CowboyinAmerica

Salad's bad for me though

Does bumping the topic because of board confusion get me recruiting points?

An idea for me next week perhaps

I think this upcoming Season 57 draft has the potential to be super interesting, but not for the common “so many active players” reason. To me, the main reason to be excited about upcoming draft is all about fit. By this point, many teams have some sort of semblance where they’re going, and are some sort of way along the path to rebuilding. There are no Cologne-esque blank slates here; even New York has an incoming goalie that robs them of that need, and Stockholm isn’t likely to invest in a highly drafted defenseman with Abbott in town. Plus, with so many of the GMs and draftees alike being established entities in the VHL, the best player available may not be a fit for cultural reasons. Chase Keller’s agent has been outspoken about playing for new franchises. Boner’s agent was a Vasteras lifer and may not like the franchise’s new location. Ko Kane and Launchpad McQuack may be off some boards due to past actions. And Norris Kensington is himself a general manager. It’s probably too early to assess the first round, but that’s what makes it fun. Here’s an early best guess, with the picks in order of current record. 1. New York Americans – C Chase Keller If Cologne were to win the lottery, then I wouldn’t expect Keller here. If Stockholm were to win, then I’d give Keller a 50/50 shot. Any other team, though, and I think the franchise center is a no brainer, and I imagine he’d certainly want to play for the franchise. 2. Stockholm Vikings – G Norris Kensington If Bushito thinks he can outearn everybody else in TPE, then why not double down and have both players on the same team? If he’s able to pick up Kensington in the draft – and it could be easy, if other GMs stay away in fear he’d focus on the other player – then having Abbott (or a recreate) and Kensington as two pillars moving forward makes a lot of sense. 3. Cologne Express – LW Phil Bennington This is where the fit begins to come into play. Even with right winger Birkir Hólm Guðnason in play, I believe that Cologne would like to pair him with another offensive weapon rather than go defense here. Plus, especially given the perception that some have of the Cologne franchise, the GM would be well served to bring a big, well-liked name into the fold. Bennington serves both purposes. 4. Calgary Express – G Shawn Brodeur About 24 hours ago, I would have put Jeff Gow here. Now, though, I think a GM comes in and wants to blow up the operation, and probably the first piece to go would be Jacob. That means a replacement franchise goalie would make a whole lot of sense, and Brodeur more than fits the bill. 5. Seattle Bears – D Boner Especially given the team’s surprising playoff run this season, I would expect Seattle to have an extremely busy offseason. Goalie Key Perought seems to be back to activity, but if something happens, Brodeur or a trade (Jacob? Mist4ke?) could be in play. Defense is another obvious hole with Fowll gone missing, and in this scenario, they have their pick of the bunch. Boner is excellent value at 5. 6. Riga Reign (via Helsinki) – D Casey Jones The Reign went for it all this past offseason, trading the third overall pick and bringing in a host of former Americans. But even so, the blue line doesn’t have much depth, especially given Digital’s pending retirement. Drafting Jones and pairing him with Bogdanovic would give them a stout blue line to continue this run for a few more years, it’s almost a no brainer. 7. Toronto Legion – D Keaton Louth To me, this would be one of the more interesting questions of the first round. The Legion have defensive depth, but Lane will likely be viewed as a bust and Ky is rather unpredictable. They also have their first line set in stone moving forward, but second liners Doughty and AK47 are at retirement. Ultimately, I have them taking Louth’s high upside to pair with Sokolov sooner rather than later, but Gow’s tempting. 8. New York Americans (via Riga) - LW Jeff Gow If you’re going to be building a team essentially from scratch, there are worse ways to do it than pairing up two former VHL GMs on the first line. Gow has looked engaged in this go-around, and being part of an up-and-coming New York team would give him more incentive to continue to be so. 9. Cologne Express (via Davos) – D Mats Johnsson Another reason it makes sense for Cologne to pass on a defenseman early in the first round? Because they’ll likely be able to pick up a good one with the Davos pick as well. Seeing Cologne double down on the Robbie strategy with Ko Kane would be extremely intriguing, but my guess is that they hedge their bets and take the safer Johnsson here to pair with Matthieu Bourdon. 10. Quebec City Meute – C Launchpad McQuack There are some teams where I wouldn’t even put McQuack on my board, but Quebec City isn’t one of them. Especially given the franchise’s winning ways and the respect afforded the GM, the boom-or-bust McQuack could thrive here. Plus, it would be a good fit for the team’s second line that is seeing Maximoff retire and Locke stop coming to practice.

Hmm. That's a very shitty game to lose.

Lose to Calgary, beat Quebec. Sure, makes sense.

