A Gustav 30 in 30, #17: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 2

[Gustav 6,436]

 

Being killed by the sim is one thing. Being absolutely obliterated by your own players is another.

 

 

Another week, another installment of this series that I've been putting off putting together because it's going to be lots and lots of analysis of my own GMing. It's a little bit harder, too, because I won't be talking about any winning and I'll be going over a few seasons I spent trying to shuffle around assets in Davos, keeping some players who were good enough to fairly ask for a winning environment away from one because they were a little too nice to do so.

 

Anyway. It wasn't all that bad, and there are things worth talking about that made life worth living during this time as well. Let's get to it--the mid-S70s in Davos, from my perspective.

 

 

NOTABLE TRANSACTIONS OF S75:

Preseason:

S76 DAV 1st and S76 DAV 2nd traded to DC for S75 DCD 1st and S76 DCD 3rd

Roque Davis re-signs and is traded to Moscow for S76 MOS 1st and S77 MOS 3rd

S75 DAV 3rd, S76 MOS 1st, and S76 DAV 3rd traded to Malmo for Tyler Walker

Kunibuni UnGuri drafted 3rd overall

Taro Tsujimoto drafted 9th overall

Vladimir Mlinski drafted 57th overall

Bobby Wyman signs in free agency

David OQuinn retires

Rayz Funk retires

 

I cut off my last GM article after S74 mostly because I remembered incorrectly--the departure of Davis and the retirement of Funk did not, in fact, signal the immediate death of Davos' competitive chances. Up front, the team was still led by high-TPA-but-underachieving Soren Jensen, while hot prospects SS Hornet and Robin Winter continued to develop well and had reached TPE levels high enough to be significant contributors. Though it wasn't even a question whether Davis was sticking around--my first message to Josh that offseason was along the lines of a "you're going to FA, right?"--he was nice enough to agree to a sign-and-trade so I would end up getting fair value back instead of just losing everything. What I got back was a first-rounder that I flipped to fill our new giant hole on defense with none other than my former GM in @Advantage and his still-young Tyler Walker. Defensive play was a must, and I'd even found our long-term solution in net by shuffling picks around with DC so I'd have two first-rounders--reserving one for my own player while using the other on @Berocka's goaltender (whose name means something I don't exactly remember but is something along the lines of how he's not very good. I should have known). So, I'd answered some roster questions as well as getting the people in the locker room that I wanted, getting two big things out of the way. Even in addition to these two, I brought @Brrbisbrr back to Davos by selecting his player in the draft (who would eventually make it up for a bit), and I signed @Lefty_S in free agency (who many of you may know from one affiliate league or another).

 

I'd envisioned this as more of a retool and aimed to stay marginally competitive for a couple seasons while Hornet and Winter fully fleshed out their builds and Taro caught up as quickly as I could make him. I'd made no mistake that we didn't expect to win the Cup--Funk's retirement stung and we were a bit short on quality depth--but we were finally a young team again and I didn't have to worry about half of us retiring as we moved forward. 

 

And we tried. S75 was our second season in a row (and the fourth out of my six as a GM) missing the playoffs. But we went down swinging--our 75 points were the most out of any team who didn't make the playoffs, and it was reasonably well understood on the roster that we weren't going to take any championships. Overall, we were a bit disappointed that our first competitive run hadn't gone exactly as planned, but it certainly wasn't the end of the world and we all hoped that we could just sit back while things mostly fell into place by virtue of homegrown talent.

 

 

NOTABLE TRANSACTIONS OF S76:

Preseason:

S77 DAV 2nd traded to Riga for Lewis Dawson

Brian Moreau drafted 22nd overall

Jurgis Kalvelis Blazevicius drafted 51st overall

Owen Nolan retires

Joakim Bruden leaves in free agency

 

In-season:

Robin Winter traded to Chicago for S78 CHI 1st and Kasey Tamm

Soren Jensen traded to Seattle for S77 WAR 2nd, S77 SEA 4th, Daldo, and Eoin Byrne

This huge three-way deal in which I traded SS Hornet, a 2nd, and a 4th for a 1st, two 2nds, and two 3rds

Lewis Dawson traded to DC for S77 DCD 3rd, S77 DCD 4th, and Joe Kelly

I don't even remember what I had to do with this deal but apparently there was another three-way. I think I just took someone's roster dump but why I didn't ask for another 4th or something I couldn't say.

