Spartan

Hey BIG Al, some of us take a break from hitting people and shooting at the net to play defense and generate offense for the entire team. What would you know about it, you just hit and score .

Yeah haha, I figured, just had to call out @Juice and @JigglyGumballs when they tried to talk shit the other day, saying they were the best D-pairing in the league. Clearly @rory and I are better!

98 combined points vs 79 combined points, and LA is 4 points higher in the standings

Most importantly: Pines + Letang > Welch + Gumballs

Was this ever filled?

It's been quite the pleasantly surprising season from an individual and team perspective. Excited to see it continue!

Proutcast woo!

Huh. Well I didn't even realize they were all that long, maybe the variability within them makes them easier to listen to. I usually don't listen to podcasts because my attention span is too short, just can't stay interested in them. Yours was maybe the only one I actually stuck around for longer than 20 minutes on.

I do listen to @JardyB10's solo podcasts sometimes, mainly because they're short and sweet and he's also name dropped me in one. It's also been the inspiration for my "carcast" thing which I might turn into a series, where I record a podcast on the way back from work. Drive's about 30 minutes, I get 2 weeks from it. Some folks in Moscow listen to it, and I've generally gotten the feedback that people in the community like to have podcasts to listen to when commuting/at work/chilling. Go for it!

Yeah, this is something that will definitely suck a little bit. But NHL Fantasy ends up comparing a teams stats to each other and then seeing which team wins out per statistic. Like a point to the fantasy team with more goals. We just have a different way of running fantasy, which is also why defensive defensemen have never really been viable in VHFL. They may make "defensive" builds, but they will inevitably score points when they're on the average/below average teams in the league. I'd just like to stop seeing this every season: And honestly, 2 forwards in the top 15 has only happened one other time in the last 4 seasons, back in S76. There were no forwards in the top 15 in S78 or S77.

For point 1, I think that trying to predict shots blocked leaders are part of the strategy, at least for defensemen. Shots blocked leaders are generally always defensemen, and you know that if you select a top shot blocker, he will be a top 30 VHFL player. Take Cowboy Prout for example, he was someone I selected nearly every season before Calgary became better, and he'd consistently be a pretty decent defenseman and land up top 30 simply because he was a high TPA D-man on a non-playoff team. Out of amusement though, here's Cowboy Prout's ranking and SB Point Share over the past 4 seasons: S79 - 45th skater, 43% SB Point Share S78 - 5th skater, 55% SB Point Share S77 - 21st skater, 59% SB Point Share S76 - 38th skater, 57% SB Point Share He's had a lot of variability, as is to be expected from any player who isn't offensively driven, but when 55% of his points are consistently coming from Shots Blocked, that's when I have an issue with it. It's some kind of happy medium that we need between scoring and the physical stats to provide more balance and variety. As per your second point, I don't think that this will differ from the mean in general, although I do see a lot of people who pick defense early and often lose their groups consistently. The only exception is when you manage to target a top 5 defenseman appropriately. Sorry to all the folks who picked Roque Davis in the 1st round after his trade to LA . But also you prove my point that everyone targets forwards early, as that's a strategy that really shouldn't be a thing. Following a blueprint is boring, and it just results in everyone doing the same thing every season. No one ever picks a goalie first either, because goalie scoring ends up having most of the starting goalies in a 20 point range from each other. Good forwards shouldn't be that scarce to find, which is also why I've been debating of some way to reduce the point disparity between forwards and defensemen to make selecting defensemen in the first round viable as well.

monke

Most of what you've said is about checking, which I've never stated was an issue. If anything, one of my solutions that I was working on would actually reduce the value of shots blocked and slightly increase the value of hits since it's a bit more controllable. In the sense that you choose how much you want to hit, but shots blocked is mainly just a result of team state. Tristan and Nilsson are two sides of the same coin. Nilsson's number is widely overinflated because of shots blocked. Checking is fine, Nilsson didn't check much but 75% of his points coming from SB is an issue. Tristan also was the best defenseman on his team, which isn't an issue in a vacuum, but considering that he was like 450 TPE last season and 53% of his points came from blocked shots and 20% from hits, I'd say that's a bit more of an issue. And I don't have any issue with the Taro, Adrienne, Walker, Dood picks either, they're ideally the ones who would have strong fantasy seasons because of being the best players on bad teams. I was also thinking of slightly punishing players on bad teams since they get a free chance to stat pad, perhaps by using +/- as a factor in some linear boost/nerf. Like +/- multiplied by 0.2 or something of that sorts. Good players on good teams usually see less fantasy points just because STHS spreads out the love. They can only be top fantasy options if they play like Lahtinen/Letang/Rice/Davis on S76 Moscow and all record a shit ton of points, therefore a lot of fantasy love. Overall though, yes, reducing shots blocked is the priority. I would also like to reward scoring a bit more, since the actual points scored should be a true measure of a player first and foremost. Physicality statistics should be secondary.

