fromtheinside

There was a time long ago when I wanted to try and think of a system to incorporate VHL player cards as a whole ecosystem into the league, but nobody would go for it. I think it coulda been super cool though.

oh man I was so surprised to see this!! I am so honored to be held in such regard When I made my first gen (Scotty Kaberle) I went through a lot of ups and downs, but ultimately I landed in Malmo and became part of an amazing core there, and we were lucky enough to go all the way to capture a league title. It was such a great run with top notch people, and I honestly thought that was going to be the peak for my VHL experience. When I recreated as Scotty Sundin, I was still very driven to be a power user in the league. This was at a time that the league had just rolled out the VHLE, and I was determined I was going to get enough TPE to skip the E, and go directly to the VHL and play 9 seasons as a pro. My other goal was to be a double 1st overall player. I was lucky enough to accomplish both of those goals when @JeffD took me 1st overall in the S83 Draft. I had a ton of respect for Jeff and I vowed to him that as long as he was running Chicago, I would stay there and play for him. He built an incredible core of young players with me, @Shindigs and @MubbleFubbles. Those two lads were both top notch individuals, and although we never went on a deep run together, I still am fond of that core Jeff had built. Eventually, Jeff decided to step down from Chicago. This really put me at a crossroads. Eventually it was announced that @badcolethetitan and @Masu Chan were going to take over in Chicago. Truthfully, I remember feeling a bit anxious at first because these guys were both from the newer wave of users that came after me, and I didn't know how'd they treat me or what their plans were. I distinctly remember talking to my friend @MexicanCow123 about this and he reassured me that Cole was good people, and that I would be in good hands. And honestly he couldn't have been more right. Cole immediately began DMing me and we quickly built a very good rapport with each other. It was kind of a tricky situation because I know from a strategic standpoint he probably wanted to trade me for some value... but I told him I really preferred to play out my time in Chicago. He honored my decision and never made me feel bad about it or anything. Him and Masu were so easy to transition to and they immediately started building a good culture in our team LR. Who could forget the late nights of claiming our waifus on Discord!! lmao The ninth season is the one that usually gets the attention because its such an anomaly. I guess if anything Sundin can be a good case study to show that it IS indeed viable to carry out a nine season career. But I'll wrap this up and just say thank you to all my peers and anyone I've been in contact with during my time in Chicago. I got to meet some really great people during my time there and even now as someone who doesn't have an active player, Chicago is where I call my VHL home. Go Phoenix!

Telk was the best. Great dude.

congrats to all three of you! Hopefully you guys can elevate Chicago to a championship level franchise! I'll be rooting for yall

Was a fun final season for Sundin... great way to ride off into the sunset. Congrats Toronto on the Cup.

1: When this season ends, which player will lead the Phoenix in points? I think Legacy Gaming could be in for a solid season so I will go with them! 2: If you could vote for a VHLM or VHLE team to replace a VHL team, which team(s) would you choose? Well I wouldn't replace any of the VHL teams, but I would certainly axe any of the VHLE teams to bring back the Yukon Rush and put them back in the M. 3: Which NHL player deserves more respect? I think Michael Bunting should get some more respect. The referees literally are biased in how they officiate against him and its kinda fucked up lol. 4: It's a close race in the NHL for the Calder. Which rookie do you think will win it in the end? I think it's gonna be Bedard but Luke Hughes might give him a run for his money if he stays on the Devils PP1. 5: Here's a spoopy question. Should neckguards be mandatory in the NHL? Nah. I mean, RIP the guy who died in the UK, but we don't need to start bubble wrapping players now. It was a tragic accident, but it's a freak accident that isn't likely to be replicated. There are risks of playing a competitive game that involves putting blades on your feet, it is what it is. 6: What was your best costume? Assuming you went trick-or-treating. I was a mummy one year and that was pretty dope. Also dressed up as the Red Ranger from Power Rangers the one year. Good times lol. 7: What was your favorite candy to get when trick-or-treating? I guess if I had to make a tier list, Peanut Butter Cups are alone in S tier... Mars bars and Crunchie bars both in the A tier. Or the rare people that would give out cans of pop were also god tier but those were rare. 8: What is your favorite scary movie? Honestly, I've never been big into the horror genre. I just can't mentally get into them. I enjoyed the original Saw I suppose if that counts as a scary movie lol.

Pumped that I can wind down the final season of my career with Chicago and don the C one last time. We got a great young core here and it will only get better over time!

