studentized

1) Keep things simple. Don't try to be too fancy and over think things. If we apply good fundamentals, things will work out. 2) Lots to improve for me. I want to shoot more, score more. Need to be better at both ends too. 3) Guys a stud. Defence looks pretty solid for our group going forward. That makes your job as a forward a lot easier. 4) Guy Legrande. Really smart offensively and just being a good pro in the locker room and on the ice. 5) Neither. I still think Prague is more talented this year, but D.C has some great players taking advantage of their ice time. Both will be better in time, much like our group. ? San Jose because I'm a fan and they had an interesting off season. Lots of departures, not a lot of adds. A bunch of their youth will get a chance and if the past is any indication, a couple of those guys will contribute in a big way out of the gate. Excited to see who makes the cut.

Calgary 4-2

Calgary Malmo Davos Riga

Sidney Crosby Not sure who goes next. @Quik you picking for golding? Or does @hedgehog337 go now?

Okie dokie. Rylan Peace for me this time @Bruins10

Not sure I was fully prepared for the huge changes that take place during the jump from VHLM to VHL. It was a wild off-season and it moved fast. There is a bit of a bitter taste left in my mouth from getting ousted from the VHLM playoffs with Halifax, mainly around the fact that we don't get to try again. The minors are done and that team is gone. It was a wild ride, one I enjoyed a ton, but within the next couple of days I knew I would be drafted somewhere else. I was excited to move up to the VHL, in part because I knew there, we would be able to keep the group together to try again when things don't work out in the playoffs. The expansion teams announcement added a different wrinkle. Two more teams meant a couple more available player spots, and I was optimistic I'd end up in a good situation with good playing time. My thoughts towards playing for an expansion team were always positive; it would be cool to be part of a team's founding history. But at the end of the day, I couldn't be more satisfied where I ended up. New York has a core of young players that is unmatched in my opinion. Everyone in the room genuinely believes we'll be one of the top teams in just a few short seasons. To be a part of that is humbling and I can't wait to see how our development grows throughout this season.

Taking the +4 this week

So tired when I wrote that. I fully meant Boris haha. Will keep Wilcox in there though so I can double my chances of being right

3. I've had only 1 game where I put up points. Need to be more consistent, and be better against better teams. 4. Hitting expectations. Hanging around that 5th spot in the NA conference with the chance to grab that 4th one. I fully expect us to be one of the teams that gets better throughout the season this year 5. I plan on always playing full careers. Depreciation doesn't bother me and if you keep to one year contracts layer on, then you can always try to swing your way to a competitive team. 6. Our captain Dalton Wilcox. We seem to be getting a ton of points from defence so far, but that will normalize and forwards will catch up. I think he will be the guy leading the way. 8. I honestly was hoping the expansion rules would allow them to be somewhat competitive out of the gate, but looks like that didn't happen. Still cool for all those guys to be a part of a brand new team. 9. Prague will probably make the playoffs first, and once your in you have a shot. DC might end up with the higher peak, but can't really say when they might reach it. Probably a while. 10. Super excited for our future in NY. I think this past S68 draft will look really good in hindsight, and the returning S67 guys will lead the charge.

Alexander Pepper @DangerGolding

Sorry, have to skip you again @DangerGolding. Heading off to bed and don't want to be skipped myself. Elias Dahlberg @Bruins10

Vancouver 5-3

43 Vancouver 44 Calgary 45 Riga 46 New York

I would like to throw my name in for this as well. Definitely not the most qualified member who has applied, but I log into the site regularly and am sure I could provide fair and frequent updates for everyone.

Joseph McWolf @DangerGolding

Jake Davis @Bruins10

Yes

Claiming free week

S68 Transaction: 5RA287188H591820V Doubles Week Doubles Week 5 TPE uncapped Free week Also claiming 5TPE uncapped here

Yahoo for me please

1. Just to keep at it and be active. Don't have to earn to the cap every week, as long as you do what you can, when you can. 2. I was in a real good spot with Halifax. Top minutes, playing with our top forwards. Was really happy with the year I had. 3. We got beat in the semis by Ottawa. Good group of guys all around, but would have been nice to squeeze out a few more wins this year. 5. I'm liking Matt Thompson. Has been good pretty much every year, achieved greatness for a couple ones, and has the stats and play style I want to have in the VHL 6. Former Hali alumni would be cool, but there are so many great players all over the league. 7. Goal scorer. Shoot the puck a lot and lay the body. Couple of fights here and there would be cool. Still working on the last 2 aspects

