What is This:
I recorded all player stats in an excel spreadsheet from S49 to S69, sorted by season so that we can look at each season as it's own individual entity. I was planning on at least going until S30 with this study (the last recorded index I saw we had access to), but all of our index data from S48 and beyond is horribly formatted, and I am not going to spend all the time it takes to map that data. If anyone would like to take on that painstakingly boring task, I would be happy to use that information to further my research.
Looking at the goals scored per season, I can assure you that blue team did not rig the sim to start inflating goal totals starting in Season 65. Instead, we simply have been increasing teams ever since then based on current league activity. Each era of teams has seen a somewhat consistent amount of goals per season, with the largest gap in an era being the 8-team era where we saw about 1,400 goals in S58, and 1,800 goals in S62 (more on that historic season later).
The below graph shows total prorated goals each season, where I pretend like there was 12 teams throughout this entire 20 season era (check my math to see what I'm talking about). As you can see, S62 was a historically high scoring season at 2,700 pro-rated goals scored, and S54 was our lowest scoring season at a little under 2,000 pro-rated goals scored. I would love for a VHL historian @Victor, to explain his thoughts on why these seasons saw such an extreme variance.
As you can see below, there has been a sharp drop off in number of high goal and points scorers starting in S66 and up to now. I have two theories on this, one being the more teams we add the more players who do decent overall, but less clear high-end players. Additionally, the league has been extremely competitive lately, and with less crappy teams to beat up on the top scorers (and league scoring in general) will be down.
Hopefully this data comes in handy in comparing eras for hall of fame voting in the future. I also like the idea of pro-rating the past seasons, as we can now easily compare scoring rates every season from now on to see if scoring league wide is up or down. I will also be posting my overall table at the bottom, in case some of you are numbers people who would rather see this information in numbers instead of chart form. Lastly, I will be posting the link to my spreadsheet here as well, as 20 seasons worth of scoring data could certainly be used for other articles, and I encourage you to do so! I will definitely be using this data for future articles, and if you would like me to take on another topic please comment below after subscribing and liking and sharing this post with 15 friends.
Very Important Last Point
Look at my post below this one (wasn't allowed to post any more pictures in the media spot) - I counted the number of non-bot players per season with more than 0 points scored and more than 0 minutes played. Our overall number of players is increasing each season and is way higher than in past seasons, while at the same time our number of high goal and point scorers is dropping. This means our percentage of players who accumulate high goal and point totals is way lower than it used to be in the past, making those top point scorers an extreme rarity now.