Love of the Franchise

[Rin 208]

Taking some inspiration from @kirbithan's thread about goalie players, I felt a little inspired to look back and reminisce a little bit about the career of my first (and favorite, to this point) player, former Titans goalie Alexander Pepper.

 

 

While I've expressed the love before of being the guy in net, I also have a really fun time doing something I haven't really committed to since then; being a franchise player, and being synonymous with a team's logo in a way. When Pepper was drafted to the Titans under @Quik's regime, I had a feeling I wouldn't be going anywhere for the entirety of my career. Not that I would have had a choice, mind you; the goalie market was just as crowded and stagnant as it is today. I might have been able to find a trade to go elsewhere later in my career, and it might have even been the best choice for the aging Titans to move on from me, but I stuck it out to claim two career milestones that still mean a lot to my VHL tenure-- 300 career wins (all with Helsinki), and the franchise lead for wins as a goaltender.

 

Immediately, I made my goal with the Titans clear. Taking a peek at some of the handy spreadsheets, history posts, and Portal statistics, I noticed that the Titans had not had a winner of the Aidan Shaw trophy since season 23, when Jakob Kjeldsen took home the award. Something about breaking that kind of a curse really spoke to me, especially since a franchise-oriented goal seemed a lot more achievable at the time to my first-gen mind. If I couldn't make an impact on the history of the VHL as a whole (most wins, most awards, etc), I most certainly wanted to make an impact on my franchise. I wanted a Shaw win, I wanted a cup win, and eventually, I wanted a cup win where my player was recognized as a playoff MVP. The third of those goals, I thought, would take ages to accomplish. To my surprise, however...

 

 

...In season 66, I accomplished all three of those goals at once. Pepper split the Shaw trophy with future hall-of-famer and perennial thorn in his side, Kallis Kriketers. In the moment, I wondered if he truly deserved to split the award, but in hindsight I do think that the stat lines are close enough that a shared award makes enough sense. Back then, the award committee was a rotating group of users chosen to keep views fresh and decisions supposedly unbiased and unique, but that concept was eventually abandoned pretty quickly; likely a direct result of some of these award wins. I remember being on the committee at this time, and explicitly requesting to abstain from the vote because I couldn't remove myself from it enough to make a call. That lack of a vote resulted in the Pepper/Kallis tie, so I like to think that I made the right decision; I was too close to the situation, and truly couldn't pick one goalie over the other for that year.

 

Of course, that was one of only three trophies Pepper would see that year. With the season 66 cup win came the necessity of crowning a playoff MVP, which Pepper ended up taking home in a narrow vote over teammate Matt Thompson. This one, I think, is the vote that got the committee disbanded. The Titans, that year, were honestly just a good team. When putting all of their stats next to each other, it was admittedly difficult to find a true stand-out player to grant the award to. Since the group couldn't bring themselves to choose one player over the other, we were all tasked with ranking the players in order of how deserving we thought they were, from highest to lowest. A winner would be determined by adding up the sum total of the rankings. Satisfied with this system for voting, I ranked Thompson as the number 1 choice and Pepper as number 2, which is what I truly thought after looking at the entirety of the playoff run. Thompson would have won MVP under this voting system, had one user not inexplicably ranked him as last among their selections, taking his overall total and granting the award to Pepper, who ended up with the highest tally. While I was happy with achieving my goal so early in my overall VHL career, it didn't feel great to win it that way, and I've gone on record since stating that Thompson should absolutely have won that award.

 

 

The monkey's paw would curl as a result of the season 66 success, as Pepper would continue on exactly as he'd been playing throughout his entire career-- good, but not great. Still, as a career member of the Helsinki Titans, a team that had been racking up wins with him in the crease, Pepper began to approach a record I started regarding as my ultimate goal; the franchise leader for wins as a goaltender. While he certainly isn't the most revered goaltender in Titans history, I can proudly say that he ended up passing the actual best Titans goaltender Astrid Moon and other notable Tuomas Tukio for wins under the centurion's banner. In his eighth and final season in the VHL, he was just able to eclipse the 300 win mark, ending with a career total of 302. This was also an astounding milestone to hit since, at this point, no goaltender had eclipsed the 300 win mark and failed to reach the Hall of Fame. That was, of course, until Alexander Pepper hit 300 wins. Being the answer to this trivia question still bothers me, and is emblematic of the kind of "success" I felt with Pepper- existent, but undeserved and unremarkable. I achieved every goal I set out to complete with my first player, but all of them came with an asterisk. All of them, of course, aside from the franchise record.

 

 

Today, Pepper's number rests in the rafters of Helsinki's home ice; a reminder that his play and commitment were respected and revered by followers of the historic franchise. I cherish this moreso than any of the individual awards granted to Pepper, because it feels like the only thing he actually earned. I grew really close to the Titans franchise during his career, and they admittedly still hold an irreplaceable spot in my VHL heart. I wish Helsinki was in need of a goaltender right now, because I would genuinely love the chance to get between the pipes for the Titans again. Hell, after this career, maybe I'll pull an @Ahma and devote my future players to the Titans going forward. I love their logo, and I love being a little part of something far bigger than just me. I love that my legacy, however little, lives within this niche hockey world.

 

With Yor Bjorven now beginning his VHL tale, I hope to finally right some of the wrongs that were imposed on Pepper; I want to win a Shaw on my own this time, and I want to enter the Hall of Fame with a goalie. But with goalie being as bloated a position as ever, I also want to repeat the one thing I did right with number 37. I want to make a lasting impact on whatever franchise drafts me. I want to be able to say that, while I was out there lacing up the skates, that little patch of blue ice in front of the net belonged to me.

 

I want to love my team again.

 

1,200-ish words, claiming for 2 weeks