studentized

S69 donation Transaction ID: 87D2856832070125J Free Week 5 TPE Uncapped Doubles Week Doubles Week Claiming the 5 TPE Uncapped right away Also claiming first Doubles Week (week of Nov 10)

Happy to hear you enjoy and thanks for the shout out. Just don't think timing is right for me, personally. Want to make sure I get to a point where I'm pumping out good content more regularly before venturing into something like this. Some day in the future though for sure

Part I - Pick em' (Pick the correct winners of all three games for 2 TPE) Game 3 - Malmo Nighthawks Game 4 -Malmo Nighthawks Game 5 - Malmo Nighthawks Part II - Predict the Score (Predict the correct score and winner of this game for 3 TPE) Game 5 - Malmo Nighthawks 3-0 Part III - Player Predictions (Predict the correct player for each category, 1 TPE for each correct answer) Series leader in points: Acyd Burn Series leader in goals: Matt Thompson Series leader in assists: Joel Ylonen Who has the series PIM lead: Hulk Hogan Who scores the series winning goal: Matt Thompson

Good call

Yes, I know it's still VHL playoffs. Why are we talking World Cup already? Easy write-up, that's why. In S66, Western Europe had 4 nations to choose from: Germany, France, Ireland, and the United Kingdom (technically already a collection of nations, but whatever). For S68 I think adding a few more countries to the list might make sense: Italy, Spain and/or Iceland would open up some more possibilities and make the team more competitive on a whole, especially defensively . Despite what I would like to see, for this write-up I will still assume nothing has changed from S66 and they will only have the four more typical western European nations to choose from. To have any chance in this tournament, Western Europe is going to need to rely on its stifling defence and a bit of scoring luck. They lack high end talent outside of McWolf and Finn Davison but could medal with some smart roster decisions, good line chemistry, and some of that SHTS magic. Here's a breakdown of a potential roster for them. Goalie Easy decisions here. Finn Davison and J.B Rift represent the best goalies of the past two VHL seasons. Stable, veteran leadership from your goalies goes a long way in any tournament, especially in single-game elimination ones. This is the unquestionable strength of the team. Defence McWolf leads the way here and captains this ship. Picking a partner for him and the remaining D-pairing is where it gets more interesting. Out of Ireland, two aging, regressing defensemen in Mulligan and Baxter would have once been easy picks. Now I think both have to be passed up on, unless the tournament opens up to allow a third pairing. They've had their chance in past world cups and there are plenty of equally talented, younger defencemen deserving of a chance. In France, you have Fontenette who plays a well-rounded, not super flashy style of game. I think he slots in well with just about anybody, so I'd stick him on the second pairing. Out of the U.K you get the remaining two guys; S68 rookie (and soon to be rookie of the year?) Lance Flowers and puck mover Codrick Past. Flowers proved he could match against the best of the best this year and still hold his own. I really like him paired with McWolf but that leaves a Past/Fontanette second pairing that I'm not as sure about. In any case, I think you can get two good D pairings somewhere out of those four guys. Just might take some tinkering. Centre This is where it gets toughest for me. The three best eligible centres of the class all play a similar style; defence first, shoot second, pass third. Two of these guys are from Germany: Hans Gruber and Mark Gebauer. The other is Aston Martin from the UK. All of these guys are deserving of roster spots, but I think Martin and Gruber are the better candiates to take the draws for being slightly less one-dimensional. Gebauer should have no problem at wing, in fact, I like him better there. Winger By far this is the weakest position group, emphasized by the fact that you need to two per line. Denver Wolfe makes the first pick easy, representing the best forward available for Western Europe to choose from. It falls off a cliff after him though, so I think you probably have to stick Gebauer up with him on that top line. The next best forwards West Europe has are two more S68 rookies; Irish winger Owen Nolan and UK centre Thorney Underyew. I've got the personal connection to Nolan, but to be honest I'm not sure how well he works without a pass first centre/opposite winger. Underyew plays a similar style which makes coming up with some good line chemistry all the more frustrating. Despite the possible lack of fit, I don't really see any alternatives outside of these two guys; the next best forwards are VHLMers who just don't have the experience desried. Lineup Gebauer @Sova - Martin @Sullvino - Wolfe @InstantRockstar Underyew @jack - Gruber @TheFlash - Nolan @studentized McWolf @McWolf - Flowers @CowboyinAmerica Fontenette @okocha5 - Past @Kylrad Davison @Poptart Rift @Devise It remains to be seen how the actual roster will shape up, but that is how I would do it (barring any extra countries being added to the candidate pool).

