Groovy Dood's Annual Slowdown

[bigAL 2,176]

Groovy Dood's Annual Slow-down

 

I wish I had more data to back this up, but unfortunately I didn't take as many screenshots as I needed to. I don't think STHS allows for 'snapshots' from days past. But, it's that time of the year again when Groovy Dood dials back the individual stats and prioritizes team success.

 

In each of the last three seasons, Groovy has started HAWT. Every year, he ends up in the discussion for top 5 players in the league. Every year, he fails to end up in the top 5 scorers in the league.

 

Season 75

It started in S75. That year, the second line of DC feasted on the league. Guy Lesieur fucking crushed it that season, scoring a league-best 47 goals and winning the Kevin Brooks Trophy for Goodest Putting the Puck in the Net. Xavier leFlamant, X-Man, the Big Flamer, passed the puck really good onto the sticks of the goal scorers. He finished 7th in league assists with 63 apps. And Groovy, the hero of his own story, tied the line together. Guy scored, X passed, and Groovy scored and passed.

 

Early in the season, this line was the talk of the town. They didn't have a fancy name, but the duo of X and Dood were tearing up the league. They were inseparable on the ice and off the ice, and fed off each others success. Again, the data doesn't exist to objectively prove that, but they were one of the most potent lines through the first half of the season.

 

Of course, that didn't keep up. Around the midway mark of the season, DC was struggling. This was the season of the "aggressively average" Dragons. Name a more iconic duo: DC and 1-1 sims. We lived for 3-sim days because there was no possible way we could go 1-1 (usually it ended up 1-1-1 because of fucking course). We weren't good by any stretch, but we also weren't bad. We were average, extremely average, aggressively average. But nonetheless, the individual success piled up. Scoring lots of points is fun! Seeing your name on the leaderboard is fun! Line 2 was killing it! But the only trophy that matters is the Continental Cup, and change needed to happen.

 

Groovy and X remembered how to play defense. They stopped trying to run up the score. They took shorter shifts. They let the stars like Benny Graves take the reins of their team again. They blocked shots and threw hits. They stopped bragging about their otherworldly offensive skills and lauded the team defensive prowess. Things turned around.

 

The 1-1 sims stopped. In the final 28 games of that horribly mediocre season, the Dragons turned it up. They went an absurd 22-3-3, including two 4-win streaks, a 5-winner and a wild 7-win streak near the end of the run. This catapulted DC into the playoff spot that they've been staring at longingly all year. To everyone's surprise, the Dragons skipped the play-in round and finished ahead of Seattle by one win and one OTL.

 

To the point of the article, we can see that Groovy Dood stepped back during that epic run. In the 7-game win streak, Groovy went 3-3--6. That looks pretty good, but a pair of 1-1--2 inflate those stats. He went pointless in 3 of the 7 games. In the five-gamer, he went 1-3--4, and pointless in 2 of the five games. While those numbers aren't bad, they weren't at "competing for points leader all season" levels.

 

When everything was all said and done, Groovy fell short of individual expectations. He was competing with John Merrick and Andrew Su for the points lead all season, with X riding shotgun alongside in the Top 10 leaderboard. John Merrick ended up winning the Szatkowski with 107 points, one ahead of Andrew Su. Future Kanou winner Chris Hylands finished third with 100 points, and perennial Boulet winner ahead of Groovy finished fourth with 99 points. Dagmar Havlova, flying high on the "good player, bad team" drug, rounded out the Top 5 with 97 points. Groovy, desperate to make the Top 5, finished sixth with 95 points. What about goals? Nope, finished in sole possession of sixth on the list, ahead of supreme draft-lottery-tournament producer Jeffy Pines, with 42 goals. A shoot first scorer, Groovy didn't even end up in the Top 10 for assists, but his set-up man Xavier finished T-5 with 63 points. Because Dragons can't have anything nice, the portal lists leFlamant as 7th in assists scoring.

 

But, TeAm SuCcEsS! The Dragons finished ridiculously, unbelievably hot, and kept that rolling into the playoffs. Fears about being rusty after missing the play-in round (which they have historically dominated, with a 3-0 sweep of the heavily favoured Calgary Wranglers fresh in their minds from S74), the Dragons showed UP In the quarter-finals. There was some slight regression to the "aggressively mediocre" DC we saw most of the year, but this time, they were juuuuuust enough on the right side of mediocre. In their first round, they out-duelled Vancouver to a 4-3 series win. In the next round, guess what, they out-gunned Chicago to a 4-3 win. When the Dragons won, it was tight. When they lost, it was a 7-1 blowout. Doesn't matter, because losing one game automatically means winning another game for these average Dragons. The lack of finishing power finally exposed the cracks in the Dragons in the Finals. The Malmao Nightjokes defeated the Dragons 4-2 to take home their well-deserved Continental Cup.

