15 years of the VHL, 15 seasons for me

[ROOKIE745 610]

I have to admit, the timing feels funny, the VHL is celebrating it's 15 birthday and coincidentally I've played in 15 full seasons now.... if you add my half season of S69 and this season (S84) together it would equal out to it (plus some extra) but I'm getting off topic here. I'm right around the 15 season mark and I think with the birthday it would be a good time to reflect right? The date I joined was November 17th 2019, I had found about the league from @Enorama from the NHL.66 site. He had the D.C Dragons logo on it and I had to comment on it, and from there I joined the league after he mentioned it. I don't know if this still holds up but I am his most successful draftee from that site, so that's something right? Maybe the most successful user to come from there in general? Anyway I quickly decided that my first player would be a goaltender, my favorite position in hockey. I choose to name him after a cat that I had for a short while (for his first name) and one of my favorite goalies, Ron Hextall.

 

The first team I joined was the Halifax 21st, a team at the time that had @fonziGG as it's general manager. I wound up playing mostly the second half the season, getting 32 starts and winning 15 of them. Looking back I really don't know what the general assessment of Halifax was, if we were a middle of the pack team or what, in the end it didn't really matter cause that was the season of the Saskatoon Wild and only suffering 6 looses in total, 4 in the regular season and 2 in the playoffs. Me and the 21st managed to take one of those games off of them in the playoffs but otherwise got destroyed. After a rather disappointing draft where I was BPA'd by the Dynamo I would get traded for by the Toronto Legion and still new GM @Peace. It was decided early on that I would remain in the M for another season but there was confusion about that from other GM's in the VHLM and it lead to Hexy falling to 32nd overall and being a steal of a pick for the Minnesota Storm lead by @Rayzor_7 and @Mr_Hatter, a team that was already pretty stacked and now just added a 191 TPE goalie that mind you I would get to 250TPE before the M season started. So basically Minnesota got a max TPE goalie at 32nd overall, will that ever happen again? Probably not. Trivia fact too, I replaced the same goalie twice, the goalie I replaced in Halifax had been picked up by the Storm, and because that player was IA from what I remember, I replaced them again, how many times has that happened I wonder? My season in Minnesota is still my most successful ever, a 61-8-1 record in the regular season with 10 shutouts, and a 12-0-2 record in the playoffs with three shutouts. Say what you will but the no regulation looses still really stands out to me, that shows how impressive we were. That was also the only season I ever won any awards in, Skylar Rift and Benoit Devereux trophies on top of the Founder's Cup.

 

It does feel like a lot of my best moments were early in Hexy's career, once I joined Toronto things were.... rougher to say the least. A big part of why I stayed in the M for S70 was because Toronto was going into a rebuild and me coming up and only being a bit over 250 TPE, I would have been destroyed, not to mention stuck as a back up, so it made sense for me to stay down in the M. Toronto would see a 10 point improvement in S71 and Hexy's rookie season record was 28-25-11 with a .915 save percentage, 2.87 GAA and 4 shutouts. I do believe he got one or two rookie of the year votes and his 11 shutouts won him the first unofficial eggshell award, awarded out by @DMaximus . His 11 shutouts in a season actually hasn't been beaten yet but it has been tied by three other goalies. Hextall remained in Toronto purgatory for the rest of his career, his numbers were always very stable, S72-S74 he posted a .917 save percentage, than a .920 for S75 and .919 for his final two go arounds. His final record was 454 games played, 210 wins, 182 looses and 48 overtime looses, .918 career save percentage, 2.97 career GAA and 21 shutouts. His number 54 has been retired by the Toronto Legion, his 210 wins is fourth all time, his 48 overtime looses is first all time, and his 15,839 saves is second all time in franchise history. Not to be forgotten are the rivalries he formed with the other Canadian team goalies, Jacques Lafontaine @SlapshotDragon and Jimmy Spyro @DarkSpyro. I'm trying to keep this more general but these guys made the seasons a lot more fun and were great to have as rivals.  As a final note for Hexy, here's something a former teammate in Halifax @Doomsdaymade sure I saw     "Jaxx Hextall (HFX) for Slashing (Minor) at 16:07 - Damon Da Silva served the penalty."  Yes he was a true Hextall XD

 

