diamond_ace

Several seasons ago, in a galaxy so incredibly close that it is in fact our own galaxy, a player joined the VHL known as Mountain Thunderfist. He portrayed the classic "big brute who speaks in third person" gimmick, just bulldozing anyone and everyone who was in his way or the way of his teammates. He did fairly well in the VHLM, then tried his hand at the VHL, and didn't really get very far before fading into obscurity and joining some other in-universe hockey league like the KHL or so, who knows. It seemed as though his time was up in the VHL... and then the Prague Phantoms came into existence. So far, the franchise only has one player linked to them, Dagmar Havlova, who will be joining the team after her stint in the VHLM is over. Now, the Phantoms have agreed to terms with their second player, bringing Mountain Thunderfist back out of nowhere and sticking him on their blue line, with the notion that if you can't beat them, beat them. Technically, Thunderfist has not signed yet, but the agreement is reached and he will be signing heading into next season, pending physical.

what real life year was s19 in

It's vanderhuge AND a 3rd. If no actives are exposed, it's an inactive and a 3rd

Fixed

There were 2 deals, this one and eno-davos. We talked about it ahead of time and are just wiping the first round out entirely with the two trade picks

PRG gets S68 MOS 2nd VAN gets The assurance that I take a particular guy and not another particular guy @Beaviss @Will @Quik @Beketov

First 3 for Kefka 4. I mean I think it's the best possible combination you could have protected. Being the first guy off the list isn't a good feeling but it's the proper call to make. I'd like to still be on Seattle but from the team's perspective, I'm glad you finally saw that Low was significantly better. 5. Mostly because after answering 4, 5 is an easy one to get credit for, but no, the protect list is who it should be. 8. Yes, but not spoiling. Plus there may very well end up being more. Second 3 for Dagmar 9. Expansion 1, Expansion 2, and NY. 12. Kovalchuk if he's back after the expansion draft. 16. Peach rum, so that when I inevitably put it in peach iced tea, it's twice as peachy.

Hence the title of the article Yeah I'm still a bit torn on the whole 9/6/2 thing, on one hand having more people stick around long enough to get into the bigs can never be a bad thing, on the other hand 6/4/1-2 has been the league's identity for so long that it seems a bit un VHL-like. Realistically, we were never going to have so many expansions as to keep the old format, because there would be fears of what would happen when the talent dried up, which it may or may not even do

There are no more polarizing figures among the VHL GM ranks than the enigma known as @Devise. The man has a well publicized aversion to picks, and only Tzuyu from the current Toronto roster was drafted by the actual team. Some find this to be an unusual strategy and unlikely to bear fruit, while others have adopted a more positive outlook given the facts at hand - Devise has had far more success with this Toronto roster than he's had any right to have, and one way or another, whatever you think of the no-pick policy, it's clearly worked out well for him. This isn't about that. This isn't about the things Devise does intentionally to benefit his team - this isn't a move he made, or a draft pick he forgot to sell off. This is about how ridiculously expansion-proof the Toronto roster is. There are only 11 total players on the Toronto roster, in a league that's had a rush of new players and most other teams are being stuck putting players on the 3rd and 4th lines. In terms of pure value, having more active players can't be a bad thing, but in terms of expansion, having such a limited roster is a bonus in disguise (not to mention infuriating for the expansion GMs). Presumably, paring down the roster and selling off the depth is a by product of acquiring top tier talent via trades - with 11 players, the only way Toronto is winning anything is if most of those 11 players are top tier guys, and so much of the depth has been sold off in order to get opposing GMs accept deals of 2-3 good pieces for 1 great piece. Given that the Toronto roster was thin before expansion was even announced, it can't be said that he skimmed it down in anticipation of expansion, but rather that in this particular way, fortune has favored him. He got a bit lucky (and @Enorama and I got unlucky in the same way). However, luck does have a way of falling in with the crowd that prepares most for it, so it's hard to argue he didn't deserve it here. Still not going to make me any happier to finish off the expansion draft with Bolt god damn Vanderhuge...

