IMPORTANT UPDATE
Made some changes to the original post as well as the tl;dr. Nothing changed, but I just wanted to do a better job of clarifying that the 20M starting cap is what people should be concerned with and not the 35M team cap (which meant literally nothing as long as your starting lineup was valid).
Also, World B. Free was added to the defensemen. His cost is 2M. My apologies for missing him.
And Kurtis Hunter, although he is a defenseman now in the VHL, will remain as a forward only for VHFL eligibility because he's already been placed on some rosters when he was listed as a forward. The conditions are the same for everyone.
I feel like I made a bit of a mistake in how I presented the VHFL this season regarding the 20M starting cap vs 35M team cap and I talk about it a bit. I also give some other thoughts about the VHFL as well.
http://www87.zippyshare.com/v/hAIB8QPu/file.html
I care much more when my player is in the discussion for sure. I was much more excited for the S45 awards announcement than I have been in a long time because I knew I had a shot at Top Defenseman. Other than that, I guess I like when interesting things happen with the awards; someone winning an award X times in a row, a rookie winning an award a rookie doesn't usually win, an award being dominated by two players over a long stretch of seasons alternating winners.. I guess.
But it's all more interesting when my player is involved.
It takes a lot of skill to be last. It's hard to predict who isn't going to score in this sim.
Except there are several high TPE VHLM players on the player list so you could just fill your roster with them. Or you could just fill your roster with players like Phil Hamilton, Zach Parechkin, etc etc all the shitty guys.
Also, there is essentially no limit to the cost of your bench players. Because the team max is 15M more than the starting lineup max, your bench could consist of three 5M players. Obviously that's going to hinder your ability to switch players in and out unless your starting line is under 20M or have several 5Ms that you can just interchange. But for the most part, anyone who actually uses up all or most of their 35M cap for the team is going to be more limited in their substitutions.
You helped suggest it so thanks. I would've actually liked to have had a bench goalie as well but as I was making up this post, I realized that would mean I'd have to return to weekly save percentage scoring, which I didn't like as much. I also thought about doing something where I record weekly saves/shots against for the goalies weekly and have every team with a personal season save percentage that is taken from the saves/shots against totals for the starting goalies each week...
I just decided to not complicate things and give no backup goalie though.