studentized

Seattle 4-3

1) As I'm sure we all know by now, teammate and all around great guy Elmebeck has recently passed away. What's your fondest memory of our friend? Talked a bit about collaborating on some cool play by play analysis for the VHL. Never really got anywhere and that's kind of a bummer looking back. 2) We are only 5 points out of fourth in the league, do you expect us to make it there? I sincerely hope so. We've been a better 2nd half time these past two seasons, so reason to be optimistic. 3) We are only one goal off from last in the league with goals for, how do we fix it? Wild. I did not know that. Maybe take less penalties. Idk 4) @studentized's breakout season is bolstering our offense, being on pace for around 60 points. Who else is having a breakout season either with us or around the league? In before you jinxed it. Just read about Benny graves of DC who is having a solid sophomore year 5) If you could move for one player in the league who would you want to see in the red, white and blue? Julian Borwinn mvp. Make it so. 6) If you weren't playing hockey, what would you be doing? Begging on the street for food.

Vancouver 5-2

240 Prague Phantoms @ Seattle Bears 241 Helsinki Titans @ Moscow Menace 242 Riga Reign @ D.C. Dragons 243 Vancouver Wolves @ Calgary Wranglers

+4

Could give CPU players low/0 EN, so they get fatigued even faster and play less.

Yeah I totally see the maintenance vs reward payoff, which is why I'd vote to keep it simple (I.e every team gets the same tpe to apply to coach stats, but can spend it on different attributes. I'd also minimize the times they can update coach stats to maybe just once per season so that its not a burden to simmers.) As far as what they do: the higher the coach tpe, the higher the game boost to related player stats. The global league setting can also be used to limit how much of an effect they can have.

1. Better than that, but its still early. Too much talent in the room to suck this bad for much longer 2. Not sure. I'd be ok not playing Davos again for a while though. 3. Vancouver Calgary Seattle NY DC Toronto. Hopefully subject to change. 4. Dudes a stud. Motivates you to go get him a cup in his last year. 5. Study tape a lot. Try to recognize what other good teams do and mimic what works. 6. Borwinn is going nuts. I think Calgary overall is my biggest missed prediction. JB Rift having a big year

Another suggestion I thought I'd pitch but since I don't like to do anything for free, I'm writing it up here for some TPE. I'm not sure about the history of coaches in the VHL and if they have existed in the past, but it seems like an interesting route to explore. Coaches have editable attributes like players do: https://vhlportal.com/VHL/70/Coaches.php These provide stat boosts to players for games. Coach effects can be completely turned off as a league setting (which I assume we have done since we have no pro coaches), but if enabled, everything I've found suggests they would have an effect on player ratings in sim engine 1.1. Again, like my last suggestion I have no idea how large an effect it would have but it would just give another dimension to play with. Some testing out prior to making any change should be done. How I could see it work: Coaches are managed by GMs. All GMs get the SAME fixed amount of TPE to spend on their coach, allocating it however they like. Maybe even use the same update scale. Coach stats can only be updated in off-season (just to try to prevent someone over using it to win a matchup every game). Maybe this part is dumb. Would be curious if anyone has played around with coaches before in STHS (VHL or otherwise). No idea if their effect is even worth the overhead they'd bring, but its something else that could add a bit of change to what we've been used to.

So initially I was just going to submit this to Suggestions sub forum, but I need the TPE and I think I can make 150 words of this. If anymore ends up agreeing or has information to add, feel free to start a post there as well. Currently we default EN to 99 for all players. Part of the reasoning for this was that we didn't even know if EN rating was taken into account in the 1.1 sim engine (which we still use afaik). From my own personal findings, the EN rating DOES have an effect (even as early as 1.1) and its two fold. It affects how quickly a player becomes fatigued; which in turns affects how many minutes they end up playing in the game. It also affects the severity of the fatigue penalty that is applied. Obviously I haven't confirmed the effect this would have using our particular player ratings file/league file, so going forward with this probably warrants some independent testing on the VHL side (I don't expect anyone to immediately take my word for it). However, I do think it would add an interesting wrinkle to building players and I'm sure the bog could come up with a good way to grandfather existing players into a non-99 value. To those with STHS licences, let me know if you've seen similar things with tweaking the EN rating. Having someone else verify would probably push something like this through sooner (or put it at rest forever if for some reason the effect it has looks negligible).