Condor Adrienne made it perfectly clear he was only ever going to sign for one of the four newest teams: Malmo, Moscow, and the two new expansions which have yet to be revealed (although it's largely no secret where the teams will be). With all four lottery teams having an equal chance to win, and three of them outside of Adrienne's preferred options, there was a lot of debate as to whether these teams would take him at the top of the draft if they won the lottery. That talk is largely irrelevant now, as Malmo won the lottery, the only team to appear both on the list of teams Adrienne would play for and the list of teams that were eligible for the lottery. There were rumors that both of the two new expansion teams had floated around the idea of trading up, depending on which team had won (with varying degrees of how far talks had gotten, as obviously nothing could be too finalized with the lottery having not taken place).

Kriketers is in pepper's class, not wahl/rift/davison's class

Do we need a lottery for the two expansions? I assume whoever is picking first in the expansion draft is picking second in the regular draft, but are @Enorama and I just talking that out ourselves or are we lotterying it?

REDACTED will be jumping into a conference that already has Davos and Malmo, neither of which did that fantastically (although set up well for the future) and Helsinki is getting older. Given that I'm definitely not going to try to be competitive for the first two seasons, how far away do you think playoffs are? Since I believe you have some basis there, what is your favorite candy exclusive to UK? Favorite savory dish also exclusive to UK? Not including Malmo, what are your top 5 teams you'd like to be on? Odds of your brother making a comeback?

San

Not saying your overall point is wrong (personally I'd still be inclined to go Cast, although it's telling the way this league reacts to award votes the fact that I feel like I need to bring up my opinion of the actual award when my point is only tangentially related) but 17/233 is .0729. So the difference between 233 points and 250 points is 7.3%, which is nowhere near 1%.

Benny

Red four standing by

Kefka - Points Assists Points 99/7 = just over 14 Assists 67/10 = 6.7 PLENTY.

You're absolutely worthy We need to have another writing comp

Dagmar Havlova has had a long distance romantic involvement with former VHLer @JardyB10 Bunclewirth, ever since her husband died.