Hi folks, I’ve been putting this piece off for quite a while since it’s taken a decent amount of work, and we all know I’m lazy. However, VHFL is something I’m quite passionate about. Back in my freshman year of college, a couple years before I joined the VHL, I took a course that taught me some pretty nifty Excel skills. I decided to mess around mid-season in S73 to make a spreadsheet that could calculate VHFL scores so that anyone could calculate their fantasy team’s scores, or check on the score for any player in the league at any given time. It was initially designed just to be a fun project for me to test out my skills on, and maybe have it used by the general community once I made it nice enough. As luck would have it, Twists, the then VHFL manager stepped down during playoffs and left the league. Suddenly there was a need for a spreadsheet that could calculate VHFL scores quickly, and my file was soon adopted as the official VHFL calculation/management spreadsheet. All player rankings, user rankings, group rankings/scoring, and team tracking has all occurred in that sheet. I’ve tried to keep modifying and upgrading that spreadsheet to make life as easy as possible for whoever the current manager is, but it’s also allowed me to keep an eye on the state of VHFL over the past 5-6 seasons. I’m not liking what I’m seeing. Warning I'll preface this piece by saying there are a lot of statistics and numbers explained in here. There are also a lot of words. If you don't want to read it, just skip to the very bottom where I've written out a TLDR. So What's the Issue? Before we get too deep into the issue at hand, let’s quickly look at VHFL scoring, just to be familiar with it: It’s pretty standard, 2 points for a goal, 1 point for an assist, 0.2 for hits, 0.8 for shots blocked. At a glance, it makes sense. Goals are worth double an assist, points per hit are pretty low since some folks can get over 300 hits in a season, and shots blocked can be hard to come by, especially for forwards. Makes sense to make them more valuable, right? Well, as time has gone on, and we’ve seen seasons of skater rankings come out, there’s a very clear trend. Defensemen are simply way too good in VHFL. Take a look at this table, where I’ve tracked positional averages of the top 190-ish players in each season (190 chosen since that’s around the end of user controlled players in each season who put up any sort of stats): S79 Positional Averages S78 Positional Averages S77 Positional Averages S76 Positional Averages C 61.98695652 C 131.7755102 C 130.7137255 C 134.5555556 LW 58.81428571 LW 133.3517241 LW 122.4064516 LW 114.16875 RW 62.29090909 RW 125.369697 RW 120.7028571 RW 116.6648649 D 86.5038961 D 198.1835616 D 216.9731343 D 194.7685714 Looking at these tables, the disparity is quite clear. Consider that around 190 skaters are in each sample size. Even in S79, where the data is as of mid-season - about 32-33 games in, defensemen already have about 24 more points over any other skater position. Going back before S79, the gap is more pronounced. 65 point gap in S78, 86 points in S77, 60 points in S76. Sure, we’ve had some extraordinary defensemen in the league, such as Condor Adrienne in recent seasons, but those sort of defensemen should be outliers. Defensemen shouldn’t be this far ahead of forwards. So where is the problem starting? Brace Yourself, a Shit Ton of Statistics Incoming Before we dive into some of the graphs I have coming up, I’d like to briefly explain a few statistics I’m going to use. In order to see exactly why there was this point disparity between forwards and defensemen, I decided to create a “point share” statistic inspired by the win share statistic that’s used in hockey generally, which is some breakdown of player value to their team. Value of a cog in the machine and all that, it’s super complex and just the inspiration to what I did. Instead of calculating player value to their team, I broke down the point share of each VHFL scoring attribute - goals, assists, hits, and shots blocked - to their final VHFL score. --- Let’s use the gorgeous Alex Letang as an example. So far in S79, through 32 games, he has a VHFL score of 133.2, good enough to be the top player in fantasy. He has 10 goals, 48 assists, 106 hits and 55 shots blocked. In order to figure out his Hit Point Share and Shots Blocked Share, I individually calculated the amount of points generated by his hits and shots blocked. Hits: 106 hits -> 21.2 points Shots Blocked: 55 SB -> 44 points When calculating the point share, we simply divide the points per attribute by the overall score of the player: Hit Point Share: 21.2 hit points/133.2 total points = 15.92% SB Point Share: 44 SB points/133.2 total points = 33.03% Combined Hit+SB Point Share: 48.95% So this shows a pretty normal point share of these statistics, for Alex Letang at least. Around 50% of his points are coming from 2 out of 4 scoring stats, which isn’t anything to worry about. But that’s only for Letang, who’s had the benefit of allowing his scoring on the ice to carry his VHFL score. --- Let’s shift over to the 3rd best VHFL player this season: Mikeal Keef, a defenseman on the openly tanking Helsinki Titans. His combined Hit+SB Point Share is 75.57%. Over 75% of his 131 points are coming from hits and shots blocked! He has 8 goals on the season which is pretty good for a defenseman, but also only 16 assists. For comparison, he has more VHFL points than Red Lite, who has 29 goals and 33 assists. That just doesn’t make sense to me. The graphs even show the issue in scoring. S79 Data (through 32-33 games) I’ll be the first to admit that I should have broken the graph up into forwards and defensemen to make my point a bit more obvious, but I’ll just hope you take my word for how I break it down. I calculated the Hit Point Share and SB Point Share for every skater in the 190-200 sample from each season, and then graphed it out to see the distributions on a larger scale. There are two obvious clumps of red, which are the SB Point Shares. The lower group, which largely falls under 25%, are just about all forwards. The sole red dot under 25% between 120-140 VHFL points belongs to the aforementioned Red Lite. The entire clump that largely falls around or above 50% belong to defensemen. In the 120-140 range, there are 6 defensemen