+4

Helsinki 4-2

85 Prague Phantoms @ Helsinki Titans 86 Calgary Wranglers @ HC Davos Dynamo 87 Riga Reign @ New York Americans 88 Malmo Nighthawks @ D.C. Dragons

1. Special teams are horrid right now but should rebound. A couple different faces this year, so chemistry should build naturally. Not worried. 2. Seattle, but they look similar to our start last year. They will figure it out. 3. Hits. I hope... 4. I would say McWolf is working out really well. Solid vet presence who is leading the team in a lot of places. 5. Take less penalties. Be smarter on pk. Not much more you can do but focus. 6. The captain. Still not putting up flashy numbers compared to parts of the rest of the league but he's every bit as talented.

G - A Red Guy @Midnite

Ryan Kastelic @HenrikZoiderberg

@Maasa (your tag was missed, so your clock can start now instead of 6 hours ago)

F - Dan Wilinsky @Midnite

D - Joseph McWolf @HenrikZoiderberg

The conference is looking pretty stable at this point, so I'm sure none of these will be that bold. Nevertheless here's how I think it will play out. New York and Vancouver will dominate most of the NA conference throughout the regular season. It will probably be a tight race to the end. HHH and Boris the Forest will be the top 2 forwards of the conference. Seattle will quietly make the playoffs and once again do some damage there. I'm not saying they will be a threepeater, but I think they are poised for another deep(ish) run. D.C will pull an S69 New York; start off slow but finish strong. I fully expect D.C to squeak into the playoffs and have a competitive first round series, much like NY last year. Calgary will stay status quo in regular season wins. The future is brighter than ever but this won't be the year. They should finish close to D.C given they still have a bit of veteran talent Toronto will suck, but not as much as Davos. Bonus Continental Cup finalist prediction: Vancouver. Would be too homer of me to pick NY and I'm too pessimistic to pick Seattle, despite my gut telling me so.

Keven Foreskin @Midnite

Smitty Werbenjagrmanjensen @HenrikZoiderberg

Claiming 2nd doubles (week of 1/19/2020)