Week 2/2 claim

With S67 now all wrapped up, we can add another data point for cross-season stat comparisons. For this week, I thought I'd look at the TPA earned by players over time. A couple of limitations up front (as a result of my data set): I'm only looking at TPA, not TPE. TPE that is banked is omitted from this, so in general TPE earning is probably a bit higher than what I report. Whether this banking of TPE is increasing or decreasing, I could not track. This is most notable for players making the jump from the VHLM to the VHL, because of the 200 TPA cap in the VHLM forces everyone to bank after that milestone is reached. Because this makes a noticeable impact, I will split out the results into three sections: VHL growth, VHLM growth, and growth in both leagues. Depreciation exists (and is annoying to measure) so for some players TPA growth does not fully represent TPA earnings. I was about to get accurate and calculate what stats were depreciated based on player age, but then I remembered there are store purchases to counter it, so it wouldn't have been accurate. Ultimately in order to capture this I would need to collect better data sets and track player data at various points throughout season instead of just end of season TPA. Possible to do in the future. There are two main explanations for why TPA might be increasing (decreasing) over time. a) players are more (or less) active and everyone is doing more (or less) work on point tasks, etc. b) opportunities for TPE earning are becoming more (or less) available The general feeling I've picked up from the forums is that TPE inflation (i.e more point b) is a thing, but I don't really see a way to measure this aside from looking back through old forum pages to compare. My own personal feelings on the matter say that giving out easier TPE might even be (dare I say it) good for the league. My rationale being that as the league grows, relatively fewer members will claim the "top" amount of TPE possible, and more often than not claim a below average amount from what the average was last season. This is just diminishing returns on recruitment. Obviously there will be exceptions to this and you will recruit new members that buy in right away and build fast, but for the most part the more committed users will already be here/some other sim league they prefer. More/easier TPE earning opportunities would be a way to counter that and maintain a consistent amount of player growth that we're used to. Those are all just thoughts, however so now let's actually look at the data. I looked at end of season (regular season, not playoffs) TPA across players in the VHL and VHLM. Changes in TPA are attributed to the last season i.e S67 data is the change from end of season 66 to end of season 67 and would account for all growth in the following playoffs, the offseason, and the next regular season. It shouldn't really matter where we cut off as long as we're consistent, so I just went with what my dataset had. The boxplots below chart the changes in TPA across season. I have charted the mean TPA change as the red dot and the median is the bold horizontal black line. I looked at three different data sets; VHL growth (players who went from the VHL to the VHL), VHLM growth (players who went from having no data or being in the VHLM to the VHLM), and "all" growth (from nothing, VHLM, or VHL to VHLM or VHL). This "all" growth is the only one to capture the players coming out of the VHLM and into the VHL, so it includes a bunch of higher TPA growth data points due to limitation number 1 (/the 200 TPA cap in the VHLM). All Growth VHL Growth VHLM Growth There are some commonalities in all three data sets, most noticeably that S65 seems to be the most "inflated" TPA growth season of the ones looked at. I was not a member of the forums at the time so not sure really why that would be the case, but I would imagine that either some favourable TPA hand-out existed or that it was just an abnormally successful recruitment season. If we look only at the bottom lines of the boxplots (the 25th percentiles) of the "all" growth chart, we can see that S67 was the first season since S64 where that value was 0 TPA. This means roughly 25% of players who played games in the VHL/VHLM were completely inactive or just suffered from some major depreciation they couldn't recover from. This isn't overly worrying in my mind, especially since the median/average values are staying relatively on pace with the S66 ones, but it does potentially hint at some recruitment diminishing returns. Another explanation could just be that GMs had an increased likelihood to play inactive players this season. Definitely could be tracked over a longer period of time to reach better conclusions. In case anyone is wondering, I can share who some of the biggest outliers were. The biggest VHL-to-VHL TPA growth season was for Matt Thompson in S63 with a gain of 255 TPA (from 490 to 745) The biggest season growth altogether was for Hunter Hearst Helmsley in S66 (200 TPA in VHLM to 531 TPA in VHL) There have been 14 players in the VHLM who made it to the max 200 TPA growth all within their first season, most recently being two S68 draft eligible players in Luciano Valentino and Jeff Downey The honour of biggest loser goes to Aleksei Federov in S60 (890 in S59 to 637 in S60, a drop of 253 TPA). Surprisingly his stats were better following depreciation The best S67 VHL growth player was Tyler Barabash Jr with a TPA growth of 248. That's about all I wanted to do with this data at this point, but am always open to suggestions to do more if anyone has any. I'm also happily getting married tomorrow and honeymooning soon after that, so this will probably be my last post of this level of quality for the next month. (please still draft me GMs ?) Thanks for reading! 1045 words, so will be claiming for next 2 weeks.

Vancouver Vancouver Helsinki 2-1 Helsinki Points: Rauno Palo Goals: Rauno Palo Assists: Rauno Palo PIMs: Matt Thompson Series winner: Matt Thompson