What If? - Flyersfan/Fire Vigneault Edition

[Fire Tortorella 2,653]

It's theme week, meaning it's time for my annual (seasonal?) media spot, since I can't give up extra TPE THAT easily. This year, the theme is "what if" where we're essentially supposed to talk about something or somethings VHL related and how the league or those situations would be changed if a different situation happened. I'm not entirely motivated enough to do a long media spot on one specific instance, so in true @Fire Vigneault fashion, I'm going to talk about a couple of different things and the "what if" scenario that goes with them.

 

"What If @WentzKneeFan036Doesn't Join The League?"

So the first situation we're going to talk about is also the most subjective, since this is almost entirely feelings based and subjective. I'm sure everyone knows that this fine gentleman is my brother. When we first joined the league, I was a junior or senior in high school and he was whatever is four years younger than that. We lived at home together and have a good number of VHL memories, from "What if Riga Wins?", the very bad podcasts we did that always took longer from a technical standpoint than they did to actually record, playing and winning in Riga, GMing Riga and Calgary, joining Calgary with Bernie, and most recently, MOSCOW MOSCOW MOSCOW. What I'm getting at is a lot of my early to mid VHL related memories involve @WentzKneeFan036. If he decides that "this league is stupid - I don't want extra homework" and never joins, do I stick around? Now granted, I still got myself involved in the league (grader, Head Grader, BoG, Commissioner, etc...) even when his activity waned, but do I stay as interested? Who knows. What if I'm never in the BoG? (SEGWAAAAAAAY)

 

"What If We Deleted The VHLM?"

I have no idea how public this ever got, but it was a very long time ago (S40s? S50s?) so I feel OK sharing BOG secrets, but there was a time where there was serious thought to the idea of deleting the VHLM and having all players join the VHL at creation. I don't remember the specifics of the proposals at this point, but the root issue was that the VHLM was causing the league issues in the non-automated world because it involved a metric ton of manual work, both on the forum and in the sim file. I'm not going to sit here and say I'm the reason the VHLM is still around, because I'm not, but there was a not-insignificant amount of support for this idea, which I always thought was dumb. It can sometimes be hard to talk about the VHLM because most members today only know the well functioning version of the VHLM. For a long time, being VHLM Commissioner meant making the league less shitty than it was before, even if the results were still below average. If the VHLM was deleted, I'm sure the VHL looks entirely different. Do we have double the teams now? Do we have promotion/relegation? Do we realize this was a mistake (a la Project Player 2) and add the VHLM back at some point? Who knows.

 

"What If We Didn't Add The Portal?"

Ah, the portal - another thing that most members today don't remember not having. The portal has been the single biggest change to the league in it's entire existence, in my opinion of course. And, admittedly (ashamedly?) I was negative on this potential change at first, or at best, just non-supportive. If I remember correctly, it was @Devise who mentioned the idea first? I know @Willdid most of the building, but for some reason, I have @Devisein my head as the person who first floated some sort of "portal" idea. But anyway, my fear was that it would drive activity and eyes away from the forum and on to alternative sites (which I was right! And that has it's own pros and cons), but it's 100% turned out that the positives of the portal have far outweighed any negatives. The ability to have your updates done in essentially 24-48 hours, and most importantly, having those updates actually put into the sim engine instantaneously has been the best thing to ever happen to the league (except maybe for whenever it was that @Victordecided to join the league of course). So yeah, portal good, portal updating good, you 3 people who still prefer forum updating are weird.

 

"What If Davos Didn't Implode With Smitty?"

So this is actually the topic I originally thought of when this theme week first came out, but then I realized that in order to write a good article I'd have to do a bunch of research, and ain't nobody got time for that, so this is just going to get shotgunned from memory. So what do I remember? I remember joining Davos and originally being excited for having a young core that seemed like it was going to be a European contender for my entire career. Then after the first season (maybe my second?) there were multiple people who wanted out for locker room issues. I don't remember who they were or what the issues were (and I didn't know of any issues, because I've never exactly been a huge locker room presence, and Discord has made that even worse), but at the end of the day, we lost 2 or 3 players/prospects and I don't know if we ever replaced them. Then there were the...multiple...Shawn Glade trades. Again, I don't remember the specifics, but especially after the 2nd one, I struggled to see how those trades improved the team now or put us in a better position going forward. Were the trades made solely for the player's gain (for those who don't know, this was the GM's player), or were they made in the best interest of the team? I don't know, but at the end of the day, I decided on a first - I was going to go "me first", as I knew this was my last shot at a Hall of Fame career, and went to free agency as an actual sought after player. Smitty Werbenjagermanjensen had just won his first Labatte, but I decided to go to free agency and ended up signing with Moscow, where I won 2 additional Labattes and a Continental Cup and eventually made the Hall of Fame, first ballot. Do I have the same individual success if I stay in Davos? If Glade doesn't get traded? Who knows, but actually, probably not, so in hindsight, from an individual award/HoF perspective, going to free agency and signing with Moscow is one of the best VHL decisions I ever made. If Glade stays in Davos and I do too, maybe Glade continues to take the 1D minutes and points, as Glade was no slouch of a player either.

[Victor 11,037]

10 hours ago, Fire Vigneault said:

the best thing to ever happen to the league (except maybe for whenever it was that @Victordecided to join the league of course)

Iconic VHL moment tbh

 

10 hours ago, Fire Vigneault said:

What If We Deleted The VHLM?

Soooooon

 

Oh and MOSCOW MOSCOW MOSCOW 

[Beketov 9,133]

10 hours ago, Fire Vigneault said:

If I remember correctly, it was @Devise who mentioned the idea first?

@Devise had the general idea in his head, I put together the initial design (which is more or less that it looks like), and @Will made it come to life.

[Fire Tortorella 2,653]

1,000+ words

Claim 2/2 for week ending 5/2