Yeesh. Need those if we're going to stay ahead in the playoff race.

The issue with the cap is that it's always in flux as to whether it's too high/low. Back about 10 seasons ago good players were getting squeezed off teams because there were so many 750+ TPE players. Now, especially with Player 2s in the fold, there seems to be a lot more of that mid tier, which means more active players can squeeze on teams like Helsinki and Quebec. And add an Exceptional Player status on top of that, and I personally think the problem of parity gets even worse. Something I've been giving thought to recently that could be a change - why the $4M maximum for players in the first three years? For teams that are rebuilding like a Cologne, could spend that money on their actual future rather than random free agents (of which there are never many on the market anyway).

Wingate might be worth mentioning for Delicious too - could have picked him instead of trading for flame out Jax Barnstormer

Oooh, I like shorthanded goals

Sure, why not

Did it? Serious question, I don't remember any big free agents that the team got even during that time (though I wasn't around for a few seasons there so might be missing something)

True, but this only goes a certain amount. The stupidity of people refusing to sign with Stockholm because of its history astounds me.

I clearly trusted The Process too hard

161 Vikings vs Reign 162 Wranglers vs Meute 163 HC Dynamo vs Bears 164 Titans vs Express

3-1 Legion

Sigh. Knew it was coming sometime.

A win's a win, but probably shouldn't be taking New York to OT...

Honestly, I'll take a Forsberg hattie and getting to OT as a win

A shutout and another Laflamme goal, I'll take it!

Early Season Leads to Unexpected Playoff Race Game 130 marks a little over one-third of the way through Season 56, and as expected your six playoff teams are Quebec, Riga, Toronto, Davos, Helsinki and… Seattle? Wait, that must be a typo. Except that, through 26 games, the Bears are sitting with 25 points and the expected-to-be-playoff-bound Wranglers are only at 23 points. To be sure, this isn’t where either team expected to be at this point in the season, with Seattle gearing up for another lottery and Calgary making moves in the offseason to add veterans. And while there’s no indication that these trends will last, one-third of the season isn’t a flash in the pan either. So why is Seattle scorching (well, relatively) and Calgary down in the dumps? Here are three stats that can help explain the discrepancy: 1. That Strength of Schedule When looking at why one team is underperforming, the first place I always look is what teams they’ve played – just remember Davos’s weak start last year before storming back. And for certain, the Bears have played some easier teams. Seattle had a whopping 11 games against the bottom three teams in the standings thus far, totaling 42 percent of their total games. Calgary, meanwhile, has played those same three teams just 6 times. Once this evens out, Calgary is likely to pick up a few points in the standings just by nature of playing easier teams, and Seattle’s win percentage is going to get a lot worse when it has to play, say, an actual game against Davos. 2. Riding the Roller Coaster While the Wranglers are lower in the standings than the Bears, the team actually has a much better goal differential, sitting at -6 as compared to the Bears’ -16. The reason has everything to do with blowouts. The Bears have losses like 7-2 to Quebec, 5-1 to Helsinki and 5-1 to Riga dotting the schedule, games that you can never reasonably say Seattle should have won, and would not have won even if a few more pucks bounced their way. But while Calgary also has a few of those losses, they also have something Seattle doesn’t have many of: decisive wins against good teams, like 4-0 against Davos, 5-2 also against Davos, and 2-0 against Toronto. Those decisive wins makes me think that the bad losses will become less bad in time, while I can’t say the same for the Bears. 3. Past the First Line For a team that doesn’t have much TPE to go around, the Bears have surprisingly balanced scoring: Gabriel McAllister, Aleksei Federov, Asher Donovan, and Mattias Forsberg all have 25 points or more through 26 games, and each of those players sit in the top ten of their respective positions in point production. Calgary was expected to have much better production offensively given the TPE, but only center Marc-Alexandre Leblanc (29 points) and defenseman Felix Savard (also 29 points) sit above 20 points currently. The only other player in positional top tens is right winger Max von Hohenzollern, hanging on in 10th with 18 points. If Calgary truly wants to not only make the playoffs but give Toronto a run for its money, second line wingers like JourneyMan and The Process (1 point in 26 games!) will have to give the team at least something to work with. All in all, I expect Calgary to be a playoff team by the end of the season, assuming that all things stay the same with rosters (and even that isn’t a guarantee). Still, some of these trends are concerning, and while I don’t think the early start says much about Seattle, Calgary fans should probably be concerned.

I feel like this entire series was one big set-up to this line. (Love the piece btw)

Calgary moving to Vasteras, confirmed

Not the best set of games with Perought for this one, but still good pulling out the W