Frontloading: The NEW Meta?

[Gustav 6,425]

I did some poking around VHL rosters today, because when I'm not under some sort of pressure to work I just get irredeemably bored. The reason for this mostly had to do with--finally!--being on a team with reasonable sim success (seriously, it might have been S68 when I was last on a team that was 2nd in the conference this late in the season) after I'd come into the season feeling fairly pessimistic about things. You see, last season was horrible, and we got hit hard with retirements and the like. On top of that, I'd talked to multiple people who expressed sentiments along the lines of "you're never going to win anything; you only have two players on defense."

 

Which is a fair point. I took a look at our last sim and saw about 57 minutes in total of ice time from our defensive bots, and that sort of thing should in theory be a liability. That is, until you take a look at the standings and come to terms with the following:

• Ten teams are eligible for the playoffs.
• Somehow, currently one is New York.
• Out of these ten, three have at least 4 players on defense. None have more than that, and the other seven teams (including first and second place in both conferences) have less. Six have 3; LA has 2.
• Out of the six teams ineligible for the playoffs, all have at least 4 defensemen, and three have more than that.
• The teams who haven't filled their defensive lines are still right up against the cap, meaning that they likely have more invested in their forwards (and goalers) than other teams and have somewhat maximized this (intentionally or not) by giving up a rostered player on defense.

 

Now, if I liked to draw my conclusions homeopathy-style, I'd stop here with "defense = bad" and tell you that the less defense your team has, the better. And since this is the Internet, a lot of people would probably believe it if I framed it well enough and I'd see someone repeating said opinion at some point. But I do enough science stuff to know that this doesn't necessarily mean anything, so let me make some counterpoints.

 

• Generally, non-competitive teams have larger rosters because they take cap dumps and deal with larger pools of draft picks coming up. They've got room for people with lower TPE, and most are happy to take those people when they come around. Because of this, we can pretty much ignore teams whose rosters don't quite pass the eye test for "is in a position to be competitive"--in my opinion, removing at least three and arguably four of the teams not eligible for the playoffs. They're going to be worse whether there's anything in this or not.
• We already had a small and inconclusive sample size before considering the above point, and that only makes it more so. Nothing I'm saying here should be taken as "this is what will definitely happen when you build your team in this specific way."
• There's no doubting that bots aren't good for the team when they're on the ice. Anecdotally, in LA's last sim, all bots in total (amounting to about 2 full games of a normal player's ice time) put up a total of 0 points, with a -2 and 4 penalty minutes. Also--none recorded a shot on goal.

 

My main point here is that maybe, it's a viable strategy to spend all your money up front and place defense as a second priority. I don't think anyone's ever purposely built defense first, and I also don't think that idea in general is new. It's just that missing some players in some places might not be as big a deal as many of us think, and if we aren't seeing it already it's reasonable to think that we'll see teams purposely going for stacked forward lines at the expense of some bot time.

 

It's also important for me to point out that I don't like this. I don't want teams discouraging members from creating on defense in much the same way I don't like it when teams try to tell players to build in exact, "optimal" ways. I'm hopeful that this won't be the case, because, obviously, there remains some need for defensive players, but I am a bit concerned that this will be enough of a trend that some of the meta micromanage-y stuff might start happening. We'll see what happens--I do hope Vandelay is all the added defense LA needs to win a championship, but I'm also a bit too much of a purist to enjoy the current distribution.

[Gaikoku-hito 2,082]

Didn`t even know LA only had Two defenders this season.

Art Vandelay is the GOAT!!