 

So yeah, so much for that one. We had young players who were also pretty solid by this point. Taro had reached solid depth level, Walker was good, Jensen was still high-TPA-but-underachieving, and Hornet was by this point one of the highest-TPA players in the league. Nolan had retired, but I did my best to account for that by renting @Kendrick's Lewis Dawson--a player that ADV once asked me to pick when I filled in for one of Malmo's drafts. I figured that we could remain marginally competitive, challenge for one of the lower playoff spots, and retain our dignity as we stuck with the plan and trusted the process. It was also this season that Berocka took over as our starter--UnGuri had by this point outpaced Bruden, who had come back as the starter in S75 after being rented out by Funk a season earlier.

 

The problem with that was that we sucked.

 

We were coming up on the trade deadline, and we were nowhere near the playoffs. I knew by this point that I was wasting Jensen's (and Dawson's) last season, and that wasn't right. I also had a couple players in Hornet and Winter who still liked me OK but were completely fed up with my GMing and its results. I'd had them sit around and be disappointed in everything for long enough, so...against my best wishes, I took things into full blow-up mode. So, off went Jensen, off went Dawson, and after a good deal more negotiation, off went what was once our future in Hornet and Winter. I remember spending hours bouncing offers off of teams for either one, especially Hornet (fun fact: he almost went to Prague), and it wasn't at all fun because the whole process was a big reminder of what could have been. Among players who earned well enough to make a difference, we were down to Taro and UnGuri who were still very new, @Ahma as usual in Fernando Jokinen, Shawty Nananana, and Tyler Walker--I'd talked to Advantage and offered to move him if he wanted to win, but I wanted to see if keeping him would speed things along and he was fine with that for my sake. In retrospect, I regret this a bit.

 

But anyway, S76 ended up in a familiar place--not only in the basement, but deep in the basement. No one else was even close to as last place as we were, and we headed into S77 ready for a repeat performance.

 

 

NOTABLE TRANSACTIONS OF S77:

Preseason:

S77 SEA 4th traded to LA for Olof Samuelsson

S79 DAV 4th traded to Seattle for S78 SEA 4th, S79 SEA 4th, and Vin Calia

S78 SEA 4th traded to Toronto for S78 TOR 4th and John Callahan Jr

Reylynn Reinhart drafted 2nd overall

Miles Johnson drafted 13th overall

Griff MacKenzie drafted 29th overall

TheCHEESE drafted 31st overall

Declan Wolf drafted 33rd overall

Raihan Heavems drafted 44th overall

Lochlan Chisholm drafted 58th overall

Fernando Jokinen retires

 

The mid-late S70s were plagued with "mid-late activity" players, so to speak. Normally, a player who doesn't earn at a high rate is still a player valuable to a team and to the league. Around this time, though, so many existed that it became a big problem for management. I was always pretty solid at drafting, actually--that's not at all what made my GM run so horrible--but ironically, it made my accumulation of picks in S77 an issue. Even by the end of the first round, picks didn't mean a whole lot--Miles Johnson was a decent pick considering the circumstances, and he didn't even amount to much. The big news of the draft class was defender Reylynn Reinhart--@Ricer13 had just been appointed GM of Calgary, but had promised me a whole career right up front if I wanted one from him anyway. Aside from a pleasant surprise in TheCHEESE at 31st, though, I'd just managed to find a huge handful of players who were barely active enough to make the VHL at a time when everyone else was, too. This would become relevant later.

 

Complaining aside, S77 went decently well considering how S76 had gone right before that. I had a surprisingly complete blue line--Walker, Nananana, Reinhart, and Samuelsson wouldn't have been out of place on a better team--and with Taro playing well by this point and UnGuri a legitimate starter, we were good enough to leave last place and even challenge for the playoffs. We were so close, in fact, that we missed out on the playoffs in a tiebreaker with Malmo, making things very interesting.

 

At this point, we had questions to answer. How, for example, would we fare in getting more scoring talent on the roster? How would we deal with our massive pool of prospects when that wasn't even a good thing to have? I chose to address one of those and completely ignore the other in S78.