 

The moral of the story from S75: individual success is nice, but it cannot coexist with team success. Despite playing an absurd 20 games in the playoffs, Groovy Dood did not feature in the top-10 playoff scoring.

 

Season 76

Groovy Dood learned a lot between S75 and S76. He reimagined his game to be more conducive to team success. He began to hit more, block more, and put his body on the line for the team. He saw Mikko Lahtinen combine physical play with a scoring touch and wanted his trophy. Despite being again nominated for the Boulet, Dood had a down year and didn't crack the top 10. In fact, he finished 24th in points, 23rd in goals, and who gives a shit in assists. This is all surprising because, again, Groovy (anecdotally) came out hawt. Even more surprising is the obscene volume of shots the Dood takes. Regularly in the top-10 of shots, Groovy finished S76 in ninth, four shots back of sixth. Unfortunately, very few of those 445 shots actually went in.

 

But that's fine, that's okay, DC once again made the real life playoffs. The race to the finish was intense, and DC secured the final spot on the last day by once again edging out the Seattle Bears by one point. Most of that was shit luck to be completely honest. The aggressively average Dragons did away with the 1-1 sims and instead chose to go on crazy hot and crazy cold streaks. The final 10 games saw 5 wins and 5 losses, including a 5-win streak from game T-9-4, and finishing the final four games with four straight losses.

 

Last season's run to the Finals proved to be lightning in a bottle, and the Dragons got ruthlessly bounced in 5 games in the first round. However, Groovy Dood finished second on the team scoring with one goal and four assists. When Groovy is hot, the team is ass: it's just science.

 

Season 77

This season, Groovy Dood came out hotter than ever. The guy loves to score goals. The one stat I clearly remember: after 32 games, Groovy Dood had 31 goals. He wasn't just a point-per-game player, he was a friggin' goal-a-game player! Since then, he's been, uhh, "DC good". In the last 8, Groovy has alternated between going pointless and getting an assist or two, then pointless again, then another assist or two. The leading goal-scorer hasn't scored a goal in a while and is losing his grip on the scoring race. When the 31-in-32 snapshot was taken, Groovy Dood was ten goals ahead of second-place scorer Isabella Campbell from the Stinky Seattle Bears and held a commanding lead over Dakota "Not a Dragon" Lamb in the overall points race. Now, after 39 points, Dood is second in scoring, sandwiched between Warsaw's Aloe Dear (67) and dlamb (62). Groovy still leads the league in scoring, but that ten-goal gap has tightened down to a four-goal lead on Aloe Dear. In the only stat that matters, Groovy Dood is T-7 with four game-winning-goals, two of them behind the sole leader Jeffy Pines.

 

Like always, individual fire has equalled team poo. For the entire season, DC has occupied the basement of the league. The NA conference is objectively worse than the EU, but with powerhouses in Europe, one would assume the bottom-feeders in EU would be more garbo than the bottom-feeders in NA. Not true! The all-in, the competing DC Dragons are behind the rebuilding Nighthawks and the Riga "we murdered Simon T's mother and now he's taking vengeance on us" Reign. Luckily, last in the league only means 8 points out of a playoff spot in NA. There's half the season left, and Groovy Dood is cooling off. That's a recipe for another Cinderella run into the playoffs.

 

But, unfortunately for the Dragons, individual poo has not translated to team diamond. In the last 10, prime Groovy skid mark time, the Dragons have gone 4-6 without grabbing a single loser point. There's not much time left in the season to turn things on. Groovy Dood is doing everything he can to will the team to victory. He's skipping shifts. He's taking poops during the game instead of waiting for an intermission. He's prioritizing keeping the water bottles full over keeping the net full of pucks. He knows what it takes to make the playoffs, and he knows what it takes to get the team to the Finals.

 

The real question for the Dragons: can Groovy Dood shit the bed hard enough to save the team's season? Only time will tell.

 

1684 words.

 

Edited April 11, 2021 by Acydburn

[bigAL 2,176]

wait shit I forgot to change the title after I finished writing it

can someone smarter than me change it to "Groovy Dood's Annual Slowdown"

Edited April 10, 2021 by bigAL

[bigAL 2,176]

Claim 2

 

ALSO, UPDATE: yesterday DC had a 2-0 sim and Groovy Dood got a hat trick....!!!

[bigAL 2,176]

third and final claim