Yo if you ever want to teach in Doha, Qatar let me know, I will set up an interview for you. The Canadian school there is always looking for teachers to bring over. My mom has been there for the past 3 years and is the Head of School. I visited in 2016, such a cool spot! Would love to go back next year for the Fifa World Cup.
Warsaw Predators Centreman, Dakota Lamb, is now in his 6th season removed from his draft, and he has enjoyed his career up to this point. This season, he has 16 goals and 41 assists for 57 points, helping the Predators pace the European Conference with a 27-9-5 record. This has almost been par for the course over the last few seasons, with Warsaw being perennial contenders.
However, once again, Lamb has a contract ending at the end of this season. Although he has tested free agency twice, and re-upped with his draft team both times, he knows there is always a slight possibility that a team could swoop in. Nonetheless, that is on the backburner for now as the Preds try to finally take home the VHL's most prestigious award - the Continental Cup.
If this is the last season in Warsaw for Lamb, he has enjoyed an amazing career with the team. After being taken 10th Overall in the S73 VHL Draft, he has potted 155 goals, 245 assist, for 400 points in 329 games. Warsaw is and will continue to be his 2nd home, but there is always a nagging thought in the back of his mind that he misses his parents back home in Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada. He told us that he would not like to make any more comments to the media on his contract status, as all the focus should be on the team, his teammates, and the games ahead.
I like the singular focus of black and orange/red, builds a fantastic image that leaves no doubt what kind of mood you're trying to set. Cool logo too! 9/10
I'm happy with what I got. Forward is our weakest position group and Kaprizov has picked it up lately--we've got some good potential on our hands, plus a 1st.
plus only one team was interested so there's the current trade market for you
I've been meaning to do this post for a long time, and what better time to do it than theme week.
Now that I'm allegedly part of the elderly gentlemen's gang, I'm more than happy to provide insight to what happens behind closed doors.
You've heard it before, and you'll hear it again here: The Board of Governors doesn't do as much as you think. But, in this case, we did a shitload work. The VHLE was, for the most part, designed by the BoG. Any complaints you have regarding the rules, structure, or otherwise, can be forwarded to @GustavMattias.
We did some serious work. Also, rip beav.
The average member may not know, but there's been a major problem brewing behind the scenes for many seasons. On January 20, in the midst of S76, former commissioner Beaviss brought the "Roster Room Potential Issues" to the Board, admin, and staff.
Privately, GMs had been complaining about a flat salary cap and overstuffed rosters for a long time. That led to a massive expansion in S73 with four new teams added. But still, the issue persisted.
Calgary GM Jubis publicly lays out the roster issue problem, allowing members insight into the discussions happening at GM meetings.
The BoG discussion began in earnest when former Calgary Wranglers GM @Jubis shared his math on roster sizes for S76. Turns out, the rosters are very, very full. The ideal VHL team runs a 6-4-2 roster, with two full lines of forwards, two full pairings of defense, and two goalies. This is the optimal balance between ice time: any more players, and no one plays enough minutes; any less players and teams get accused of manipulating rosters to get their star players more ice time. Only one team in the VHL, even after expansion, had a 6-4-2 roster. That, my friends, is a problem.
Of course, this BoG thread started with Beaviss pitching expansion. The dude loves expansion more than egg salad and kranch sandwiches. By S76, Beavis and expansion was a meme, but the numbers presented by Jubis and Beav made the board seriously discuss another round of growth. In preliminary talks, more than a few members were even on board with a smaller, two team expansion. However, our wise old man (and future VHLE commissioner) @Victor dropped this nugget in the fourth post of 748 replies:
Victor: the radical
This truth bomb set the table for the months of discussion to come. The philosophy of the VHLE has been the same since the beginning: give the players who are too good for the VHLM but getting absolutely trounced in the VHL somewhere meaningful to play.
We're fortunate to have a collection of VHL/M GMs on the board. These experts on their respective teams were able to give context and insight into the numbers dropped by Beav and Jubis. Through the first few weeks, and again every month or so, the Governors were not entirely convinced that there was a roster room issue. Much was debated about who should be counted in those numbers, what the development timeline looks like for various types of prospects, and predicting sizes and quality of future draft classes. Before even considering expansion, we needed a clear picture on who was actually here in our league.
