also objectively low-stress and still in keeping with the idea that the VHL should be full (though not overfilled) with active players. Additionally, there was a debate over the intended purpose of the E and I didn't really like either end of it. On one hand, we had people who promoted the E as a system for everyone and wanted no situation that didn't involve the E for any player (a point where I clashed really strongly a few times with @bigAL). On the other, the E was being internally promoted as some sort of dumping ground for clickers, which I really objected to on philosophical grounds. From my perspective, this would be degrading the E as undesirable and creating a rift between the league's high and low earners. If a low earner were put in the E and then just forgotten about--because the system then circled back to that first point, where we decided it had to be that way--then VHL teams could wait and never see that player develop before the end of their rookie contract, at which point they could just let that contract expire and continue cruising along with their friends who earned more. Which I guess wasn't too dissimilar to my idea of doing nothing, but I still defend the difference as this way being the fake-nice way of achieving that goal that also unnecessarily lengthened everyone's player development. And to the end, I fought the decision to implement the E league, for reasons that lots of you have seen in lots of posts. I did a lot over time to get that word out there and became one of the league's prominent E haters--something that was backed up by complaints from across the league that someone's locker room was dead or that their teammates were all inactive or that (in some cases) their GM didn't even try to talk to the players. I kept that up for about as long as it was needed, and until the fall of the E, which is a story of its own. Although I do recognize the part that the VHLE played in keeping things running, that's about as far as my opinion ever shifted on the matter. Even when it was clear that it was going nowhere and it seemed like it never would go anywhere, I still wasn't afraid to speak up about it and highlight what the league could be without it. And for those who believed in the same, I'm glad I could represent that feeling. Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience: #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name #2: Can't We All Just Get Along? #3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway? #4: The House That I Built #5: Can We Fix It? #6: American Beauty #7: The Kids Are Alright #8: Dogs In A Pile #9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake #10: This Old House #11: Go Directly to Jail #12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball #13: How I Messed Up Davos #14: Ello Gov'nor #15: Weewoo #16: Jolly Kranchers #17: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 2 #18: I've Been Everywhere, Man #19: The Sun Also Rises #20: Ripple In Still Water #21: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 3 #22: I Hate the Meta #23: I Hate the Mods #24: I Hate Bureaucracy

Damn I meant to bring back Hall of Not Bad at some point. Maybe the two can coexist Seems like a great article in the making!

Had a great time being part of this! Thanks for hosting.

I think LA is finally starting to look semi-respectable. Still an underdog, but one that will be interesting to watch after some nice moves recently. I'm horrible with NHL knowledge honestly. When I looked it up, I learned who Matvei Michkov is and I also learned that he's (by some sources) favored over Celebrini--that's an interesting story and so I'll go with it. As an Italian I could go off about this. Aside from the easy answer of spaghetti, your pasta should be able to fit easily on a fork without breaking and hold sauce well (it shouldn't slip off). Things like cavatappi (for example) do both of these things worse than things like penne (for example). Penne is probably #1 because it does both of those things pretty well, and in a combined way I would say it does both of those things better than anything else. But Gustav, isn't rotini awesome for holding sauce because of all those ridges and all that surface area? Sure, and I love rotini too, especially for pasta salads, but it's also going to fall apart easily, especially if you overcook it. If you have chunks of things in your sauce, too, the interference of those things with your pasta will cause it to fall apart much more than it would with a different (penne) pasta. 1. The VHLM just finished its draft tonight. What was the first team you were ever drafted to, and what was your experience with it? 2. Football season is in full swing, and I am busy wasting just about all of all of my weekends. Is there any non-hockey sport (or anything at all) that gets you super involved during a specific time of the year? 3. What's your favorite RECENT movie?