1: The Chicago Press Conference has returned! There are plenty of new faces around the team so why don't we start by figuring out jersey numbers for the season? Which number would you like your player to wear while playing here? I will stick with 13 for Sundin since thats Mats Sundin's number IRL. But if someone else has their hearts set for it, 15 is cool too! 2: Which NHL team is your favorite and why? I am a diehard Leafs fan. Grew up watching the Leafs with my grandpa every Saturday night on HNIC. He has long since passed away but I burden the fandom for him lol. 3: Which attribute do you intend to focus on this season? Skating and Scoring but I am just trying to survive my last season after that depreciation hit. Hopefully I can finish strong! 4: Which song would you choose as your goal song? The chorus of Rumbling from AoT lmao. Definitely a banger! Or if we are going non-weeb route, Final Countdown by Europe. 5: What would be your goal celebration? Always been a fan of the Teemu Selanne celly from when he broke the rookie goal record on the Jets. If you don't know, He took his one glove off, tossed it up in the air, then used his stick as a gun pretended to shoot the glove out of the air hahah its fucking great, check it out. 6: Scotty Sundin is 1 goal away from setting the franchise record for goals in a Phoenix uniform. How many games do you expect it to take for him to achieve this milestone? 73 games. lmao thanks for shouting me out in the PC!! Hopefully game one and it helps the team get the dub!! 7: What is your favorite animal? Love me a cute bunny rabbit. They are friggen adorable with their chubby cheeks and floppy ass ears. God bless em. 8: What is your favorite color? Been a big green guy, always have been, always will be.

1: Is there anything you've learned about your character that you'll use for your next player (Whenever it is that you decide to make a new player) No not really lol, this is my second player and I am almost at the end of his career. I feel like I've learned everything there is to learn in that regard. 2: If the Phoenix had to change their colors, which colors would you think would work best with our logo? It's a phoenix, so I feel like you kind of have to incorporate fire colours, so like orange, red and yellow. I feel like you are kinda limited thematically there. 3: In Rock, Paper, Scissors, which are you most likely to choose. None, it's not about probability, it's about mentally dominating your opponent. People got it all wrong. 4: Which PWHL team will you most likely cheer for as the league prepares for its first season? Lol I ain't watching that shit haha. Maybe that makes me a dickhead, but I don't have any interested in watching women's hockey outside of maybe Team Canada in the Olympics. I get everyone's all about giving female pro sports a chance and equality, but to me the product just isn't comparable. Same as WNBA.. it's been around for decades and nobody watches... 5: Do you believe more NHL stars should take discounts on their contracts in order to win? I think "should" is a tough way to word it. I think players should prioritize what matters to them. So I am a Leafs fan.. the top 4/5 guys make all the money and handcuff what the org can spend on the rest of the roster. They've all made plenty of money already off their prior contracts and the core has been together now for awhile and they've accomplished nothing. Now they are all approaching free agency again the next couple of years and its time to decide what matters more to them. Like Nylander thinks he should get 10 mil a year... okay well have fun playing somewhere else then, because obviously the Leafs can't afford to do that. You can take 8.5 mil a year and still never have to think about money in your life, and doing that would help the team compete. But nope, ego is too big for that. If they all sacrificed just A LITTLE, it would benefit the team so much but none of them wanna do it really. Morgan Reilly is the closest thing to a good contract they have, god bless his soul. 6: Which Movie do you wish had a sequel? Overall, I want less sequels and more original movies. But nothing comes to mind right now. I am drawing a blank. 7: On a similar topic do you have a show, game, or movie that you really enjoy and think it's underrated? Hmmm underrated things. I think the movie The Butterfly Effect is pretty underrated. It's one of my favs and I don't think alot of people have seen it. Underrated anime.... Assassination Classroom probably. It's legendary. OH!! Tower of God is pretty underrated too. I can't wait til they put another season of that out. 8: Best anime opening? If we are talking purely on the songs themselves... oh god theres so many... Rumbling- AOT Blue Bird- Naruto Gurange- Demon Slayer Black Rover- Black Clover unravel- Toyko Ghoul Kaikai Kitan-JJK Rise- Tower of God I really could go on forever lol...if you want just checkout my anime playlist