Been sitting on this damn thing since 5, waiting for the week to change

Not a lot of info is released to the public as to how the draft will go for the expansion teams, so I'm going to be talking a lot in hypotheticals here. One thing that is known is that the expansion teams won't be in the lottery picks, so let's just take the exact middle of 5-12 each round - 8 and 9 sounds about right. Hypothetically, for the sake of the article, we'll just say that since a normal expansion draft's worth of players are divided among two teams, that these two teams get a bonus pick to offset that. For the sake of the article, we'll go 17-18, right after the lottery picks in the 2nd. That leaves 8/9, 17/18, 22/23, 34/35, 46/47, 58/59, and so on. There are a lot of good players that will be available in the expansion draft, from a few teams. There will also be some... well, less good players available. I don't think it's exactly a secret that Toronto only has 11 total players, so only two of their players will be available, and it's almost certainly going to be some combination of inactives. Nonetheless, there are too many variables in the expansion draft to properly discuss that from the perspective of one of the teams to receive players - an individual team giving up a pick, on the other hand, only really has one variable. To make this work in the hypothetical sense, we're going to say that between the 5 players each team will receive, and their own GM players (both of whom are centers) that they've managed to get exactly one full line (3 forwards, 2 defense, and a backup goalie). Thus, they'll be going into the draft without positional needs, other than to balance the players they will acquire. This will not be taking into consideration trades - Condor Adrienne, for example, wants to go to an expansion, and perhaps one of them will try to trade up to get him, but that's way too much to consider for this type of article. At 8/9, we're going to assume the top 7 in the Live S68 rankings are gone - that's Adrienne, Flowers, Eller, Underyew, Downey, Lehtinen, and Stansson. This will almost certainly not be how it goes - some of the teams at the top will need to take a player who can play down one more season for cap relief, so it wouldn't be surprising to see someone reach on Ryo Yamazuki II for example, as an established user where you know what you're getting from him, and could reasonably be stashed in the minors again to allow for an S61 player to get off the payroll. However, it's easier to assume the non-expansions will go straight down the board, at least at this point. This means that at 8/9, Sigard Gunnar and Luciano Valentino are the top two on the board. However, an interesting thing to note is that the 10th player is A Red Guy, a clear favorite to win a starting job for a team that needs a starter. Based on this article written by me last week the only immediate starter jobs are the expansions and New York, so I'm going to project two different routes for the expansions here, one that shows a team drafting a goalie early and building around that, and another that shows a team waiting on goalie until later. Given the fact that four defensemen are already off the board (this draft is heavy with them at the top) the other expansion takes Valentino here to avoid missing on a positional run. Expansion 1: A Red Guy Expansion 2: Luciano Valentino By the time 17 and 18 come around, New York will have had their second round pick, and I'm going to project they take Raymond Bernard there, but that Fang Flashback will still be around (more on Flashback in a little bit). In that case, the first 16 players in the rankings will be projected to be gone with the exception of Flashback, and that Bud Knight as the 17th player will be the other one to be gone. Again, this almost certainly won't be the case - some teams will have members they have more personal connection to, and sacrificing 15-20 TPE for something like that, or going for a guy they believe to be more active (such as Andrej Petrovic, who is a +6 in the arrows at the time of writing) could easily outweigh some spots in the rankings. We'll again project that the second team will wait on a goalie - honestly, with New York and the other expansion already having taken one in this article, they could still go for a while on that front. The first team will be projected to take Petrovic here, the boom potential of a guy with a +6 (and a guy who is an established vet and has at his peak made some fantastic players) is too much to pass up on. The second team, given they already have one defenseman in Valentino, will go Kaspars Claude. Claude is a guy who'll be shooting up the rankings when the rankings next get updated, and may not be around here, but has a lot of similarities to Petrovic. Expansion 1: Andrej Petrovic Expansion 2: Kaspars Claude At 22/23, here's where I'm saying Flashback is gone. This will entirely depend on how much confidence Moscow has in Owen May to recover early form, and honestly I think they do, but there's value in taking a guy like Flashback here as a safe Plan B if May's issues resurface (and as valuable trade bait to a team like Helsinki or Riga to build around once Pepper and Kriketers start to wind down their careers, leaving Flashback with a starting role somewhere either way, if May remains the goalie of the future for Moscow). Moscow doesn't need a ton of help immediately, just for the guys they already have to develop, and they'll have a player coming in with their 1st rounder to replace whoever is taken in expansion anyway. Plus, and not that this would be taken into consideration in the real draft, this allows my hypotheticals to reset back to just going down the rankings and seeing who's there. As Kaspars Claude is outside the top 21 at the time of writing, my scenario at this point is the top 20 plus Claude are gone. Team 1 has taken a goalie and defenseman, team 2 has taken a defenseman and a left winger (although I'm not going to