10,000 TPE

[scoop 3,432]

With this VHL.com article, I will reach 10000 career TPE across all of my VHL players. It seems a bit crazy to me to think that over 20% of that has all come with one player, considering Jacob Stone is my 13th player in the league. In honor of reaching this TPE mark, I just want to take a quick look back at all of my players. Rather than looking at them in chronological order, I've instead put them into five different groups, with regards to my investment in earning TPE for them.

 

S2 Sam Helberg  - 0 TPE

S68 Justin Rushmore - 159 TPE

S72 Izzy Valencia - 113 TPE

 

The first group is those players who never amounted to anything. My very first player was Sam Helberg, with whom I was never active. I created him, completely forgot about him, and only realized he existed much later. Even after finding that I had created a player for the S2 draft, I had no recollection of it. Justin Rushmore and Izzy Valencia were created during one of my longer stretches of inactivity in the VHL. They were a couple half-hearted attempts to get back into the VHL that ultimately went no where.

 

S11 Fayt Leingod - 545 TPE

S33 Keiji Toriyama - 658 TPE

S53 mist4ke - 571 TPE

 

These are players that were never destined to be anything great, for various reasons, but were good enough to have lengthy VHL careers, as crazy as that sounds considering what TPE looks like nowadays. Fayt Leingod was my first proper player in the VHL, and I was not one of those first gen players who burst onto the scene. This was also at a time where it was more difficult for just anyone to earn max TPE. Keiji Toriyama came at a time when I was intentionally limiting my investment in the VHL, as I had just gone through some tough times with a previous player, and had a realization that I tied too much of my self worth in the results of the VHL. mist4ke was created during the time period where members were allowed to have two players, and he was my second player that I really didn't care much about.
 

S40 Lloyd Light - 981 TPE

S79 Taylor Mourning - 1253 TPE

 

These two players are the hardest categorize. Lloyd Light could maybe fit it with the previous group, but I definitely put more into him than those three. He just wasn't on the same level as my top tier players. He came after Toriyama, as I was finding how to better balance my investment in the VHL with my life outside the VHL. I stepped back into things a bit more with Light. Taylor Mourning should arguably be grouped with the next couple players, but I have him here because I never went fully inactive with him, and as a whole, his career fits nicely alongside Light in that I wasn't a top tier earner with him, but I earned enough to get to the point where more TPE starts meaning very little.

 

S18 Geno Esposito - 630 TPE

S61 Samuel Gate - 610 TPE

 

Geno Esposito and Samuel Gate are the two players who I look back and wonder what could have been. As I mentioned with Leingod earlier, I was not concerned with my first player being as good as could be. As I became more involved in the league, by the time I got to my second player, Esposito, I was. While 630 TPE may not seem like a lot nowadays, let's compare him to Lars Berger (a S17 player, so just a year earlier) who held the TPE record at 1104 from S24 to S31. The reason I think of Esposito as a "what if" kind of player is that I retired him in the deadline of his fifth season, in order to make the goalie of the future for New York, as I was the GM at the time. I could have had three more seasons with Esposito, and while I would not have set the TPE record, I probably could have been near the top of the leaderboards at the time. Samuel Gate also had a shortened career, playing six seasons, but he could have been so much more even in just that time. While Gate did end up playing six seasons, I was only active with him through Season 62. And I was truly inactive after that point in that I didn't earn TPE in any capacity. It was not a "turned into a welfare only" situation. I was not earning any TPE at all.

 

S24 Benjamin Glover - 1269 TPE

S50 Diana Maxwell - 1126 TPE

S88 Jacob Stone - 2085 TPE (and counting)

 

Benjamin Glover was the player I created after the retirement of Esposito, and he became even more than the potential that Esposito had. For a few seasons after his retirement, Glover held the TPE record. The time of his career was no doubt when I was most invested emotionally in the VHL, though that was more so because of my position as GM of New York at the time. The progression from Toriyama to Light to Diana Maxwell was a slow return to form as a top earner in the league. Looking strictly at the numbers, maybe it's not quite right to put Maxwell in this same category, as her TPE is a step back from Glover despite being years later when TPE numbers were going up; but I'm putting her here anyway because I don't care. Jacob Stone obviously belongs in this elite tier, as although he won't achieve the career record as Glover did, I will get him into the top five of all time by the end of the season.

[Corco 1,237]

I always appreciated that you went against the leaguewide stigma at the time of being anti-Vasteras to sign an extension there with Toriyama, especially since you had bounced from team to team with him quite a bit already, if I recall correctly. 

[scoop 3,432]

24 minutes ago, Corco said:

I always appreciated that you went against the leaguewide stigma at the time of being anti-Vasteras to sign an extension there with Toriyama, especially since you had bounced from team to team with him quite a bit already, if I recall correctly. 

Yeah, he bounced around quite a bit.

 

Started in Seattle in S33.

Traded at the S34 deadline to Riga.

Traded in the S34 off-season to Davos

Traded at the S35 deadline to Seattle

Traded in the S35 off-season to Calgary

Traded in the S35 off-season to New York

Traded in S36 mid-season to Vasteras

 

Even the pick that was used to draft him was acquired in a trade.