Hello VHLM! Following the (miraculous!) news of the end of the VHLE, we were left with a list of players who were suddenly once again eligible for placement on VHLM teams. Lots of possibilities arose around how best to handle the situation, and eventually we decided on the process that you can read about here. In short, players were given the opportunity to "opt in" with their old VHLM team, and the remaining players would be placed in a draft with picks adjusted to try to spread players evenly between teams after the opt-in process was complete. In total, we had 27 players drafted who are now on VHLM rosters. They are as follows: 1. Marek Nowaczyk | @Chillybro | Las Vegas Aces 2. Cody Toland | @ctoland102 | Philadelphia Reapers 3. Pan Daffleck | @OrbitingDeath | Mississauga Hounds 4. Władysław Mintus | @mintusaurus | Mexico City Kings 5. Anthony Simmons II | @Starchychaff | Miami Marauders 6. Robin Sierra | @ethanjaeda | Houston Bulls 7. Ty Duke | @TheDuke | Halifax 21st 8. Masa Akimoto | @Hokikeijot | Ottawa Lynx 9. Drosmis Sarkanis | @Mr Bohannan | Saskatoon Wild 10. Jack Dickins | @Mystery_boy98 | San Diego Marlins 11. Blaze Thunderstrike | @eaglesfan036 | San Diego Marlins 12. Bric Sheithaus | @Oldhead91 | Saskatoon Wild 13. Cole Stermer | @Bazeus | Ottawa Lynx 14. Micah Cederbaum | @MicahC | Houston Bulls 15. Hunter S | @Hunter S | Mexico City Kings 16. Nikita Yolishev | @Joel Main | Mississauga Hounds 17. Taylor Swift | @lilchrist | Philadelphia Reapers 18. Kevin Connor | @Luke033 | Las Vegas Aces 19. Gavin Bebard | @Gavin Bebard | Las Vegas Aces 20. Quinndillus Whopper | @Max77 | Philadelphia Reapers 21. Filip Zinek | @FiZi | Mississauga Hounds 22. Shaunca | @shaun1979 | Mexico City Kings 23. Dustin Moore | @Maxx | San Diego Marlins 24. Isaak Robinson | @isaak | Saskatoon Wild 25. Hugo Boss | called up | Ottawa Lynx 26. Chuck E Cheese | called up | Halifax 21st 27. Alphonse Desjardins | called up | Houston Bulls @VHLM GM @VHLM Commissioner

There are things that pop up every season that I don't like to do, whether it's got to do with running the M or doing BoG stuff or just experiencing the league in general. Rather than being things I can change (because then I'd write an article trying to change them), they're really just facts of life and parts of why administrative league jobs aren't actually all that fun. While I'm glad I am where I am, I thought I'd give you some insight as to some specific things I don't like. Draft planning: I HATE planning for drafts and it's probably the worst thing on this list for me. I actually don't mind running the drafts themselves, but trying to figure out when I'm available can be a bit tough. As a GM, I always had the luxury of submitting a list just in case things came up last minute, but I can't do that if I'm the one who has to click the right buttons and skip the right people to keep things moving. This is the only time VHL clashes with real life for me--I've had to say no to some fun things because I had a draft to run, and I always feel like I'm missing out when I commit to a day because the people I know tend to make plans for things on shorter notice than we give the draft. When I do have to miss, too, it really is for legitimate reasons, but then that makes me feel like I'm letting people down here. Submitting the awards ballot: Another thing that I don't mind the "main" part of--discussing awards can actually be pretty rewarding in that I think there's good room for fair debate and I have a good amount of say in swaying opinions to the people who I think deserve them. The awards ballot itself is tough for one very specific reason, and that is the selection of the all-rookie team. Our index isn't reliable in showing who is and isn't a rookie, and scoring leaders on the portal don't often encompass everyone, so that usually means I have to scan through every team and click on every player who I think conceivably could be a rookie, all so I can end up making a choice for who I think rookie forward #3 might be. It comes right at the end of the form and is way more tedious than anything before. Having to talk to @Spartan Reminding people of things that should ideally be automatic: which isn't blaming the portal people in the slightest. Things like waivers closing at the end of the season is our responsibility, but it isn't something that we always (or I ever) remember to do exactly on time. The worst example of this, though, is that the timing of rollover isn't always obvious to everyone and you're really not supposed to drop players before it happens. Best case, we only have to mention this when someone asks. Worst case, strings have to be pulled to reset things properly. Anyone arguing for themselves in any award thread: including nominations for Hall of Fame Builder. Barring a couple specific cases, it's always ridiculous and it makes me want to vote for you way, way less when I see it.