5) Want to move out of that "rebuild" phase and into the "contender" one. 6) Sharks legend of the same name wore #11. Might as well be consistent. 7) Get my phD. Won't happen until I'm ready to retire cause also got to earn a living. 8 ) Hug my dog. Guy is a pro cuddler 9) Hmm this is an interesting one since I've found that I'm not a huge fan of discord-side of the VHL compared to forums. I find that the LR is most active after sims go up and that's when I'm working. Also find the flow of conversation harder to follow when everyone is chatting. Not sure how to improve, honestly. 10) From a Reddit post. Joined at an awkward time, just hours before a VHLM draft, but still managed to talk a bit to Halifax and get drafted

Claiming final doubles week

A couple weeks back I made a fairly simple post tracking giveaways and takeaways in the VHL (see here). I cherry picked some of the leaders in some categories I thought were interesting, but that didn't really tell the whole picture. So to start off this media spot, I thought I'd include a full individual leaderboard below. I've haven't been successful getting this html to embed in one of these forum posts so I've ended up just adding it as an attachment. Let me know if its broken for anyone, but it should be viewable in just about any browser. takeaways-leaderboard.html A couple of good points were brought up to me regarding that past article. The one that stuck with me the most is the whole "Why should we care?" aspect. Are giveaways and takeaways even worth tracking in the VHL? Do more takeaways make a better player? More giveaways a worse one? More importantly, how do they affect wins at a team level? To start answering this last question, let's just look at the team rankings below combined with their place in the standings. Team GP W L OTL P Takeaways Giveaways Diff Malmo 72 46 20 6 98 9803 9541 262 Riga 72 46 22 4 96 9701 9679 22 Helsinki 72 45 22 5 95 9797 9851 -54 Seattle 72 43 24 5 91 10051 10036 15 HC Davos 72 40 22 10 90 9852 9732 120 Moscow 72 40 30 2 82 9701 9782 -81 Vancouver 72 35 28 9 79 10030 9974 56 Calgary 72 35 32 5 75 9658 9602 56 Toronto 72 29 29 14 72 9930 9930 0 New York 72 30 35 7 67 10048 10135 -87 Prague 72 23 40 9 55 10058 10083 -25 D.C. 72 20 49 3 43 9349 9633 -284 From looking at the above you can argue that some relationship probably does exist, but it's not clear how strong or how important that relationship is. The top and the bottom of the standings happen to be the best and the worst in turnover differential, but the middle is not as nice. So how should we look at his? One thing we could try is to compare the accuracy that turnover differential has on predicting wins to the accuracy of another, more common stat. It's widely believed that the team that shoots the puck more, scores more (and so wins more), so shot differential can serve as a nice comparison stat. In S68, the team that won the shots differential won the game 66.1% of the time. I wanted to compare this same metric to teams that won the turnover differential. Turns out that teams that won the turnover differential won only 52.1% of the games. At first glance, this feels low but the more you think about, the more it makes sense. Keep in mind that the more a team possesses a puck, the more chances for giveaways (and less chances for takeaways) they have. Considering the extreme case where one team possesses the puck for close to the entireity of the game, said team would almost certainly win but also lose the turnover battle. So a better metric would measure "takeaways per some unit of possession allowed". The closest metric measuring puck possession that I can use is shots. With this new metric of "takeaways per shot allowed", we get that teams winning this differential end up winning the game 65.5% of the time. One thing lost in both these stats is how badly a team won/lost the turnover differential. A single more takeaway than giveaway might not sway a game much, but 20 more might. This is represented in the data above; when looking at all the games where the team won the turnover battle (as defined by my new stat) but still ended up losing the game, we find that the average turnover difference is 20% smaller than normal. This supports the notion that games that are closer in turnover differential, often end up going either way in terms of the final result. One good way to actually model this would be with a linear logistic regression which would try to model how the magnitude of turnover difference affects the probability of winning. I might end up doing this another week, but for now I'm out of words to write. 608 words

Nolan never minced words when describing his expectations for the world juniors. "If we don't win gold, we've failed". It's was a tough year for the rookie right winger, scoring only 16 points and just barely hitting the 10 goal mark for the New York Americans. A season that would have only felt worse had Europe came up short in the WJC. Fortunately for Nolan, and the rest of team Europe, the team did not disappoint. Nolan scored the first two goals in the finals against team Canada, one coming just 13 seconds into the game. "I've been mentally preparing for that moment as soon as I was selected to the team'' the winger said. "It was nice to see it go in". His strong play all tournament long really helped propel Europe, who's only 2 losses came in round robin shootouts; both to Canada. "It feels (expletive) great." he said on winning gold. "I need to make sure I keep this style of play into next year in New York so I can win some trophies there too" 178 words

I'd be interested in giving it a go for Western Europe.