who are getting a significant chunk of their points from shots blocked. That’s a massive problem in my opinion, and the trend continues in all the seasons I observed. Take a glance: S78 Data S77 Data S76 Data In every single one of these seasons, there is a significantly large chunk of red hovering above 50% made up of defensemen, leeching a majority of their points from shots blocked. There’s also a bit of a parallel observation to be made here that forwards simply aren’t getting enough value either, outside the 2 or 3 outlier forwards that exist every season. The Boulet candidates for example who have massive amounts of hits, such as Groovy Dood, Christian Mingle, Mikko Lahtinen, and then the best players with checking on the worst teams who get a nice boost in shots blocked. It’s a very clear trend and it’s making VHFL too predictable. Don’t believe me? Let’s show you how the current scoring is creating a clear-meta in VHFL drafting that’s ruining the game. Is There Really a Clear Meta? In order to see if there’s a meta that users follow to win VHFL, I went back through the top users of S79 (as of 8/8) through S76 and pulled the top 5 in each season. I then went to their groups for drafting and noted down what positions they selected with their first, second and third picks of the draft. Here’s that breakdown: S79 Top Users First pick Second pick Third Pick Doomsday (filler) Vaakanainen - F Letang - D Nilsson - D Fishy Dood - F Odinsson - F Lite - F Leafsman Dood - F Letang - D Campbell - F Tate Lite - F Letang - D Lamb - F Esso2264 Dood - F Lamb - F Pines - D S78 Top Users First pick Second pick Third Pick Thunfish Mingle - F Kankkunen - D Dear - F Juice Sandstrom - F Mingle - F Winter - F Dasboot Mingle - F Sandstrom - F Hornet - F Renomitsu Sandstrom - F Elsby - D Tsujimoto - F GustavMattias Hornet - F Tsujimoto - F Winter - F S77 Top Users First pick Second pick Third Pick GustavMattias Lahtinen - F Dood - F Walker - D Victor Killinger - D Brown - F Dood- F Kylrad Lahtinen - F Killinger - D Brown - F gorlab Letang - D Dood - F Marsh - D leafsman Lahtinen - F Dood - F Killinger - D S76 Top Users First pick Second pick Third Pick OrbitingDeath Lahtinen - F Graves - F Mitchell - D Dasboot Lahtinen - F Mitchell - D Bob - F Juice Lahtinen - F Mitchell - D Krishna - G Esso2264 Dood - F Hylands - F Davis - D Patrik Tallinder Vikingstad - F Hylands - F Davis - D Let’s all point and laugh at the poor folks in Doomsday's filler group. Must suck to suck. But charting out the picks made by each user and in each round, you get this table: Round 1 Round 2 Round 3 F 18 12 11 D 2 8 8 G 0 0 1 In the first round, 18 out of 20 users picked a forward first. The two exceptions were in S77, where Erik Killinger and Alex Letang were selected first, and they were 2nd and 4th overall in that season respectively - so really not a bad decision if you’re confident in landing a top 5 player, and also confident in your ability to find a top forward with your next few picks. Keep in mind, you have to select 3 forwards and 2 defensemen though. In all other situations where forwards were selected first, the forwards selected by these teams ended up top 3 in VHFL forwards. There’s a significantly higher emphasis on selecting a top forward with your first pick, as high end forwards are difficult to come by. There are usually only 2 or 3 forwards that land in the top 20 of overall skaters, and our top 20 users have prioritized those forwards with the first pick of their drafts. Exactly half of them (10) also went back to selecting a forward with their 2nd pick as well. Common names here have been Groovy Dood in S77, Chris Hylands in S76, and Onde Sandstrom/Taro Tsujimoto in S78. The third round pick is usually one of the more crucial picks, and also similar to round 2 where most people go back to selecting a forward. Top scorers such as Robin Winter in S78, Grooby Dood in S77, Jim Bob in S76 have all been selected with the third pick of a user. One person, Juice, took Ajay Krishna with his third pick in S76, but also had Latrell Mitchell and Mikko Lahtinen with his first two picks to bail out that decision :P. Krishna was a top goalie that season anyways, so I suppose we can let it slide. The emphasis on forwards is undeniably clear. Out of the 60 picks made by the top 20 users in the past 4 seasons, over 66% of those picks are forwards. People know that they need to get the best forwards possible if they want a chance to win in fantasy. Defensemen are, as I like to say in Moscow, “a dime a dozen” simply because there are always 20-25 defensemen who will outscore the 5th best forward - VHFL-wise. The people who do select defensemen in the 2nd or 3rd rounds get it right though. They consistently selected defensemen who landed top 5 in the final rankings. Doomsday’s filler so far in S79 has both the #1 and #2 skater, in Letang and Nilsson. That kind of power can make up for a weak 3rd forward. And Vaakanainen, his 1st overall pick, was certainly the weak 3rd forward in the group as he went on to select Red Lite, the top forward in VHFL right now. But again, the argument here is that Nilsson shouldn’t be the 2nd best VHFL player just because he’s on a horrible defensive team that gives up plenty of shots against, that he can just stand in the way of. --- This piece is already around 2,000 words, so I’ll save my “solutions” article for another day. I’ve thought of a few different ways to fix fantasy, but I’d love to hear suggestions from the community in case someone can think of something that I haven't. I’m happy to run testing on any kind of idea! --- TLDR for you bums who skipped to the end: VHFL is broken because scoring favors the best defensemen on bad/average teams who block shots. Defensemen as a whole score way too much, with even average defensemen scoring up to 60-70 more fantasy points than the average forward. Therefore, VHFL success depends on how well a user can follow the meta of selecting the best forwards with their first few picks, and simply picking passable defensemen and an average goalie to finish out their team, since the top 20 skaters in every season have like 17 defensemen in them anyways. I think it's an issue, and will propose solutions to fix this down the road. If you have any thoughts, please comment them . (2.4k+ words, 4 weeks claim)