Now we jump onto my second player, Jonathan Ori, his first name comes from one of my middle names (Jonathan) and his last comes from a character from one of my favorite video games series, Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisps. I went with a center and choose players like Joe Thornton and Adam Oates as to who I wanted to model him around, a playmaker. Some decisions I made early on was to have both his drafts split up, that way I get more enjoyment out of each draft and it's something I have to look forward to twice, I say this because, back then at least the M draft wouldn't really mean anything if you knew you were going into the VHL right away and those drafts were in the same season. That's not something that I think would really happen now but it was apart of my though process. The other choice was that I would have Ori go into free agency at some point, and I kinda hard locked on season 84 for it, I didn't want to do it as a last season thing because I wanted it to be that he could help a team for multiple seasons. There aren't as many stories surrounding Ori as I feel as there was with Hextall..... not yet anyway. It is notable that Ori was drafted by the Minnesota Storm, a franchise still GM'd and AGM'd by Rayzor and Hatter. But Rayzor was finally getting to move on into the VHL and was taking over the Titans so his attention was kind split and Hatter had to do some extra work for the Storm. Ori's only season in the M is nothing special, 4 goals and 36 assists for 40 points. In the playoffs they went far, 14 games and 12 points for Ori but they didn't win the cup sadly.

 

Now that I was an established user of the VHL it made the VHL draft more interesting for sure, no longer was I an unproven, unkown user. I was a guy who grinded it out and made it to 1565 TPE on my first player. GM's have trust in me and it lead to more reaching out to me, I've talked about this story before and just kinda how crazy the S79 draft was for me, I don't wanna go through it all again but to try and sum it up, Eno tried to trade up in the draft but that never worked out but because I had told other GM's I wanted to go there others passed on me leading me to land right in the hands of a familiar face yet again, Rayzor. I don't know if there's like a stat somewhere but right now, I have been drafted by the same GM 3 out of 4 times, twice in the VHLM and once in the VHL, just what are the odds that could happen? It's gotta be pretty slim right? Anyway once again I was joining a rebuilding team but unlike with Hexy I went up right away, Ori was a little more prepared and because he's not a goalie there isn't a choice of "who do we put in net?". I knew his rookie season would be rough and indeed it was, just 23 points, 19 of them assists, in 72 games. Ori spent 5 seasons in total in Helsinki and while the rebuild was not going as fast as we had hoped it was going well, and had it not been for the conference system set up, we would have made the playoffs in S83. It was a gut punch for sure and it led to a hard off-season for me. I knew Helsinki would be even better next season but as I had been struggling with motivation, experiencing free agency was just what I needed.

 

It was a hard goodbye but one I was happy I made, @Banackock, the GM of the Seattle Bears since like forever was the second GM I heard from, and was one of GM's that talked to me during the S79 draft. Seattle was the best team that reached out to me, most other top tier teams were already rubbing against the cap limit, and so was Seattle to but Bana made the trades to get it to all work out. Once I was officially signed to the team I remembered that a certain someone was on the team, Slapshotdragon. My long time rival and fellow S70 draftee was here, he had been drafted in my place in the S79 draft and now the two of us were together. Weather is be that Bana had some plan behind this or maybe it was just fate, but a trade part way into the season brought DarkSpyro onto the team, completing the trio of former Canadian players, goalies and first names that start with J. It is even funnier as Seattle was a team we all battled against, the titan to take down, something that for the most part we failed to do. And now the three of us are here playing together, how ironic.

 

And that pretty much covers my 15 full seasons of VHL experience.... for readers there is one area I didn't really touch on and that would VHL playoffs..... and well the reason for that would just be the real lack of it, in the 12 full VHL seasons I've played I've made it there 3 times, and that was all with Jaxx Hextall, and those weren't even in back to back seasons, they were always split up. We only escaped round one once and that was an upset on Seattle funny enough. Hexy's record in the playoffs is 12-10-3 in 25 games played, a .918 save percentage, 2.88 GAA and 1 shutout. Hopefully things change with Ori in Seattle now, we're in a playoff spot and I hope we can make waves in them. That's all I have to say here, I know I didn't talk about the WC or WJC but I never paid to much attention to them and don't have many memories of them, the only thing I can remember is the time Hexy and Lafontaine were on the same team, that is some stacked goaltending. I hope you all enjoyed my run down memory lane, I mostly wanted to talk about the stuff I remember and not so much on the stat side here, 15 seasons is a lot and I still got two more to get through after this one. As for the future I plan to take a break after Ori's career is finished, I need time to recharge and make sure I know what I want to do with my next player who might join in the early S90's, we'll see about that. See you guys in another post later!

 

(word count 2047, Did not think It would end up this long XD)

Edited August 1, 2022 by ROOKIE745

[ROOKIE745 610]

claiming for second time July 31st

[ROOKIE745 610]

claiming for the triples week and uncapped TPE (VHL 15th birthday)

[Enorama 2,039]

1 hour ago, ROOKIE745 said:

Maybe the most successful user to come from their in general?

 

Considering the only other two I know of didn't even crack 100 TPE, I would say it's no contest lol

[SlapshotLegion 867]

We were a trio then; we a trio now. Lots of love to you mate!

[ROOKIE745 610]

Claiming for third time August 7th

[ROOKIE745 610]

Claiming for fourth and final time August 14th