A Gustav 30 in 30, #19: The Sun Also Rises

[Gustav 6,469]

 

The first sig I made for Taro. This would have been sometime during the school year in 2020--I remember making it while sitting in the library wearing a mask--and I believe this would have been right at the start of my fall semester in my third year. I was just about exactly halfway through my degree and as VHL-brained as ever. I think the Japanese text is just Taro's name, but I don't remember.

 

 

If you as a GM think your drafts are painful, then you need to take a second and reflect on the early days of managing super large, 2019-sized draft classes, when guidelines weren't as defined and inexperience combined with ignorance to crank out drafts that regularly exceeded 3 hours in length and often featured GMs with no regard for planning their own time or respecting others' taking multiple tens of minutes to talk out deals while on the clock. 

 

And if you think that's bad, you haven't seen anything yet. The 1974 NHL draft was excruciating, so much so that my favorite team chose to draft a player that didn't even exist.

 

I'm going to assume that most people in this league know the deal, so I'll just link you to something in case you're unfamiliar and keep it pretty brief--the draft was conducted entirely over phone, and the Buffalo Sabres were bored. Not finding much value in the eleventh round, GM Punch Imlach and director of communications Paul Wieland created Taro Tsujimoto, a fully fictitious player from Japan, and drafted him. Before the Internet, the hoax lasted a little while before being revealed, and the NHL wasn't amused. Taro, though, would live on to become an immortal part of Sabres history and one of the greatest inside jokes that hockey has ever seen.

 

Flash forward 45 years, and I joined the VHL. I named my first player Jerry Garcia and almost immediately regretted it--within a week, I had thought of what a great idea it would have been to take everyone's favorite fake hockey player and put him in my new favorite fake hockey league. Taro was on my mind from the start, and I spent almost a year and a half waiting until my recreate season hit and hoping that no one would come along and steal my idea before I got the chance.

 

Thankfully, because the VHL only cared about recruiting Canucks fans, not many people joined in the seasons in between who were eager to cash in on the legend of Taro. The name and the concept were still available, and I stopped at nothing to bring everyone's favorite fake hockey player into fake reality.

 

Taro signed in Ottawa for reasons I don't remember. My stated reason in my player creation thread, back before portal waivers, was that I wanted a good combination of team success and playing time, and I got that for all of 3 points in 19 games with the Lynx. 

 

The next season, though, took a very interesting turn when I managed to be drafted by Mississauga--the team I'd previously (inaugurally) GMed. This was where Taro's promise as a prospect took its full form--putting up 50 goals and 119 points, he was one of the top scorers in the VHLM and was on top of the TPE leaderboard at the time of the draft. 

 

I was GM of Davos at the time, and it was just my luck that at the time, I could just decide that I wanted my player and have him handed to me. The league has gone through a handful of different sets of rules regarding GMs' players, and as hard as it may be to believe for some, many here are completely unfamiliar with them. When I joined, VHL GMs controlled two players that were managed separately. One was treated just like any other player, but the other was tied directly to their team, was never drafted, and was force-retired the second they left. At some point around S70, this was switched up because it was kind of stupid and because rosters were full enough that members taking up double the space wasn't ideal. At that point, a GM got only one player, who was treated exactly the same as anyone else, except that the team could elect to designate one of their first-round picks to have automatically spent on their own player. This was what I did with Taro, and as one could expect, every GM who was picking their player in this way wanted that pick to be as close to the end of the first round as possible. Unfortunately, I never got to trade down for free picks--I had 3rd and 9th overall, using that 3rd on goaler Kunibuni UnGuri and reserving that 9th for myself. No one was interested when I asked around before the draft, and even though Toronto offered during the draft, I was at work. My picks went per my instructions, that offer went unseen, and I was still pretty happy that I'd gotten the draft's presumed #1 player, whose contract I still controlled, at #9. This would be the last season a GM player was chosen in that manner, as the old system was abolished after S75. 

 

Anyway, Taro officially started to wear purple, and that happened right from the start as we had no E (the horror! Such an unsustainable system that we used it for almost 15 years). Anyone who's bothered to read my second GM article will know that our roster found itself a bit crowded in the mid-70s. For instance, if I remember correctly, we had 8 forwards in S75. This meant that I'd be buried in the lineup, and deservedly so at rookie TPE levels. A 43-point rookie season (including Taro's only time below 25 goals) was all there was to be seen so far, and Davos missed the playoffs yet again.

 

S76 rolled around, and as anyone who (ahem) reads my articles knows, it was the one where I decided to let our roster implode. Or, rather, we could have been competitive, but nothing worked. We still had lots of forwards on the roster (maybe we were down to 7?) and Taro's ice time was limited, but the deadline saw us selling hard. Then-top forwards Soren Jensen, SS Hornet and Robin Winter were shipped out for big draft capital, and we suddenly had more roster space that suddenly meant that Taro got top ice time. By this point, he was my top forward and I could play him like one. With an improvement over the previous season. Taro finished with 65 points, as well as an amount of hits that was finally showing signs that I'd been working on checking. 

 

By the start of S77, Taro had achieved a "good player" TPE level and was the top forward on a bad team--a recipe for some slight number inflation as well as some enjoyment floating my way on my own stat sheet. S77 featured 92 points and 234 hits, cementing Taro as a perennial VHFL favorite and dragging the team to within surprising striking distance of a playoff spot. Taro was still improving going into the offseason, and I was really looking forward to seeing how S78 went if I'd already been doing this well.

 

And I guess S78 went OK. The team took a big step back (again), but 86 points and 284 hits was a solid total (keep in mind that averages were lower at this time) and Taro had at least earned his status as the face of the franchise. There's not much to say about S78, except that some of the players I'd added as fresh faces were about to turn the corner to good TPE totals, and I was ready to make a big splash as a GM in the coming offseason.

 

That's where I ended my most recent GM article, and that's where I'll end this one as well. Lots of exciting memories are about to come, and you'll hear about both Taro and Davos.

 

 

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

#17: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 2

#18: I've Been Everywhere, Man