smh

Claim 2/2

New week, new presser! 1. We just acquired Aurelien Moreau from Toronto for an S80 1st and S81 2nd. What are your thoughts on the trade? 2. We've been building this team up for the past few seasons, do we have all the pieces we need to be contenders? If no, what position do you think we need to bolster? 3. We've chatted a lot about Monopoly in the locker room recently. What are some of your favorite games to play with teammates? 4. For the third or fourth season in a row, we have a rookie in the top 3 of league-wide rookie scoring. Why do rookies just do so well in Moscow? 5. Assess your performance so far through this season. Are you meeting your expectations? What do you want to be doing better in? 6. How are you doing today? How's life going? Drop a sentence or two about what's going on in your life, I want to know what you're up to

MOSCOW MOSCOW MOSCOW

As I said during our trade chats, Toronto's STHS luck really has been some of the worst I've seen in my time in the VHL, maybe even worse than what Riga went through a season or two ago. It's bittersweet to get the complete overhaul going, but you had a lot of players in their primes to move, starting with quite the overall haul. Your S80 and 81 drafts will be very interesting to see!

Thanks to @Peace for the negotiations, I appreciate your patience and admire your respect for your players' wishes. Best of luck with the retool! @Frank Welcome to Moscow my man! Thrilled to get a young defenseman to boost our defense corps as we look to turn this young team into contenders. Let's get to work!

Hey @Ledge and Dairy thanks for my 1k react . Only fitting an old player of mine gives it to me!

you said it, not me I can support this! nah that's ok vhl circa S79 ayo Can you tell them to take @N0HBDY back, he's come back from France and is dropping hella PIMS. We do not want him anymore

congrats!