~*WARNING: This post got really long, and often disjointed, and I'm sorry. There's a much more concise TL;DR at the bottom.*~
Today was a pretty big shit pill for me to swallow as a VHLM GM.
As you may or may not have noticed, Anderson retired his goalie and re-created essentially just to maximize his chances to win a Founder's Cup this season. This was quite unfortunate for my Ottawa Lynx, as he was my first round draft pick, and I had him pegged to start this season and next, with him being ~2nd best goalie (and best active goalie) in the league by playoffs this season, and the best goalie across the board by next season. It would have been two solid competing seasons. I had a full plan for competing this season, but he never gave me a chance to share it, or even to communicate at all. Even if he didn't like the direction of the team, we maybe could have worked something out, whether it was a trade or me using my Rigging powers to turn him back into a forward or something. And if not, then he could have retired, and at least I tried. But I never got that chance, so that's particularly frustrating.
While I am upset with Anderson and would like nothing more than for this to somehow blow up in his face, this isn't meant to be a "Fuck that guy" thread, or a classic angry Jardy rant. Unforeseen shit screws over GMs all the time. And to be fair, with me working a new job, I haven't had a lot of time for the league the past three weeks, so I haven't been as on the ball as I could have. I meant to share my plans for the team in the LR last night yet, but by the time I showered and ate a very late supper, I couldn't keep my eyes open. Maybe if I scouted more before the draft instead of kind of winging it I may have found it would have been smarter to pick another skater up at 7th overall. Who knows.
But I digress, what this thread is really about is the VHLM as a whole.
The reason I became a VHLM GM in the first place was because I wanted to try to help it. I don't have the time anymore to take over as Jr. Commish and overhaul as I see fit though, so I tried to do it in my own way. People often talk about the VHLM being shitty and needing to change this and that to improve it. The consensus on the VHLM is that the goal, as a GM, isn't necessarily just to win, but to foster activity and create good vibes so that new members can get a positive introduction to the league and be integrated into the community.
And I agree with all of that to an extent. The VHLM did/does indeed to change this and that; I've always personally advocated a complete overhaul of the VHLM that includes a salary cap. And I do agree that the VHLM is a developmental league first, winning second.
However, I think being very competitive and winning is a big part of that positive experience for members, especially new ones. And you have a better chance of winning with veteran members and high TPE inactives. So my goal as a GM is to find a good a blend as I can with the restrictions of acquirable players in place. I obviously don't want exclusively veteran members and inactives just to rape the league, because then I'm essentially just spinning my wheels as far as the ultimate goal of being a VHLM GM is concerned.
And I think part of what spoils the VHLM is the ridiculous cyclical nature of it. The turnover of each team in the VHLM season to season is horrific. When I still simulated the VHLM, off-seasons were by far the worst time of my real life, as moving every single player in the league around (especially when you're less familiar with who they are and who they used to and currently belong to) is a tedious nightmare. But besides being shitty for Higgins, it's just shitty in general. How ridiculous is it that, in a (then) 8 team league, two teams have maximum legal rosters (which is ~20 players), while two have 0-2 players? The fact that teams are even allowed that many players is absurd on its own. In the VHL, our main parent league, it's uncommon for teams to carry much more than two lines worth of players (10 skaters). Obviously the minor league is going to be different/higher, as not ever created player makes the VHL, but to double it is fucking excessive. What ice time is an active player going to enjoy with four full lines of players? And if you aren't playing a line or two of players, why must they be on your roster at all? Of course, this happens because GMs like to completely unload all their players in a rebuild and get ALL the draft picks, and winning teams will do the opposite. Add to the mix that an inexplicable 6/8 teams make the playoffs, and it doesn't make for an overly interesting league.
I wanted to break this cycle, so I became a GM to show that it's possible to do that. I've always tried to compete. At least within reason, I don't want to throw any active members to the wolves in a playoff fight they can't win. But for the most part, I've made an effort to retain all/most my draft picks, and compete every season, even if I don't win the Cup. And I think I've done reasonably well with that, I think I only missed playoffs/unwillingly entered playoffs maybe once or twice since I've started GMing. And while I never always had the best teams, I think we were usually at least good enough to make it interesting for my players. I've basically tried to have a balanced team that I think would be appropriate and possible for 3-6 other teams in the league to have simultaneously.
Hence why I always wanted a salary cap, to force GMs to share the wealth, and to prevent GMs from COMPLETELY unloading. The VHL has a better balance with fewer players and more teams because there's only so much a GM can do. Half the league can't literally trade every player they own because there's a cap floor. And even if they could, the other half of the league can't hoard every active member in the league because there's a cap ceiling. The VHLM could be more or less the same way.
Instead, there's only Band-Aid solutions. To prevent teams from owning every draft pick in a season, there's a direct restriction on how many draft picks a team can hold. To prevent there from being teams with no players on them, teams are just removed outright. I was okay with the reduction to eight teams, because the expansion to 10 was iffy in the first place. I also thought reducing to seven teams was a fair landing pad, as I thought it would indeed help parity a bit. But I was never in favour of dropping it to five teams. Under the current structure, the cycle of "trading all the players one season, then trading all the draft picks the next", is never going to stop. The only difference is that with fewer teams, there's an actual possibility of one team buying out the rest of the league, as we might be seeing this season (though admittedly this might partially be because of the way Brampton's former players may or may not be distributed, and due to the legacy of the way a 7 team league worked). At least with 7+ teams if one team bought out 4 others, there was still 2 other teams that could maybe compete.
And now, I have to decide whether I want to sell my future and put up a now long-shot fight against one team to try and win now, and lose later, or if I should salvage my poor active members' seasons and deliberately lose this season. Which you might recognize is the exact opposite of my GMing goals. And considering Oslo, Yukon, and Saskatoon might all be faced with the same choice, there might not even be a market for either. Meaning that this VHLM season has the potential to be the biggest joke of a VHLM season ever, which is saying quite a bit.
Anyway, this got WAY longer than I anticipated/wanted, so I'll just stop thinking of things and writing them down now.
TL;DR: Anderson being a dick has made me realize that this first season of the five team VHLM is shaping up to be a failure because it's either going to force the SELL-BUY cycle that causes 1-2 playerless teams (something the reduction was specifically trying to eliminate), or it will be a one-team show, which is somehow worse. Also I'm right about everything but am too lazy to have any conviction.
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