I'd legit apply but I'm also too lazy and have zero interest in being the press conference servant. Good luck with the search!

Fun Vandelay fact: I wasn’t ever in the running for top goalie (that I remember), but I was nominated for MVP a couple times because the team didn’t have much scoring that season. Vandelay COULD HAVE been my second player in a row to win MVP twice and no other awards.

It's a bit weird for me to think about, because I've had it on my VHL mind for years on end, but the E is deleted at long last and I'm happy. There are things I'd want to change about it in a perfect world. I still don't like that the league now prefers the idea that a player will spend (at least) one extra season in the development league. I also don't like the idea that someone who earns enough to be able to make it up to the VHL straight away will be quite strongly discouraged from doing so by the way the depreciation system is set up. But I do like, for example, that all of that extra time is spent in the same league, that we're getting rid of one of the three drafts that players need to be confused by, and that we have to deal with one fewer league taking away from our hiring pool. The E did things in its time, and not all of those things were bad. We really did need a strong response to a situation we were facing back in the day, but now that we really don't need that, I'm more than OK with getting rid of it. The league now has a much cleaner structure, that should still be resilient and hold up to recruitment drives, that is also able to maintain full M rosters at times when recruitment is limited. And this is something I'm very excited by. Naturally, a larger M community is a stronger one, and achieving that without flooding things in ways that make league sizes all messed up is something that I think is now possible. Time will tell whether things are perfect--and, spoiler alert, they never are--but S96 will be great and I think we can make the M even greater in the seasons to come.

I'm going to say Toronto because they have more top-end players and those are a bit harder to get through roster moves. They do have some work to do in mitigating retirements, but a championship will still be achievable. I'm partial to @Abaddon's MORPHEUS DESTRUCTIOUS--I've really never been one to lean heavily into the roleplay side of the site, but I really appreciated what came attached to this player and the name was cool too. I'm actually going to go out on a limb here and say NO--I actually didn't grow up on these for some reason and the ones I have memories of are just basic nugget-shaped. Perhaps if that weren't the case I would have a different opinion. 1. What is your favorite defunct VHL (or VHLM) franchise? 2. What are your thoughts on the E being deleted? Do you agree with the decision, and is there anything you would change about it? 3. What shows are you currently watching, and why should I care?

Going to back this up. It's at least important to GMs and commissioners. From our standpoint, M GMs are NOT supposed to drop players in the offseason before rollover because it messes with portal stuff. Having to remind everyone of this and dealing with it happening anyway just about every offseason defeats the point that "you're just supposed to know," because clearly it isn't obvious enough. I'd imagine that GMs could do this (or even just follow the retirement forum and wait to get hit by tons of pings at once), but I'd also imagine that a GM who this would occur to also isn't one who would have trouble staying on top of it in the first place.

I'm a big fan of GMs who want to keep being GMs. Props for staying on with Vegas as long as you have and never giving us anything to worry about!

Week 2

Yes, the draft order is flipped because that serves the snake order better (top teams will end up with one fewer pick). If your capped players are still under contract with your team, they will stay on your team.

-No, mainly because we would have to work out a whole framework for what could/couldn’t be done with this and it’s all happening on short notice. Hopefully it’s understandable, and it will at least give everyone a few solid teammates for the time being. We don’t anticipate making this a live event. It should be doable before the draft, and I get that it would be nice to know what you’re working with before then.

I will take your subjective description of me as a compliment. Honestly it isn't far off in that I was underweight all the way through high school and now I work out a bit. What I am out of 10 is a matter of opinion but I'll take your rating. I don't wear glasses though. You guys are right that I peaked in Mississauga but I'll take it as another compliment that you disagreed with my assessment of myself that I'm old and washed up. I at least know what biathlon is and have caught it on Olympic broadcasts once or twice but you're correct that we know nothing about it beyond that here. Never been skiing or shooting so I would be horrible at it. Thanks for taking time for me!