 

 

NOTABLE TRANSACTIONS OF S78:

Offseason:

S78 DAV 1st and S78 LDN 2nd traded to London for S78 RIG 1st

Luc Tessier drafted 4th overall

David Tavau drafted 11th overall

Gregory Bates drafted 38th overall

 

In-season:

Tyler Walker traded to Calgary for S80 CGY 1st and Darth Kaprizov

 

I got who I wanted in the draft by trading up for a solid forward--@KC15's Luc Tessier in the top 5. Later on in the first round, Ahma was back, and I picked up @Tyler's Gregory Bates a bit further down the board. Needless to say, we were back to drafts I was happy with.

 

S78 would take a turn for the worse, though. After challenging for the playoffs just a season earlier, and with not much changing about the roster, we found ourselves out of a playoff spot again near the deadline. It was at this point that I finally realized that keeping Walker around and hoping everything would work itself out was pretty unfair, and he was even getting a bit older at this point as depreciation set in. He was still worth a bunch--a first-round pick, plus a near-max earner in @Darth Kaprizov, was a solid return and shuffled things around positionally in the ways that I could have used (even though I got ripped on in the trade thread for some reason). I'd made moves I was happy with, but mostly spent S78 putting blocks in place and waiting while we all disappointed ourselves in coming next-to-last. Still, though, the second time through the rebuild cycle was the start of a new, more restrained Gustav, one who didn't try to transform the team overnight and made moves that made reasonable sense.

 

Until I tried to rock the VHL world in S79.

 

But that's a story for another time.

 

 

In total, I think you could pull out any one of these seasons by itself and reasonably say that it wasn't that bad of a show of management. I did well relative to the draft picks I had in every one. I never got completely ripped off in a trade. I always made sure that my team was full of nice people who the rest of the league wanted to be around. Decisions that didn't work out actually made sense in the moment. Trying to compete in S76 was realistic on paper, and I made sure to pull the trigger when it was clear that it wasn't working. Keeping Winter and Hornet made sense because they were young, and keeping Walker made sense at first because I felt that I could make things happen quickly (and it continued to make sense when S77 made it look like that could have been the case). S77 and S78 featured no stupidly early attempts to end things, and when we eventually get to the part where I try to dig out of the hole in S79, the timing of that made sense as well. 

 

I think that Davos was partly on the receiving end of some bad league circumstances. We started going downhill at a time when accumulating draft picks wasn't really a good thing to do, and we partly tried climbing uphill at a time when the league was a bit locked up with roster sizes and whatnot. It was an interesting time to be part of the VHL and an unfortunate time to have to change things about your team. Oh, and it was also a really unfortunate time to have horrible sim luck. Of course, my strategy as a whole could be criticized (and quite fairly), but hindsight is always 20/20 and when I go back and look at all of the moves I've listed here, I remember exactly why I made them and the reasons still make sense to me today.

 

Rebuilding is hard in the VHL. I didn't like the one I did in the VHLM, and that only lasted one season. By the time I was doing it again, I was thankfully being promoted, but it made me want to quit a little. I've just been over four straight seasons of rebuilding here (OK, first "retooling," then catastrophically failing at that, then actually rebuilding). That's the entire length of my VHLM tenure--so it wasn't exactly easy to stick with things. I think it gave me a much better appreciation of how much it took for the players I had to stick with me through all of it, and how much understanding needs to go into trusting the GM as a rebuild goes all the way from start to finish. I wish I could say that all of this worked--obviously, it didn't--but there's another GM article on the way at some point that will go over some more exciting seasons. Until then, I guess I'll just be writing about Kranch or whatever.

 

 

Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience:

 

#1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name

#2: Can't We All Just Get Along?

#3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway?

#4: The House That I Built

#5: Can We Fix It?

#6: American Beauty

#7: The Kids Are Alright

#8: Dogs In A Pile

#9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake

#10: This Old House

#11: Go Directly to Jail

#12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball

#13: How I Messed Up Davos

#14: Ello Gov'nor

#15: Weewoo

#16: Jolly Kranchers

[Ahma 1,433]

Our team had stuff made of champions back then. Shame we never made it through the dance to win it all. We had a lot of fun though that's for sure!