Hall of Not Bad, Volume 8: Brendan Telker (and Paul Atreides!)

[Gustav 6,132]

"I'm not sure I have seen anyone put forth an argument for Atreides, Telker, and [John] Merrick which to me suggests their days are numbered."

-@Victor, S87 HoF Discussion

 

"I'll go with Brendan Telker! Had some great moments with him in Malmo! He is a really great guy and a solid teammate to boot!"

-@fromtheinside, Chicago Phoenix Press Conference

 

(the league doesn't quite have the public HoF discourse it used to)

 

 

 

Let's take a trip back to S67. A whole new generation of VHLers, each making their draft class better than the last, was busy making the league look nothing like anyone had seen it in the late S50s. Previously in danger of collapse, the league began to see a period of rebirth that seemingly went on with no end in sight until the S80s. S67 was the first time in three seasons that the league had not expanded--first to Moscow in S65 and next to Malmo in S66--and it would only be another season until Prague and DC came onto the scene. It also happened to be a new time for me, and as the league was figuring itself out, so was I. As the VHL expanded, so did the VHLM, adding three new teams in S66. Having spent only one season in the league at the time, I was appointed GM of the Mississauga Hounds, and I found myself tanking for better draft stock after just once trying to compete with the best. The roster was gutted, my success depended on waivers, and one of those waivers was a first-gen player named Nate Telker.

 

Now, Nate Telker was a fairly nondescript VHL player. Named after his creator, @Telkster, he spent a season down in the M and then a full career in Moscow. During the later half of his career, he put up a consistent 60-some points per season, but never reached the point-per-game mark that many members strive for and had most GMs thinking that any recreate coming out of the agency would live up to Nate's reliability as a second-liner but likely not much more.

 

Something had clearly changed by Round 2, though, as Brendan Telker was 4th in TPE in the S77 draft class. Selected 5th overall, not too far off from that ranking, he started his career in Malmo and racked up his first six seasons there, including three in a row over 100 points, a Funk in S78, and a Cup-winning S79 where he led the league in goals. A pure scorer and a solid member in the locker room, Telker never missed the playoffs in his career and was highly valued everywhere he went. Though his agent left the league on short notice early on in his next player's career, I wouldn't be surprised if members who have shown up sooner than that are familiar with the name, and I certainly don't mind contributing to that.

 

The last HoNB covered the earliest player I've talked about (and will likely ever talk about) in S14's Voittu Jannula, and here we're expanding our scope to the latest. I like this for a couple different reasons. First, it covers a time where I was actually in the league, can remember it, and can write about things with more familiarity than I'd have from just reading over old posts. As applies to this one, though, I'm excited to look at a player from this era because it's incredibly difficult to fairly evaluate players from the league's Meta Era.

 

This is discussed briefly in my guide to building and at greater length in a different article of mine, but the first few years of the S80s were the culmination of an understanding that had slowly built itself up through the later S70s. The reason why we have our attributes laid out the way we do is not because we want to inconvenience you but because it became necessary to stop players from following the "meta"--a TPE-efficient build that gave the league a few players every season that had perhaps unfairly inflated numbers. Beyond this, entire teams' statlines were called into question, numbers recorded even just a few seasons before or after paled in comparison, and those who weren't part of "meta" teams were quick to express their gripes with the ways that the league had reduced itself to one and only one strategy. Players from Vancouver (who threepeated right before league attributes changed) took most of the heat, but others were involved as well. Moscow, Warsaw, Chicago, and Telker's own Malmo come to mind as teams who (I think) did their best to follow in the Wolves' footsteps, and this raised a great deal of justifiable debate over how to treat some players that had higher point totals than those in the seasons around them.

 

Luckily, players both in and out of the Hall of Fame from the league's Meta Era have higher totals than some others I considered for this installment. I can only take a window of plus or minus a couple seasons from Telker here, but in that time, we can compare his career to:

 

Taro Tsujimoto: a Hall of Fame player. I'll always know everything about Taro before I can tell you about anyone else in this article, and that's because he was my own player. Taro was part of the last class (S75) that allowed GMs to claim their own players, and I was able to shape his career entirely on my own terms as GM of Davos. Earning for Taro also helped the players that depended on me for wins, and that was enough to develop him into my team's top forward and the face of a struggling, and proudly non-meta (I wonder, could those things be related?) franchise straight through one of the weirdest periods in league history. Taro got into the Hall of Fame with strong play and probably a little bit of team-related recognition as Davos' best, but he also may have one of the weirdest trophy cabinets the league has ever seen--two MVPs and nothing else. Interestingly, that's the extent of all my players' awards as well--I've never won anything else with anyone else.