Parsing the full play-by-play of games is slowly getting easier for me and so with it means that some more stats can be tracked (that the VHL index doesn’t do). I was interested in seeing how my player was performing in a few of these aspects and decided to just extend the results to every team last year for a small write up. The stats I looked at are: net takeaways, shot deflections, posts hit, defensive zone exits, and offensive zone entries. I’ve talked about how I calculate takeaways and giveaways in an earlier media spot (see here if interested), so I won't rehash that discussion. Deflections and posts hit are pretty self-explanatory as well so that only really leaves zone entries and exits. I will briefly explain how I calculated zone changes in this article. There are only a couple of play-by-play sentences where zones are mentioned in the sim that I could find: Sentences like “Pass to Player A in neutral/home team/away team zone” Sentences like “Player B carries the puck into the neutral/home team/away team zone” Sentences like “Player C dumps the puck in the home team/away team zone” Sentences involving things like Icings, face-offs, etc. For my calculations I’ve excluded cases 3 & 4. This is more or less consistent with some of the definitions of zone entries in hockey analytics from what I can gather. In particular, when the sim mentions dumping the puck, I do not constitute that as a zone entry in my calculations since these are almost always recovered by the opposing team. I suppose I could have tracked these as a separate metric if anyone is really curious but I didn't care enough about it for my player. Ok, to the definition. A zone exit occurs when the puck moves from defensive zone to neutral zone and a zone entry occurs when puck moves from the neutral zone into the offensive zone. As far as who gets credited with the zone entries, I’ve probably made some assumptions that are not standard in hockey analytics (not actually sure about this but zone entries seem like a stat typically looked at a team or line level vs how i’m doing it i.e down to a specific player). I opted to go the route of allowing “half” entries in cases where two players are involved in the play. For example, in case 2 above, Player B would get attributed one (whole) zone entry because they carry the puck in themselves. But for case 1, because it’s a pass involving two players, I will have attributed a 0.5 (half) zone entry to each player involved; the player passing (parsed from the previous by play sentence) and the player receiving (Player A in my example). Ok so let’s look at the numbers. First and foremost is New York. New York Best turnover differential: Lance Flowers (+247) Worst turnover differential: Soren Jensen (-241) Most deflections: Keven Foreskin (55) Most posts hit: Boris the Forest (13) Most offensive zone entries: Lance Flowers (876.5) Most defensive zone exits: Lance Flowers (772) A theme you’ll notice in this is that defensemen will often lead the team in zone entries and often times forwards do better with zone exits. This might seem a bit counter intuitive at first and I’m not sure if it bares a ton of realism to the NHL, but the numbers don’t seem too outrageous to me (I’m no expert on these types of stats, however). For New York, the numbers paint a nice little picture for sophomore defenseman Lance Flowers @CowboyinAmerica. His point totals dropped a ton this year from his rookie season, but it was in no way a down year for the guy. He lead the team in the turnover battle and zone entries/exits. That’s a huge part of the team that might go unnoticed to anyone not reading the full play-by-play. Similarly for Boris, who had a better year on paper, the 13 posts he hit suggest he just needed a little more luck to get even better results. Reminder to aim for the net next year @chillzone Ok, now for the rest of teams (sans analysis because I only cared enough about New York). Only tagging league leaders here since otherwise too many people would be mentioned, and I'm already not huge on tagging folks normally. Vancouver Best turnover differential: Brock Louth (+224) Worst turnover differential: Denver Wolfe (-386) Most deflections: Julius Freeman (93) *league leader* @rjfryman Most posts hit: Julius Freeman/Denver Wolfe (13) Most offensive zone entries: Diljodh Starload (977.5) Most defensive zone exits: Diljodh Starload (831) Seattle Best turnover differential: Leph Twinger (+332) Worst turnover differential: Acyd Burn (-233) Most deflections: Dan Wilinsky (53) Most posts hit: Scott Greene (11) Most offensive zone entries: Hulk Hogan (1007) Most defensive zone exits: Hulk Hogan (834.5) Toronto Best turnover differential: Rusty Shackleford (+338) Worst turnover differential: Orion Slade (-343) Most deflections: Rylan Peace (72) Most posts hit: Orion Slade (11) Most offensive zone entries: Elasmobranch Fish (1112.5) Most defensive zone exits: Tzuyu (928.5) Calgary Best turnover differential: Brady Stropko Jr (+233) Worst turnover differential: Chico Smeb (-405) Most deflections: Roll Fizzlebeef (59) Most posts hit: Chico Smeb (11) Most offensive zone entries: Charlie Paddywagon (1234.5) *league leader* @DMaximus Most defensive zone exits: Charlie Paddywagon (1017) D.C Best turnover differential: Piotr Jerwa (+463) *league leader* @majesiu Worst turnover differential: Mikko Aaltonen (-548) *league leader* @GRZ Most deflections: Mikko Aaltonen (41) Most posts hit: Benny Graves (10) Most offensive zone entries: Luciano Valentino (987.5) Most defensive zone exits: Mikko Aaltonen (975) Riga Best turnover differential: Guy Sasakamoose (+407) Worst turnover differential: Ryan Kastelic (-310) Most deflections: Elias Dahlberg (70) Most posts hit: Elias Dahlberg (17) *league leader* @Nykonax Most offensive zone entries: Apollo Hackett (1091.5) Most defensive zone exits: Ryan Kastelic (907.5) Moscow Best turnover differential: Edward Vigneault (+320) Worst turnover differential: Dan Baillie (-244) Most deflections: Jet Jaguar (81) Most posts hit: Dan Baillie (15) Most offensive zone entries: Smitty Werbenjagermanjensen (1178.5) Most defensive zone exits: Smitty Werbenjagermanjensen (937.5) Helsinki Best turnover differential: Sidney Crosby (+368) Worst turnover differential: Julian Borwinn (-358) Most deflections: Kronos Bailey (81) Most posts hit: Julian Borwinn (14) Most offensive zone entries: Julian Borwinn (941.5) Most defensive zone exits: Guillaume Fontenette (904.5) Malmo Best turnover differential: Condor Adrienne (+365) Worst turnover differential: Jake Davis (-287) Most deflections: Phil Marleau (72) Most posts hit: Ryan Sullivan Jr (11) Most offensive zone entries: Jerry Garcia (1043.5) Most defensive zone exits: Jerry Garcia (893) Prague Best turnover differential: Cinnamon Block (+327) Worst turnover differential: Willie Dredge (-261) Most deflections: Erik Draven (69) Most posts hit: Alex Pearson (12) Most offensive zone entries: Wolf Stansson Jr (948.5) Most defensive zone exits: Wolf Stansson Jr (857.5) Davos Best turnover differential: Basaraba Moose (+169) Worst turnover differential: John Madden (-335) Most deflections: Jerry Wang (59) Most posts hit: Brendan Plunkett/John Madden (7) Most offensive zone entries: John Madden (1066.5) Most defensive zone exits: John Madden (1165.5) *league leader* @Thranduil Let me know if anyone wants full data for their team/player or if there are different metrics you want to see in a future post. For now just gonna keep adding stuff as it interests me. Gonna make a double claim out of this too if I can.