1: Which player do you think has been Chicago's MVP so far? For sure it's been our goalie. Jeffy has been holding it down in between the pipes this season. He's giving us a shot each and every night out there. 2: At this point, how many points (For goalies it'll say wins) do you expect to end this season with? Currently I am sitting at 50, so I think 80 is a realistic goal to finish the season. Anything more than that would be a nice bonus. 3: What is your bold NHL prediction for this season? Hmm how bold do I have to be here.. how about this, I think Ottawa AND Buffalo make the playoffs this season. Is that bold enough? 4: What was the longest you've played a single Be A Pro career in NHL games? Probably like 3 full seasons and playoffs before losing interest lol. It was never my goto game mode. 5: If you got a new pet, what would you name it? Not a big pet guy tbh. But I'd get like a bunny and name it something stupid, like Cat. 6: Which language do you wish you could speak? Japanese, obviously. If not Japanese, Indian or Cantonese seem like good languages to pick up. 7: What is your favorite band? Linkin Park has been and will always be my favourite band. I grew up on them. RIP Chester 8: Aside from Game Of Thrones, which series has the most disappointing ending? I know Game of Thrones wasn't ideal, the pacing of the final season was fucked, but I agreed with how a lot of the characters ended up. But the path to getting there was just so fucked lol. But to answer the question, Lost and Dexter were both so much worse than Game of Thrones. Dexter was just laughably bad, but Lost was the most unfulfilling and disappointing end to a series and it ain't close.

the good ol VHLM Power Rankings. love to see it.

1: Might've been better to ask this during the first week, but what is your preferred jersey number and why? Growing up i was always a big fan of number 15. It was Tomas Kaberle's number plus my birthday is on the 15th so yeah kinda always stuck with it. 2: If you were to have your custom team in the VHL, what would you name it? I would name it the Yukon Rush and it would be in the VHLM. #BringBackYukon, what a travesty the VHL committed when Yukon got Thanos snapped out of existence just to serve the E. Still pisses me off to this day lol. 3: Which attribute do you plan on focusing on this season? Probably just banking all season now to fight that nasty depreciation of my last season. But DEF and SC are probably the top priorities. 4: At this point in the season, do you see your player winning any awards? Still a lot of games left! Well first off, the team's success is the most important thing. I really am happy to see us getting off to a respectable start this season. As for awards, I'm not really chasing AWARDS per se, but I do kind of wanna go for some of the all-time records in the Chicago Phoenix record book. I am getting pretty close! 5: If you could appear on any ongoing show, which would you choose? Hmm that's a good question. Lol maybe The Bear... if you don't know what that show is, it's a show about a guy trying keep alive his dead brother's restaurant. It resonates with me alot since I am a line cook, and the details in the show are so spot on. I could see myself working for Carmy. If you have ever seen Shameless, the guy who plays Lip is the main character, I highly recommend it, it's great. Now if we went the anime route, I'd probably wanna be in Luffy's crew in One Piece. He's going to be King of the Pirates after all. 6: Who is your favorite YouTube creator? If you have one. Ah geez I go through fazes. Obviously being a Leafs fan I am a Steve Dangle guy. Outside of that I really like NorthernLion and Asmongold. Both of them are more Twitch streamers who take their VODs and use it as YouTube content, but it's all the same shit really lol. Also love me some Uncle Roger. 7: If you were an animal, which animal would you be? I'd definitely be a big old fat bunny rabbit with big ol floppy ears just mucking grass all day and shitting all over the place, living my best life. For sure. 8: What is a scallop? Scallops are a type of seafood kinda. I'm allergic to shellfish so I can't really compare taste, but the texture and how you cook them are comparable to shrimp kinda. You wannna pan-sear them, and arroser them (you melt down your hot liquid, tilt the pan on angle so the liquid is pooled in the bottom, with your scallops at the top of the pan, then continuously keep spooning the hot butter/oil/whatever over top of the scallops over and over)