 

Duncan Idaho: a Hall of Fame player. I usually tend to keep a player out of HoNB analysis if they offer absolutely zero room for fair debate with the subject, but we're working with a stupidly small window of accuracy here and Idaho was the best player of the S77 class. Going third overall to Moscow, @OrbitingDeath  is no stranger to creating all-time greats, and Idaho was no exception. Like Taro, he would win two MVPs (even co-winning with Taro in S80), but even more impressively, he won the Boulet five consecutive times from S80 to S84. Whether one considered Moscow a very meta place to be is almost beside the point--Idaho was the league's best two-way forward by far, a consistent threat to end up near the top of the scoring charts, and my pick for the best player of the Meta Era. 

 

Jerome Reinhart: a Hall of Fame player. Speaking of meta, Reinhart was the heart and soul of it in Vancouver and frontlined the Wolves' threepeat. The most distinguished create of @MexicanCow123, he came screaming out of the gate in S79 with three 110-plus-point seasons in his first four on the league's most "meta" team before switching to defense in S83. Perhaps saving him from being dismissed as just another product of gamesmanship was his post-meta career on defense, where he still recorded a 100-point season and even won MVP in S85 with London. I don't intend for his charts to be a direct comparison to Telker's as a forward; I have him in here more so to illustrate how drastically the meta era changed some careers. But whatever conjecture may have been present about his circumstances, Reinhart left the ice after S86 with no doubt about whether he deserved to be recognized for it.

 

Paul Atreides: NOT a Hall of Fame player and actually the player I originally selected as this article's primary focus. @Mr_Hatter made the Hall of Fame as a Moscow lifer with S68's Raymond Bernard, and Atreides followed up with strong expectations. Going first overall in S77, Atreides and Idaho swore to play together for a good part of their careers and both ended up in Moscow for most of their time in the VHL. Atreides' best season came after a move to Toronto in S83, where he led the league in goals, but he's best remembered as part of the Menace and a combo that worked out very well with Idaho. Finishing his career incredibly similarly to Telker on the stat sheet, he never managed to win a Cup and missed out on Telker's Most Improved campaign--factors that, along with "wasn't the face of the franchise," just barely put him into secondary status as far as this article is concerned.

 

There's a lot of "talking about" so far, and not so much "thinking about." Let's change that.

 

 

 

One might think I'd be writing this article about Taro without any further context. Clearly, Telker would have made it had he maintained his early-career pace, and these are certainly some of the weirder-looking graphs we've analyzed. Curiously, Telker's line starts to level off a season before the end of the Meta Era, and also curiously, Idaho and Atreides seemed very unaffected by changes induced by the hybrid attribute system. I'll also note that Taro seems to pick it up a little bit at the start of the Meta Era, which is interesting because I know for a fact that Davos wasn't set up to be a meta team--perhaps STHS saw increased scoring in other places and decided to compensate a little, I don't know.

 

In any event, I see a situation that is difficult to parse out numbers-wise. If we assume that everyone played under the same conditions and ignore awards, Telker probably makes it in and Tsujimoto doesn't. But with Malmo as a whole being a little crazy on offense, with a noticeable post-meta decline on Telker's part, it's fair to kinda-sorta apply an asterisk to his early career--though not as much as it would be to apply one to Reinhart's. Besides, if we look at awards, I think two MVPs on Taro's part (won largely for controlling a share of his team's offense--as of the last unofficial regular season awards, he still held the largest point difference from his nearest teammate). Everything is a bit foggy so far, so let's look at some other stuff.

 

I always say that hits are complicated to evaluate in these articles. A player who hits a lot deserves to be recognized for it, but a player who doesn't isn't necessarily missing out. It's difficult to hold that opinion and not treat players without a lot of hits negatively, but let's try to do that anyway.

 

 

Idaho absolutely deserves to be recognized above the others here. He had more hits in his first two seasons than our subjects did over their entire careers, and it's not fair to say that we should just ignore that in his case. I'd also say that Taro was two-way enough for it to be positive--perhaps a more fair interpretation here is that smaller differences in hits (like the one between Reinhart and the others) don't mean a whole lot. I'm not throwing anyone out, or to the side, or, in fact, anywhere because of this chart. It just so happens that a huge two-way game can often be a reason to vote for someone, and we've just established that it isn't a viable avenue for Telker.