The first group that was skewing our numbers were inactive players. There were inactive players taking up valuable and limited roster spots from low-earning active players. Like the VHLM did, the VHL needed to develop a way to cull inactives. That change was fleshed out over the course of months, and culminated in a rule change beginning S78. Now, teams are only allowed to carry ONE inactive player per season. With a finite number of VHL roster spots, we cannot afford our active members to be stuck behind inactive players, no matter how much better the IA player is.
See, we value you active members!
The other problem with the roster size numbers is that every player was treated equally. This is not true when we are discussing earning. Max earning players will reach the VHL faster and stay there longer. Non-max earners (for example, clickers) are still valued members of our community and cannot be discounted. We knew we had to deal with this roster size problem in a way that works and engages our max earners, mid earners, and clickers.
Our number genius @rjfryman and his ruby programming skills provided us with weekly TPE chart detailing how many people were in each TPE bracket, sorted by age. This data allowed us to discuss whether there actually was a problem (there was) and assist in setting the VHLM/E TPE caps.
Less than 100 TPE Update: 17
100 to 199 TPE Update: 67
200 to 250 TPE Update: 32
250 to 299 TPE Update: 11
300 to 399 TPE Update: 46
400 to 499 TPE Update: 34
500 to 599 TPE Update: 30
600 to 699 TPE Update: 28
700 to 799 TPE Update: 20
800 to 899 TPE Update: 13
900 to 999 TPE Update: 9
Over 1000 TPE Update: 21
Lost in my math: 0
SEASON BREAK DOWN: {70=>3, 71=>15, 72=>26, 73=>30, 74=>43, 75=>62, 76=>48, 77=>57, 78=>44}
Not sure when this is from, but this is what RJ's updates look like.
Once we definitively identified a real problem, took measures to ease pressure by culling IAs, and collected updating data on player demographics, we could realistically start talking about creating a new league.
In order to create a third league, we had to discuss the philosophy of our two existing leagues. The VHL remains largely untouched, but the VHLE drastically alters the purpose and structure of the VHLM. We were cognizant of recreates wanting to get back to the VHL as soon as possible, and didn't want an extra league to slow those max-earning, experienced members down. The VHLM was reimagined as a 'landing pad' for first-gens, or a 'junior hockey' for recreates. Like the VHLM today, the new focus continues to be on development and retention. Success in the VHLM is graduating players to the VHLE. There were many pages of heated discussion about nuking the VHLM draft and moving to an all-waivers roster building mechanism. It was argued that this would reduce the ability for GMs to go for scorched-earth rebuilds like we see today, but we worried about VHLM GMs having little to no actual managing duties. Ultimately it was decided to keep all VHL/E/M drafts.
If the VHLM is meant to be a training grounds, the VHLE was the first real battleground in a VHL career. The E League, as we lovingly referred to it before it was officially named, would be a competitive league with the goal of winning chips. We envisioned a KHL-style rival league, where pros would come over to the VHL when they were properly developed. There were some voices that wanted older, regressed players to be able to go play Season 7 or 8 in the VHLE, Jagr-style, but that didn't come to fruition.
It was important that the VHLE was independent from all other leagues. We settled on 6 teams, based on the demographic data from RJ, and that effectively ruled out AHL-style affiliation. Six teams with prospects of 16 VHL clubs was not going to work. We thought about prospect-sharing teams, like the Chicago Wolves, but the cons outweighed the pros of that system. Like the VHLM, considering the GM experience was important. We want VHLE GMs to have agency over their own team - we wouldn't want a contender to lose half their team to call-ups in the midst of a playoff push. The VHLE is fully independent from other leagues, with the only caveat that all players are also VHL-drafted.
Once concern that we absolutely wanted to avoid was the EFCA-style manipulation of the uncapping system. Under no circumstances did we ever want anyone to actively stop earning TPE. I know I got to the 199 cap in the EFL and then completely disengaged because it was disadvantageous for me and the team to earn a single point more. The soft/hard cap was discussed at length, and really, what we have in the VHLM is a pretty sweet system. Like the M, earners in the E will stop applying TPE at 399, but will continue to earn and bank for the rest of the season. Once you earn TPE # 400, you are automatically going up to the big leagues next season. A player could choose to stop at 399 and start earning in the offseason again, but we plugged that loophole. Like now, your career clock starts when you are VHL drafted. If you choose to manipulate the system to get an extra E season (why?!?!?), you will be penalized in the grand scheme of things by having a shorter career in the VHL.