1: The season starts this week! Are you excited? Yeah it's an exciting season around here. We are rolling out a brand new team pretty much and it should be cool to see how all the new faces perform. Obviously we have tempered expectations as we are kicking off a rebuild essentially, but there's still lots to be excited for. 2: Aside from Chicago. Which team do you think has the best branding in the VHL? I think DC Dragons and Malmo Nighthawks both have some pretty sick drip. The DCD logo is probably the best design, but I love the Malmo colours so much. 3: How many points do you expect from your player this season? I think purely from the amount of minutes I will playing, that 80 points is pretty realistic. I'm hoping to be a point per game player this season, so anything over 72 is solid. 4: No promises or anything, but for future signature/graphic reference, which NHL player do you want your VHL player to resemble? Well my character is based off of Mats Sundin, so that's the obvious choice. If I had to pick someone more modern, maybe Anze Kopitar as he is a veteran center just like my player is. 5: Are you going to play NHL 24? Why? Lol oh boy, don't get me started. Fuck no I'm not getting NHL 24. Granted, there's still time for them to announce some new game modes or whatever, but we all know that's not happening. The EA NHL franchise has become such a joke. I feel bad for the devs that have to make the game. EA gives them so little resources because the NHL franchise makes them basically nothing in comparison to Madden and FIFA. Every year is pretty much just slight gameplay tweaks, that usually end up getting patched in the first month anyways. The game is just an empty husk with its only purpose to push out subpar HUT content. If HUT was done better maybe I'd be more into it, but they can't even get that right. Look at MLB The Show's Diamond Dynasty and how much content they push out, not to mention you can have a competitive team for free. Speaking of MLB The Show... NHL's big reveal and selling point this year is that it's cross-platform... of course it's not cross-gen, so it's still limited. MLB The Show has been cross platform and cross gen for 2 years now and you can literally play with anyone you want... NHL still can't figure it out. OK end of rant lmao. I should claim this shit as a Media Spot. 6: Which NHL player do you think will have the most goals this season? Probably McDavid or Matthews. Not an exciting answer, but that's who I'd bet on if I were to place a wager. 7: Do you have a favorite quote from a movie or show? If so, what is it? There's probably a ton of them but Thanos from Avengers Endgame has a good one. "It nearly killed me, but the work is done. It always will be. I am... inevitable." Then there is a ton of them from D2: The Mighty Ducks that I love.. such as: "2 minutes for.... ROPING? That's a new one on me!" and "IT'S KNUCKLEPUCK TIME!" and of course "THE QUACK ATTACK IS BACK JACK!!". What a great movie. 8: What is your favorite beverage? I know people love their booze, but chocolate milk will always be my S-tier beverage. Nestea is a close second, and that's NESTEA, not fucking Brisk Tea. If you give me a Brisk Tea we will have serious fucking issues.

It's an honour to wear the C for the Phoenix. I am excited to finish off my career in Chicago and usher in the next wave of Phoenix players! Thank you so much for this privilege.

1: There are a lot of new faces around this organization. To help with introductions, what's one thing you'd like your team to know about you? Hello I am fromtheinside, and my player is Scotty Sundin. I am planning on being a career member of the Phoenix and currently have two seasons left before retirement. I've been pretty distant with the VHL in recent memory, but I am going to try and make a decent effort to be more involved a bit more again. I am excited to see what Cole and Masu decide to do with the Chicago franchise and I think we are in great hands. 2: Who is/was your favorite NHL player? Growing up I have had a few different favs. Gilmour and Sundin when I was younger. About 10 or so years ago I was a big James Reimer guy. Nowadays I don't really know. I guess Marner is my favourite Leaf. I am hoping to snag Connor Bedard in my keeper fantasy hockey league, if I can manage that then Im gonna be a big Bedard fan haha. 3: Which player does your player model their game after, if any? Lol easy question, Mats Sundin of course! Mats was a big strong center who was just so good all-around and was a quiet leader. That's who I model my player off of. 4: If you had a custom goal song, which one would you choose? Well seeing how we are Chicago, I guess the Chelsea Dagger theme would be fitting for our club. For me personally though... hmmm whats a good anime theme... lets go with RUMBLING from AoT lmao. 5: Which attribute do you think is the most important in the VHL? DEF or SC for sure. I think defense is pretty impactful in a lot of different ways, so I can only choose one, it would be that one probably. 6: Is there any VHL player you'd want to play with one day? It's been awhile since I played with Boom. Always a top option for me. Pretty excited to play with Laine on a team finally, never thought we would end up together anywhere. There's lots of people Id enjoy being teammates with. 7: If you had a lightsaber, which color would it be? Red obv. They look the coolest and they bring that Sith energy that I am all about lol. 8: What is your favorite videogame? Tough question. There's a ton of good options. I played a ton of Counter Strike and World of Warcraft growing up, so those games are special to me. I really enjoyed Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2, those are GOAT'd for me. Starfield comes out in a couple weeks and I have high hopes for that game, maybe it will be one of my favs.