2. I learned how to be a better pro. It was not a good season for me on any level, but I'm hoping to prove that I learned some important lessons by doing better next year. 3. Defence and grit. I think I'm happy with my goal scoring ability, I just need to earn an opportunity to play more. 4. We have lots of potential at wing, but not very strong at the moment. 5. Yes. Everyone works hard and if our core stays together we will get better. Next year should be the start of our window. 6. Walter Clements was a solid centre. Someone who understood the role and played responsibly. Offensive output aside, I enjoyed my time playing with him. 9. I wouldn't touch a thing honestly. Let those guys grow, but we are super lucky to have a strong blue line.

I had a hard time coming up with an idea for theme week this season. I usually like to incorporate a bit of data in my media spots, but the history of the VHL is already pretty well documented. Initially, I thought I would do some era-adjusted stat comparisons between current players vs those of the past, but collecting player stats prior to season 59 is still on my to-do list, and there wasn’t a whole lot of interesting player comparisons I could find with what I had. It wasn’t all a waste however, since all that work did eventually lead me to something I did want to write about, albeit with not a lot of time left to actually do the writing. The chart below plots the scoring output for how the league-average player performed across each season from S59 to S68. It may not look like there is a huge difference (in hindsight, comparing the “league-average player” across seasons may not be the best way to view what I want to show), but the effects become more obvious when looking at some of the stat leaders; S62 was by far the craziest. I was already somewhat aware about the high scoring S60-S63 seasons, just from chatter around the forum, but what I never really understood was what caused it. Why did scoring come back down to earth in S64 and plateau? What caused it to go up in the first place? Naively I just assumed that the SHTS sim has lots of knobs that can be tweaked and that some knob was probably turned in such a way that made scoring increase. While possible, that answer is highly unsatisfying. More realistically, there is probably something in the data that can explain it. I had a couple of ideas about what types of things I would think would cause a scoring increase in the VHL. For example, maybe the ratio of the number of user-created forwards to the number of defencemen/goalies was more in favour of forwards? If there weren’t a lot of people that chose to make players in goal-preventing positions, then it would make sense to see scoring go up. The chart below plots this information. As you can see, this mix of positions has pretty much been left unchanged across the years. In particular nothing here stands out about S62 that would explain it's league scoring rates. Rather than looking at the quantity of players at each position, we should really be looking at the quality. It still feels like TPA is the most common way that people measure the quality of a player on the forums, so that’s what I used. Below plots the average TPA invested in each player at each position group (forward, defence, or goalie). S62 clearly looks like the outlier here, with low average TPA across all position groups. Most notably it was the worst goalie crop we’ve seen in a while, mostly due to retirement of the elite guys from the year before. But in terms of the gap between TPA in forwards vs TPA in defence vs TPA in goalie, there really doesn’t seem to be a clear explanation. In fact, the TPA gap favours forwards in more in recent years than at any other point in my data, yet league scoring hasn’t returned to it’s past high. Number of User Players By Position Average TPA of Players By Position One obvious flaw to the above line of reasoning is that it doesn’t account for where the TPA was spent. There are definitely high TPA forwards that don’t score much (Current Riga forward Anthony Matthews has the highest TPA “cost” per goal scored in all my data). And there are also high TPA defensemen that don’t prevent scoring well (this is harder to measure, obviously, but the most notable high TPA, high minus player from my data was Luc-Pierre Lespineau-Lebrunette. What a fighter). To account for this without getting too complicated we might only want to look at two TPE stat categories; SC as the strongest predictor of goal scoring and DF as the (most-likely) strongest predictor of suppressing goal-scoring. Below the chart plots the average rating of SC vs DF across seasons. One thing this shows is how investment into DF changed after S63. Despite SC increasing on pace with DF in recent years, it seems that just the presence of DF being invested in played a role in moving past the high scoring early 60’s. In my mind, there’s still a lot left unexplained in regards to league-wide scoring variations across seasons in the sim. What I am more confident in saying is that the early S60’s were likely an anomaly; a period where the average player was worse than we’ve seen in a long time, where people didn’t care as much about DF as we currently do, and where the few good players that did exist were able to take advantage and score at an insane rate. I doubt we see something quite like it again.

