Local Rookie Speculates Wildly

[ctots 400]

Hello everyone, it’s the second week of March, and that means a new opportunity to stack up some TPE for my dork of a player, Baxter Arcanum. He’s late to the party as a new create rookie this season, but I am comforted by the fact that he keeps climbing up in the pre draft live rankings thread. As of today, he’s up three positions over last week at 21st. I don’t think there’s enough time left in the season for me to really push any higher than that on the leaderboard, but it has been a lot of fun for me to look at. From the way things look, this draft class is weak in terms of wingers but there are a lot of strong prospects in all other positions among the top 15.

 

In terms of how he’s actually playing this season, I couldn’t be happier. As a defenseman, he’s got 37 points over 38 games, that’s nuts. I would imagine that with the changes that are going to happen this off season, I will end up geared more defensively and less inclined to actually score. That’s pretty much in line with what my vision was for this player before I knew anything about how stats worked in the league: a two-way defenseman with a knack for making plays.

 

Predicting new meta (?)

 

Speaking of the meta shift, I took another look at the new attributes and how they relate to STHS attributes. Scoring and defense are spread across 7 total attributes, which will lead to much more statistically balanced builds, and potentially cause players to tailor their builds to a particular style of play instead of just feeding the sim the numbers that it wants to eat. It seems like the general consensus is that this is a good change, so I’m just jumping on the bandwagon or beating a dead horse or whatever, but it’s the thing to talk about this week so that’s what we’re doing.

 

One of the things I’ve noticed right away is that there is more incentive for wingers to stat into faceoffs. It’s not just covering for the edge cases where you’re forced to take one, it’ll also give you some strength now to sweeten the deal a bit.

 

I’m very interested to see how things shake out with Grit tying checking and fighting together. It seemed as though high checking would lead to more fighting anyway, so maybe this is a bit of a consolidation? As a knock-on effect, we may find a greater need for discipline as a stat to prevent the penalty minutes from spiraling out of control.

If you want to be a reliable penalty shooter, you’ll want to make sure you’re investing heavily in the Wrist Shot hybrid attribute, since that’s the only hybrid that offers a benefit to that stat. This also means that skaters with a decent wrist shot will perform admirably in penalty shot situations. This means across all leagues we will likely see significantly improved performance in shootouts and on penalty shots.

 

It’s way too early to make any firm calls, but I’m excited by the level of intricacy that this change adds to the process of allocating TPE. The next three seasons are going to be absolute madness in terms of build design, I’m sure, and I couldn’t be happier that I joined at a time where I get to be front-and-center to all of it.