concern myself with getting the proper wings - if a team ends up with 2 LW and 0 RW, that's fine). This part of the draft is where we get into a few interesting prospects actually, and going just slightly off the board is almost certainly going to be profitable. Someone like Chad Gilbert might be a good one for Team 1 to start building a forward line with, as he's still active currently, and has been around to claim the theme bonus. Team 2, on the other hand, with a D/LW combo already, might go with someone like Fredrik Elmebeck here to round out that defensive pairing. Expansion 1: Chad Gilbert Expansion 2: Fredrik Elmebeck In the old days, 34 and 35 would basically just be where the scraps would go, if there were any. In a modern draft, not only are there definitely still actives here, there are still a lot of them. Many good choices at this point in the draft, although there's a few who are projected to be gone here based on the rankings who are inactive or less active than players who are projected to be left. GMs will almost certainly notice this, and at this stage, it's a guarantee that the top 33 players in the rankings will absolutely not be the top 33 players drafted - in fact, I'd expect probably 10 or so players below the line to be gone and 10 or so players above the line to be around. Among the players in the "top 33" who I expect to be around at this stage, although in their cases it has nothing to do with activity, are Bruce Grimaldi and Samuel Ross. These two will only be there because they're goalies, and there are fewer teams that need goalies than there are goalies that need teams. Block Buster, at 36 in the rankings (one of the next few players after this spot) will also be here. This is around the time I expect teams to start taking these guys for value. However, there's still a team that needs a starter, and that's Team 2 of our expansions. I think we're getting just about to the point where even someone maximizing value would pick up a goalie if they need a future starter - in fact, at this stage, the "less active" backup they'll arguably have ended up with in the expansion draft might actually start the first season, because the player drafted could choose to stay down one more time. Team 1, already having secured a goalie, would be able to take just about what they want here - we'll project the top 35 to be gone with the exception of Grimaldi and Ross just for the sake of making it easy. Team 1 could take someone like Ondrej Ohradka, a player who is just coming off the back of a three week media and is clearly committed enough to the site to have done something like that in the first place. Team 2, however, will be basically just flipping the coin between Grimaldi and Ross, taking one now because both (and perhaps Buster as well) would likely be taken for value before it comes back to them. Let's say Ross goes here, just because he's joined a week later and is therefore on a slightly better pace than Grimaldi. Expansion 1: Ondrej Ohradka Expansion 2: Samuel Ross At 46 and 47 we're starting to scramble for actives, which is why Grimaldi, Ross, and Buster will definitely be gone here. It's likely that Helsinki will grab one with their 4th as a hope the player develops behind Pepper, and perhaps Davos with a late 3rd to develop behind Davison since Pouta isn't quite on pace. Or really, at this stage, any team could take one, then if someone unexpectedly leaves the team with a spare goalie can trade one to the team with the departure. I'm going to just take guys late on that I think could have promise at this stage, and that will likely be what happens in the real draft as well, except some of these guys will be gone. Let's say Killy Foilen for team 1 and Balentine Kidd for team 2, both of whom are active and are right around this level in the rankings, although they may both be gone by then. It remains to be seen who will actually be here at this point in the draft, and it'll definitely look nothing like the rankings at this stage. This will leave team 1 with LW/C/RW/D/G from this draft and team 2 with LW/C/D/D/G. Expansion 1: Killy Foilen Expansion 2: Balentine Kidd At 58 and 59, and this is as deep as I'll go (mostly because at this point it'll put me on 4 weeks worth) we're basically scraping the barrel. However, scraping the barrel isn't always a bad thing - there are guys at this stage in the draft who joined just before the cutoff to go into the next draft, and may very well end up outperforming their draft position by a lot. There may also, on the opposite side of things, be inactives who developed enough before they left to be half decent filler options if necessary or trade pieces if they're inactives belonging to users there's a chance of getting back. The actives will definitely be preferred, but also harder to find. One, however, stands out with a big green +7 next to his name, and that is Alex Armstrong. If he happens to be there at 58 (he won't be) this would be a no brainer pick for team 1. Team 2, on the other hand, could take a shot on someone like Raleigh Ritchie, who left for most of the season but came back and did an affiliate welfare recently. If he continues to be back, even as just an affiliate welfare guy, he could become a good piece. Expansion 1: Alex Armstrong Expansion 2: Raleigh Ritchie This gives both teams one line of players through just the regular draft, and it's looking pretty good from that perspective. Expansion 1: Ohradka-Gilbert-Foilen / Petrovic-Armstrong / Guy Expansion 2: Claude-Kidd-Ritchie / Valentino-Elmebeck / Ross 2107 words Kefka

I figured you didn't actually think it was tampering, I'm just ensuring that the league doesn't - even if you and I know the intent that doesn't mean the league does

I have said nothing implying leaving the team you're on by your own choice. I am implying that if Beaviss leaves you unprotected (which he may or may not do) I would be inclined to take you. Not tampering.

But is there also a Gritty in Prague? ?