Speaking of career length, it was a pretty big change to add in a ninth season. For 99.99% of players, the VHL career will still be 8 seasons. If, by some absolute miracle, some player eclipses 399 TPE before their VHL draft (or the offseason cut off date, whatever), then they would skip the VHLE entirely and have a 9 season VHL career. We do not want that to be the expectation or the goal: if we let everyone skip the VHLE, why would we even bother with the hassle of creating it? Extending the career clock meant that everyone would have a fun, competitive season in the minors AND a regular ol' 8 season career. To further encourage participation in the VHLE, we made regression in Season 9 really, really mean. You can use a Jagr to protect one stat, but the 5% (?) overall regression can't be stopped. A 9-season career likely involves a weak rookie season (being a lower TPE than your peers who marinated in the VHLE for a season) and likely a weak ninth season, crippled by regression. It's possible to skip the VHLE, but you shouldn't do it and you shouldn't want to. Finally on this note: literally one person from the recent draft class was eligible for this. There are recent seasons where zero people would have met the criteria.
Recap: we know there's a problem, and we know how to fix it. We've thought of most loopholes, and came up with some neat creative solutions to plug them. Now, we need to package this idea together and turn it into something real.
We had been calling it the "E League" (it always made me think of the NBA's G-League) and that worked for the time, but wasn't going to be an official name. Branding is always a highly subjective exercise, and there was heated debate about what the league should be called. One unnamed board member was so incredibly deadset on calling it the Europe Victory League (EVL) that he created a poll to decide the name, lost, and created another poll to make sure no one wanted to change their vote and call it EVL. It would just be too hilariously fitting to have the Victator running the EVL. It'd make for excellent canon, with the rival league across the pond playing heel to the good guys VHL, but in practice it wasn't very realistic. We ended up keeping the branding consistent with the other leagues, and choosing VHLE over VEHL and EVL.
In the Best people here but socially distanced, we always have to consider the rainbow flavoured unicorns.
To continue the branding train: I don't think I ever noticed all the VHLM teams were in North America? With all our M teams on one side of the pond, it made perfect sense to put the new league on the other. As a bonus, the names and logos of all of the European VHLM teams that used to exist were available. Recycling names would be a fun exercise in nostalgia, while also reducing costs of commissioning new logos.
So, that's some insight into the going-ons of the Board of Governors. This was probably one of the biggest projects the BoG has worked on ever, and I'm really proud of what we've come up with. I joined the process in mid-March: it had been going on long before I got there, and continued long after. Six months, 30 pages, 748 posts later, the BoG actually did something!
So, to those who have known me in the past, they know I used to run a team called Le Chic de Paris on the IHL. I wanted to try something a tad different (something that had technically more effort from my part), so this is my shot at it with La Revolution de Paris.
@Sonnet finally decided to follow through on testing out the podcast game, and I was honored enough to have been his first podcast pal! We stray down a lot of tangents, but we had to keep it spicy.
Sorry about the random points where my mic got super quiet. I don't know how to fix that shit, so you just have to deal with it. I also am too lazy to add music. Our voices are good enough audio.
I actually included checkpoints for this episode:
5:15 - pbe v vhl & earth
17:53 - max earning, questions about the meta, and point task grading
23:06 - (mostly GM) job pay
30:21 - VHLE
~46 - down with UPS but especially fuck fedex
59:42 - abrupt topic change to PALINDROMES
1:03:47 - VHL logo review
run time: 93 minutes, both of us are eligible for 3 weeks of claims
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v.2 got a reaction from bigAL in Life moves pretty fast...
v.2 got a reaction from Da Trifecta in Stockholm Vikings logo
v.2 got a reaction from diacope in BERLIN IRON BABY!
v.2 got a reaction from qripll in BERLIN IRON BABY!
v.2 got a reaction from Victor in Annual 40+ win goalie prediction