Hockey fights are fun. Let’s talk about who is the best. There are a couple of ways to look at this, depending on your flavour. 1) the best fighter is the one who wouldn’t back down (the one who fought the most) 2) the best fighter is the one who picked his fights wisely (the one who won the highest percentage) 3) the best fighter is one who could not lose (most wins without a loss) 4) the best fighter is the one who made it his craft (most TPE invested into FG) Fights are scored in SHTS as won, lost, or tied. If we call a tie a 0.5 win, we can figure out who the best are according to each criteria. Luc-Pierre Lespineau-Lebrunette played from S60 to S66 for Quebec and Toronto. The defencemen partook in 44 fights over that time: 16 won, 10 lost, and 18 ties. Don’t let his losses fool you, the next highest skater only fought 31 times, so Luc-Pierre definitely deserves his dues. Hulk Hogan takes the honour of having the highest Fight Win percentage of those with at least 10 fights. His 5 wins, 1 loss, and 9 ties in just two seasons give him a win percentage of 63%. This may not seem high, but it stands above the rest which makes him one of the best. That one loss may haunt Hogan forever but no such thing for ACL TEAR. With 7 wins, 2 ties and 0 losses, ACL tear just narrowly missed my completely arbitrary min 10 fights needed threshold above. What he’s achieved is impressive, but what's less impressive is his re-roll of TPE away from FG. He really could have been something special but for some reason he mistakenly must have thought Goals > Fights. Luc-Pierre Lespineau-Lebrunette takes the cake for most invested in FG (averaged across an entire career) with 85 TPE. He started out with 80 in his rookie season and reached as high as 90 before depreciation knocked him down. That's dedication to the craft. Let’s hope to see some good bench brawls in this years playoffs. Luc-Pierre Lespineau-Lebrunette is my pick for best fighter of the 60’s.

1. Don't have enough information or experience to talk about line setting in am informed way. Should be set to whatever wins us the most games, but I imagine that needs a lot of experimenting over fairly large sample sizes to figure out. 2. Catching up 9 points in 9 games would be a miracle. Stranger things have happened, but we understand that we most likely miss the playoffs due to how we played the rest of the year. 3. As a part of the core of forwards, I still think we will be fine over time. It was a tough year for us, but I really think I can step up and improve the next couple of years. 4. There are some pretty good top end S69 prospects, and we should be able to grab at least one. I'm less informed on some of the lower ranked ones, but that's where the success of a draft is built 5. That whole European conference dominating the NA one. Malmo with the Matt Thompson comeback tour has been a cool story 6. Strong showing in playoffs. 20-30 goals as am individual one.

+4

Last season Nolan's name did not get picked and it bugged him. "I thought I was putting together a strong VHLM season and was hoping to squeak onto the World team roster. Was weird seeing all my teammates go and not me". This year is different; the right winger will represent team Europe. Despite having a lackluster rookie season with New York, Nolan will be counted on to score some important goals and log some top minutes in this year's tournament. "I'm hoping to redeem myself a bit since the VHL has been tough for me. The World Juniors should give me a chance to play with a score-first mentality again, something I've went away from this year playing in the bottom six in NY" said Nolan. Some familiar faces will also be joining Team Europe. New York teammates Eller, Elmebeck and Gunnarason will all represent alongside Nolan. "I think it just speaks to how bright our future is in NY. We have a lot of young talent and we all really want to show just how good we are on an international stage". When asked about his hopes for this years tourney, Nolan responded "Bringing home a gold medal will make this entire year, and all the hard work that went into it, worth it. Anything short of gold would just add more disappointment". Look for Nolan to have a strong tournament.

1. Just go out and enjoy every win. Remember that we have a bright future ahead of us and that we are all fortunate to get to play this game we all love at such a high level. 2. I have no problem with D leading the way offensively. Our D are a little more seasoned then our forwards, so not really surprised it's been this way. They are all special to watch, LeGrande in particular. 3. Both are deserving. Gonna come down to how they perform the rest of the way. Really wish the best for them both. 4. Our goalie tandem is great. I played with Gunnarsson down in Halifax last year and the guy is a rock. A red guy is a big part of our future so happy to see him get noticed for some strong play. 5. Great leadership core. LeGrande, Elmebeck, and Rodriguez all stand out to me but our room is strong overall. 6. Lots of familiar faces on team Europe with me so mostly friendly. We have a lot of work to do to get to where we want to be so the competitiveness should pick up.