 

I'm not sure I can do the case for/case against thing in general here. Because we're dealing with players who dealt with each of their own unique circumstances in their own right, I think I have to look at them individually.

 

Telker vs. Tsujimoto: Telker distinguished himself much more early on while Taro was busy not living up to his hot-prospect status. This means that Taro spent most of his time catching up--but does that matter one way or another? I think there's something to be said about starting off strong, but that loses itself to some extent when you realize that Telker had the worst "peak" out of anyone else and wasn't able to fully sustain his production after the meta changes were put into effect. There's also a noticeable enough difference in hits to make a difference, and Taro also easily wins the awards race as far as this is concerned. Flip the awards, and we probably have one in and one out, but I don't think there's an argument to be made over Taro.

 

Telker vs. Idaho: Yeah, no. Idaho wins in every category.

 

Telker vs. Reinhart: This one is next to impossible to compare directly. Reinhart's early career was strongly effected by the meta, and his later career was played at a different position. That said, I think the reasons why Reinhart is in are pretty clear. Regardless of what we think of meta, Reinhart still was the top scorer on a team that won three Cups in a row and was objectively a driving force behind a major event in league history. Telker was good, but he wasn't that and still finished up with a significantly lower point total.

 

Telker vs. Atreides:  You'd be hard-pressed to find two more similar players. Both were picked early in S77, both played clean, low-hitting, high-scoring games, and both won a Brooks. I think Telker wins despite slightly higher offensive output from Atreides because he was able to win a championship and Atreides spent most of his career at secondary "fame" levels to Idaho, but it's very close. In this case, the difference is close enough that it might be a negative--saying that Telker was good enough, with not much of a line between him and the next-best, also implies that Atreides is good enough. And maybe people would argue that, but it's harder to take that stance than the other one.

 

We're also not mentioning a handful of other S70s players that could have been in here had we expanded a little bit. I didn't mention (potential future HoNBer) Lee Xin or HoFer Aloe Dear here, both S74 players with similar or higher totals. I'm also not talking about anyone S80 or later, where 9-season careers add another layer of weirdness that I'm sure I'll have to unpack in another one of these articles. I think it's fair to say that Telker was the best non-HoF forward of the late S70s, but was he good enough to make it?

 

I don't really think so. There will always be layers of "what do we think about the meta" to roll back, but Telker is the definition of Hall of Not Bad. At the very least, he deserves to be remembered as a good player and a good community presence that helped make his team and his league great during one of its most uncertain times ever.

 

Brendan Telker was removed from the HoF ballot in S89, having never received a vote since becoming eligible four seasons earlier. For those curious, Atreides did get one vote for induction in S88 but was removed in S91. With both off the ballot, likely for good, their time for the Hall of Not Bad has come.

 

Previous HoNB articles:

Volume 1: Alexander Pepper

Volume 2: Shawn Glade

Volume 3: Jakab Holik

Volume 4: Bo Boeser

Volume 5: Tyson Kohler

Volume 6: Lasse Milo

Volume 7: Voittu Jannula

[Victor 10,550]

31 minutes ago, Gustav said:

(the league doesn't quite have the public HoF discourse it used to)

Although it's easy to blame the lack of forum content, tbf you had nearly 10 years of posts to search through in some of your other articles

 

32 minutes ago, Gustav said:

At the very least, he deserves to be remembered as a good player and a good community presence that helped make his team and his league great during one of its most uncertain times ever.

This is key for me, he was such a trooper and a real steal with Nate, I'm glad he enjoyed even more success with Brendan.

[hylands 838]

telkster has to go down as one of my best draft picks ever. he was an absolute joy to have on the team and was just an all around great dude.

[UghSike 211]

You literally utilized graphs. Dang! That's dedication. This is a proper write up, and impressive if nothing else. It was wordy yet easy to read and compelling at the same time. I've read a lot of forum posts in my short time here and not many have entirely made me want to search a specific author, but I'll be checking out some of your other work as well.

[Gustav 6,132]

2,569 words; week 2 claim

[fromtheinside 1,278]

Telk was the best. Great dude.