Traded Early In My Career. Am I Washed?

Renomitsu · January 21

Am I Washed?

Short Answer: Maybe? Long(er) Answer Below.

Woof. For someone who’s historically done well in sim sports leagues, Spanish Moon Moth’s career has not gone as I’d expect it to – at least not so far. And I have to say, thus far it’s deserved – a manager like Seattle’s Banackock, who has historically been shrewd, discerning, and resultantly very successful – does not take trading away an important asset and high selection very lightly. On December 23^rd, 2023, he elected to trade Spanish Moon over to Prague with an S93 second round selection from Davos in exchange for Steve Lattimer, a first, second, and fourth in that season’s draft. The team was clearly in rebuilding mode and hadn’t found what it wanted from my player in the first season or so after being drafted – and as a team that has to take a multi-season future view, that meant acquiring as many new resources as possible to get the rebuild back on track.

Perhaps part of my initial surprise at being traded was hubris. I like to think we both handled our respective ends of the trade professionally, and I’m quite excited to spend my career with Acyd as my manager. But the TPE rankings are what they are – and Spanish Moon isn’t doing as well as I have typically fared. As a result of a few busy weeks, in fact, Zetterberg’s Leif Reingaard has just hit the century mark over my player’s TPE. That hasn’t happened to me before, and certainly has never happened this early in my career. Both he and Daniel Janser are absolute terrors when it comes to earning. But this also isn’t the height of my sim league participation like 2019 and the greater part of the pandemic were, and obviously my place in life isn’t quite the same. Thankfully, I’m also not stuck being the same user I was during my year-long hiatus from sim leagues, working through an absolutely grueling second year of residency. I won’t make excuses: even after my second post-graduate year (PGY-2), I was not the best sim league user by the numbers.

It’s also tough to watch my player slip in the rankings (again, deservedly) as someone who has strived to be the best at everything I do. I was drafted fourth overall in the S91 VHL draft, and had slipped to tenth in VSN’s first VHL Future Watch. What hurt arguably more was Spanish Moon Moth’s further descent completely out of the rankings as a whole. Yeah, I know my class is stupidly stacked and even FrostBeard has dropped down to fifth in the rankings. Velv and tcookie have hovered around my player’s rankings too. It’s not often a top five player gets scooted over without significant interpersonal controversy – and there’s certainly no bad blood between Bana and I.

Ultimately, I wish I could have been a bit of a better communicator with Bana. You can bet, however, that I’m giving Prague my all, the very same I would have given any earnest, high-quality manager, titles that both Acyd and Bana obviously meet. I’m going to re-prove my worth to this league once more – even if that means running under the radar for a little while.