This is one of the busiest offseasons we've had since we first got hired and made our first rounds of big changes. There are very clear reasons for that, of course, but it's also reminded me a lot of how it felt during that time when I got to sit down and think about the issues faced by the VHLM and realize that I had the power to change those any way I wanted. I won't drop the news until we've finalized it, but we have something on the way that I think you'll like. Our goal is to be fair to both players and GMs in this process and I believe we'll get about as close as possible.

Honestly you may have done more pushing for the green light on the project than anyone else. Bitchstav likes to think that side only comes out when it's warranted.

One of my biggest ideas ever took almost a whole year to even become a work in progress. Something that you may have noticed by reading other installments of this series is that I generally do my best to evaluate myself fairly. I've owned up to a few things I would have gone about differently today, and I usually don't try to sell myself or tell you that I'm perfect. A possible exception to that is in my writing about my time as a VHLM GM, a job I would say I was damn good at and I won't apologize for thinking so. With that, including the fact that I was one of the better ones at securing and developing waiver players, one would expect that to be one of my favorite parts of the job. In those days, a GM had lots of control over the course of their team's roster as it related to waivers. A particularly active GM could take advantage of this by offering to lots of players and usually being one of the first to do so. A particularly active GM could also offer to players in unique and personal ways that could sway a player's perception toward their team. With this being what it was, forum-based waiver offers were something that reflected positively on those who did their job well. The thing was, it wasn't always fair. Waiver players were great for non-competitive teams looking to fill spots and end up with a more active locker room, and they were also great for fringe teams who had a few good players but lacked depth. From the objective standpoint of winning games, though, waiver signings were bad for highly competitive teams with a real shot at the championship. Especially as the trade deadlines approached, fewer and fewer teams offered to players who would bring the average down at their positions, and some who I won't name specifically went on to win the championship in seasons like (hypothetically) S70 and S73 off of rosters full of then-legal capped inactives. It didn't help that the S70s were marked by a huge crackdown on VHLM management, which went from almost completely unregulated to highly structured with rules that both helped and didn't help. There was really nothing that could have been put in place to make people make waiver offers, though, and the best that could really be done rules-wise was just a general "please be nice" statement that didn't really mean much. With rules changing and systems changing with it, I wrote an article that I'll talk about much more extensively in a future part of this series: a lengthy response to all that had happened so far. At the very end of the article, I first speculate on what would happen if we were to do something new and put the VHLM's waiver system on the portal. It just so happened that right around the same time, the Board of Gustav had an ongoing thread about VHLM changes in a general sense. I brought this up there and pushed for it for a bit, getting some positive feedback that included the first and last time @Victor will ever say this: ...but things were very jumbled in that thread, support wasn't universal, and it mostly got buried. This first happened in October of 2021, and when December rolled around and my semester was over, it was still on my mind enough that I took it to its own thread. I was really hyped about the possibilities that a new system like this would bring. First, automated waivers would mean no dodging new players, with the availability of roster spots becoming a guarantee rather than an option on the part of the GMs. Players would also gain control of their own destiny, choosing to join a top team and win a championship or go to a place able to offer them playing time and star status. It would also get rid of something else that annoyed me, which was sneaky GMs trying to lie about a player's opportunity ("we'll put you on the first line!" regardless of roster makeup) or their team's status ("we're the Cup favorites!" was thrown out there by at least three different teams in S68). The thread was somewhat active for a couple weeks, and then it died despite positive feedback. It just wasn't exciting enough for the group to want to bang it out. When putting things in place, especially big things, there's always some understandable pushback. But this thread really didn't have all that much of it. My biggest concern was whether it would be doable on the portal end, but @Dil was both very willing to do it and not at all concerned about the workload. The thread crawled its way into early January with only minor issue taken with the original idea, but the necessary "let's do it" drive never showed up and the meta conversation was happening around the same time anyway. It received its first of many bumps around this time, and it was decided at this point to have the VHLM