GMS: DON'T BE OFFENDED BY THIS. I'VE SEEN EVERY SINGLE TEAM DO IT AND IT'S JUST BECOME A NORM.
Fresh off the VHL sims, feeling pretty good about Zetterstrom's performance, I check out the M sims and am blindsided by blowout after blowout. I'm seeing games that are 7-3, 8-3, 7-2, and a couple 5-2s. But this isn't really the problem, just an example of aftermath. The issue with the VHLM right now is that teams are trying to win or tank. It's that simple. It was especially apparent at this draft, where teams like the Bulls and the Storm were just piling up picks; while teams like the Marlins struggled with no picks until the seventh round. After I watched that draft happening before my eyes, as Houston literally drafted half of the first round, I knew this season was going to be rough out of the gates. And it has been. The Bulls have only lost one game, and the Storm 3. They're doing that while the Aces and the Wild flounder, both with nine losses. The parody in this league is gone.
And then we take a look at the differences in roster sizes. Let's compare the the team with the most players, the Storm, versus the team with the least players, the Lynx.
We're looking at 22 players versus 9. That's a 13 player difference. And it's not one we can take lightly. This is not only affecting the crazy high scores of the games, but of the retention of members. If you can look closely, you'll see Sean Ramirez on Minnesota. He's an EFL guy, and so far he has claimed only base TPE and an affiliate PT. But what we're really going to look into is his ice time while playing for Minnesota.
Two minutes and 33 seconds. And he's not the only one. Jacob Oldenburger, Nathan Askarov, and Gary Tarantino ll also had under 3 minutes of ice time in the game. And let me tell you, this is not acceptable. Let's now look at the ice time a bot got on Ottawa:
The highest forward, which applies to Askarov and Ramirez, got more than 8 minutes of ice time, as well as limited power play and penalty killing time. That's a 6 minute difference, which, spread across a 72 game season, is a *pulls out calculator* 432 minute difference. Four hundred minutes. And that's not the worst of it
Then there's the defenceman issue. At the draft, there was a massive run on defencemen. They were getting prioritized over forwards more than one hundred TPE more than them. And, believe it or not, the teams like the Bulls and the Storm, hogged all the defencemen! You wanna know how many defencemen Minnesota has? Seven. Ottawa? ONE! This is not acceptable! A bot defencemen on Ottawa got 20 minutes of ice time! When a defencemen on Minnesota gets less than 3! There's no way this happens unless a team is trying to win, and another is trying to not.
So after all those statistics and comparisons, I'll finally get to the part where I recommend a rule change. What I want to come out of this is a player limit on VHLM rosters. Nothing too sharp, so that teams have to constantly trade guys to stay under, but one that prevents what happened with the Storm and the Bulls to happen. It will also prioritize the use of the Juniors, which have gone untouched so far because of the massive gaps on the rosters of non-contenders. The limit could also change by season, so if we get a massive recruitment wave, we can expand the limit. I'm welcome to criticism from GMs and commishes about this suggestion.
Just to nail it in: THE VHLM IS ABOUT RETENTION AND DEVELOPMENT, NOT WINNING AND TANKING. Apologies to any GMs I may have offended while doing this, just know that I have seen every single team do what I just described in the last couple seasons.
670 words. I just wrote a media spot.