Claiming first doubles week

Although the STHS index has fields to track take aways and give aways, the version of STHS we sim on does not actually fill anything in. Still, as pointed out by my teammates on New York, the full play by play game logs contain enough information to reasonably calculate these. So that's what I did. I will briefly outline how I went from full play by play to numeric stats but full disclaimer: it's probably not perfect. I can even post the source code if people are interested in building on it (otherwise I will probably just keep generating these on demand for my teammates when they want it). How I got the results: The game files are all served as html so that's what I parsed from. For any one wanting to try, it wasn't too painful thanks to some handy packages in nodejs. From the full play-by-play, only two sentence "templates" stood out to me as describing a give away/take away. I wouldn't be surprised if I missed some though, so let me know if you know of any others. They are: "Pass by Player A intercepted by Player B (in the neutral/teamX/teamY zone)" and "Player A is hit by Player B and loses puck" The first one is pretty cut and dry. Player A gets credited with a give away and Player B gets a take away. I interpreted the second sentence type in pretty much the same way (i.e Player A with give away and Player B with take away). In reality though, the second case could have Player A lose the puck, but in the following sentence have the "Puck retrieved by a Player C" where Player C is on the same team. In this case, I'm not sure that a give away is truly appropriate, but I was feeling lazy so I didn't go to this level. If it makes you feel better, the first type (intercepted passes) is much more common that the latter, so I think the results would be pretty close. One thing I noticed right off the bat is that give aways and take aways are being reported MUCH higher than NHL levels (like an order of 10x more). Perhaps this is the reason that SHTS is not tracking them in our version of the sim. Or perhaps I just interpreted everything too aggressively. Thankfully, I think most people are concerned with their TA to GA ratio rather than the absolute numbers anyways, so I'm still thinking there is some usefulness here. The results (for season 68 up to game 251): Most take aways: Piotr Jerwa @majesiu - 1014 (runner up Sven Hitz @JayF - 1011) Most give aways: Mikko Aaltonen @GRZ - 959 (runner up Guy LeGrande @Steve - 948) Most take aways in a game: Brady Strokpo Jr @Bushito- 41 take aways in game 241 Most give aways in a game: Lance Flowers @CowboyinAmerica - 39 give aways in game 190 Best take away to give away ratio: Mikka Pajari @Devise - 177 TA to 94 GA = 1.88 TA:GA Best take away to give away ratio (min 800 GA + TA): Basaraba Moose @Toasty - 636 TA to 377 GA = 1.68 TA:GA Worst take away to give away ratio: Chico Smeb @xDParK - 193 TA to 425 GA = 0.45 TA:GA Worst take away to give away ratio (min 800 GA + TA): Mikko Aaltonen - 553 TA to 959 GA = 0.58 TA:GA Next steps: Besides just cleaning up the code a bit, one interesting next step (and possibly an upcoming VHL.com article) is to try to associate each player in each game to their team at that time. This will let me easily figure out which teams are the best in regards to TA/GA as well as make it easier to generate all the player results for a specific team. I could also take this a step further and scrape the line combos and assess performance of lines using TA/GA. An easier next step would be to generate this report for the VHLM since they need some love too. As always, let me know if you have any ideas of other things you'd like to see. Thanks for reading!

1. How do you expect us to place at the end of the season? Close to where we are now. The possibility of playoffs is slim. If we squeak in, we will give it our best. 2. Which team looks the most dangerous on the ice? Vancouver looks like they want to repeat. Super potent in all phases of the game 4. Gunnarson and A Red Guy are out with the flu, who straps on the pads? Not me. I barely block shots as it is. Probably whoever blocks the most would get designated. 5. If there was a NYA Fight Club who would be the defending champ? Still yet to be in a VHL fight but it will come eventually. I'd win a fight club against these guys though 6. Who are the real surprises in terms of performance this season league wide? Toronto going through a massive plummet. Look similar on paper to last year, so I was surprised. 7. How are you doing? Exhausted. Just got back from 1 month vacation. Lots of work to catch up on.

+4

Vancouver 2-0