Commissioner team at the time poll their GMs about it. I thought this was pretty fair. Except that a week later, GMs still hadn't been asked. The thread was bumped again to make this happen, and we thought it would. We then spent the next month going bump --> larger objection and alternate proposal --> bump --> bump with nothing happening and no feedback from the GMs. Portal waivers were sort of dead in the water at that point. This wasn't exactly helped by feedback from the VHLM GMs at the time, who weren't happy that the system would be taking away a level of control from them. To be fair, this is understandable. The league already has its contentious situations at times where the updaters need to draw lines between what is and isn't acceptable for TPE, or when the mod team decides to make decisions about who can and can't be hired into jobs on behalf of commissioners, and no one really likes to hear that something they've always been able to do, to an effect that they likely see as positive, is no longer going to be something they're allowed to do. On top of just losing control, though, a very fair take is that it strips those particularly active GMs of their ability to out-waiver the others through effort. We did, thankfully, choose to roll ahead with this anyway. A workaround that we'd decided on was that GMs could still make their own waiver pitches to be automatically available on the portal, and a decent counterpoint that we used to justify the rest was that the amount of work needed to constantly be available and offering to outdo the others was unrealistic to expect from a GM anyway. And, eventually, after about three months of kicking around the BoG, Dil finally proposed moving forward with portal waivers by starting to work on it. And got no response, because the idea wasn't vibes enough. Continuing to bump the post elicited replies along the lines of "I thought we were all done talking about this," when clearly we weren't because nothing had ever come out of it to conclude it. Some things had happened in the background as well. I had talked with then-VHLM Commissioner @McWolf personally about some ways to address VHLM GM issues with the system, and I had a very good conversation with one of the proposal's larger opponents in @Spartan that resulted in us finding a solid middle ground on the issue. Namely, he was concerned about my idea of auto-assigning players to teams when some may not even exist long enough to accept a contract, and we eventually agreed that it would probably be best to still require GMs to make offers officially by themselves. As far as I could tell, there wasn't anyone left in BoG that was against the proposal, so it was really frustrating to see "are we good to go?" met with literally nothing. Eventually, it got the green light from the blue team, and my* proposal finally was put into work. *this was suggested before I ever brought it up by @Berocka, apparently, who has an angry podcast about my taking credit for it somewhere. I don't have any memory of that ever happening and always thought I came up with it independently. Let's just be happy it was pulled off. We were promised a "by next season" in early May, but like all big projects, this wasn't the case (no hate here; I'm not exactly done with this series and my 31st season is coming to an end). Later on in 2022, Spartan and I became VHLM Commissioners ourselves, and that conveniently lined up with the system becoming ready. Portal waivers were finally rolled out in November of 2022, over a year from when I had first brought them up. For better or for worse, portal waivers are still a thing today! Some aren't convinced that the system is perfect, and I understand that. But a year of fighting for it to happen finally paid off despite the best efforts of those of us in power to not care about it. That part is mostly joking, to be clear. I love and trust most people in BoG and there are legitimate reasons why not everyone is rushing to implement all of my ideas all the time. It is times like these that make me wish that I could snap my fingers and make things happen instantly, but I also get that the league would probably have run itself into the ground by this point if I got to do that. Looking over the thread, I found that I actually did a lot less of the bumping myself than I thought, and it really was a group effort that contradicted the "I singlehandedly forced the system through" narrative I originally intended to take to this article. As a whole, no matter who it was, portal waivers took a really long time to make their way through the system, and I think that justifies this article's title anyway. Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience: #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name #2: Can't We All Just Get Along? #3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway? #4: The House That I Built #5: Can We Fix It? #6: American Beauty #7: The Kids Are Alright #8: Dogs In A Pile #9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake #10: This Old House #11: Go Directly to Jail #12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball #13: How I Messed Up Davos #14: Ello Gov'nor #15: Weewoo #16: Jolly Kranchers #17: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 2 #18: I've Been Everywhere, Man #19: The Sun Also Rises #20: Ripple In Still Water #21: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 3 #22: I Hate the Meta #23: I Hate the Mods