Alexander Pepper, FISTED ANALLY BY A CIRCUS MONKEY or Not FISTED ANALLY BY A CIRCUS MONKEY?

[Rin 138]

While hardly a topic even worth bringing up, the discussion behind Alexander Pepper's Hall of Fame candidacy is one that's at least close to me. He was my first ever player, the one I definitely put the most time and effort into since I was a non-jaded first gen. I'm also really big on goaltending as a whole; I could honestly play nothing but goalie and probably never get bored.

 

While Pepper's career was certainly successful, his ultimate legacy goes down as the answer to a trivia question. Unless something's changed (and I highly doubt it has), he's the only goalie in VHL history to hit the elusive 300 win mark and miss out on the Hall of Fame.

 

 

And why is that? Well, even just looking at these numbers tells quite the story. A .917 save percentage is the posterchild for "mid" when discussing all-time great goaltenders, and a lackluster 30 shutouts doesn't help any arguments either. Hell, the 3rd winningest goaltender in Helsinki history, Astrid Moon, recorded a whopping 75 shutouts in about 150 fewer games played. Pepper was certainly not a statistical darling, and even in an era where all goalies struggled to put up meaningful performances, he didn't particularly stand out among the crowd. Especially not against Kallis Kriketers, the goalie for the Riga Reign at the time who consistently set the bar for the era.

 

 

While Kallis didn't hit the 300 win mark, his numbers were drastically better in almost every other category- especially when it came to GAA and shutouts.

 

Stats aren't everything, though, and Pepper certainly did rack up a few awards. However...

 

 

...a few things stick out when you take a peek at Pepper's trophy cabinet. Every VHL level award was given to him in season 66, which ended up being his absolute peak as a player. This Helsinki team, though, was just destined to win after getting so close so many times; nothing was going to stop an absolute all-star roster from finishing the job.

 

I'd always said that my #1 goal as a player was to bring the first Shaw to Helsinki in however many seasons it was at the time. And while that did end up happening, it wasn't without controversy. This was back when there was a chosen "awards committee," in which various members would vote on specific awards instead of the BoG. This was an issue for a few reasons, and honestly, it was a direct contributor to Pepper being granted this award. I was on the panel at the time, and I was adamant that I wouldn't provide a vote for awards in which my player was a reasonable consideration. I didn't want to bring a bias to what would become VHL history, especially in an era of the site where people were ready to rip you apart with accusations of rigging, fixing, or "abusing power." My abstinence, however, resulted in an exact tie for the voting of that award- Kallis being the other contender, of course. As a result of that voting, the award was shared between Pepper and Kriketers in what was an awkward award ceremony. Looking back, I probably should have just voted for Kallis in that race; I don't really think Pepper deserved to win now, but at the time I was way too afraid of over-biasing one way or the other. At the end of the day, though, I think splitting the award is even more embarrassing than not winning one- Pepper couldn't do a single goddamn thing to get above Kallis at any point.

 

The last elephant in the room is the Kanou win, which was honestly another casualty of the flawed award committee system. A stacked Helsinki roster was causing quite the stir in those voting threads, since the cup-winning team didn't have a clear standout player. I practiced the same mindset I'd applied to the earlier Shaw voting, choosing to abstain and instead let the rest of the group decide Pepper was worthy of the nod or not. However, the majority of the group refused to simply vote for one player, and so a compromise was created- each member would rank their top 4 candidates on a scale of 1-4, and each vote would be worth a weighted number of points. Feeling more confident about being able to vote with the new system in place, I submitted a ballot that was true to how I felt- I put @Beketov's Matt Thompson down for 1st, and Pepper down for 2nd. Pepper ended up claiming the most points once all ballots were submitted, but only by a tiny margin. When the full ballots were posted for us to see, it immediately became clear that Pepper had only won because one member placed Thompson as low as fourth, which was objectively a dogshit waste of a vote. Thus, the REAL biggest snub of Pepper's career was the fact that he took home a Kanou instead of Thompson; fitting for a player who was always comfortably in second place.

 

So at the end of the day, Alexander Pepper is a player with great franchise-level accolades to his name to go with a trophy cabinet filled with awards he didn't even really deserve. He was the definition of mid, kind of like the VHL equivalent to Corey Crawford. Wildly successful as far as his teammates, organization, and fans are concerned, but ultimately not someone worth remembering if they're not wearing the home team's colors. Alexander Pepper was not FISTED ANALLY BY A CIRCUS MONKEY, he unfortunately has a very fitting role of being trivia question fodder for the rest of time.

[Rin 138]

The filter even caused the URL to talk about circus monkeys, that's actually hilarious

[Beketov 9,033]

1 hour ago, Rin said:

Thus, the REAL biggest snub of Pepper's career was the fact that he took home a Kanou instead of Thompson

At least I’m not the only one to realize it.