Bratislava's polarizing offense.

[Shindigs 1,771]

Things are going quite good in Beardislava at the time of writing. We're in a hard fought battle for 3rd with Stockholm and just came off another 2-0 sim, courtesy of our goalie putting up around a .98x over the two games combined, with our first shutout of the season to cap it off.

 

It's been an interesting season so far. The VHLE is much more competitive this season, the top 3 teams are on pace to finish with 200 fewer shots on goal than last season. We now have 4 .920+ goalies in the league instead of just one last season. And it's increasingly starting to look like a lot of the S81 point record will stand for some time. Because there's just more parity this season, and it shows on the score sheet. Hopefully a sign that the league is starting to come into its own, rather than just the results of the S82 draft being stacked with goalies and Dmen at the top. But that all remains to be seen, I suppose?

 

So to actually get back to the title of the article, the polarizing offense of the Bratislava Watchmen, we have had a bit of an interesting thing going on all season. Where our team will consistently either perform on the PP or ES, but never both. Part of this seems formulaic to the point I think the sim engine may purposefully fudge numbers of player based on their amount of special teams time.

 

I won't get into it too much, but we had a runaway best ES performer who wasn't on a PP unit. When we put him on a PP unit, his ES production absolutely tanked, while his overall production stayed relatively the same. Just now more of those points were from the PP and less from ES. It was almost like him getting a bunch of extra ice time didn't even really increase his overall production. It just shifted it to the PP instead. That would be pretty interesting to run controlled testing on, as a sample size of 1 doesn't exactly tell us much about this potential trend.

 

This same kind of thing is going on throughout the lineup as well, there are a few exceptions where players are performing well in both forms of play. But 2 of our top 3 PP forwards are also 2 of our bottom 3 ES forwards, which is just odd. Why can they score at will on the PP but not in ES? And weirder still our lowest PPP/20 production forward is also one of our best ES forwards. How exactly does that make sense? I get being a PP specialist who can't score ES, but the opposite makes very little sense to me. But then it's STHS, so why would it make sense?

 

Has anyone else been seeing similar trends, or are we just having a bit of a silly season in Bratislava with these contradictions?