VIKING Wins First Brand Tournament

[Devise 4,475]

Instead of talking about the results of the first tournament most of the league has been engaged in healthy debates regarding the success and potential tweaks of the first brand Tournament. Because of that I'll take the time to send out a proper congratulations to General Manager of the VIKING Brand @tfong for a stellar first season outing.

 

As the simmer, if you want thoughts on why/how VIKING and Fong did it, I'll say it was a combination of good roster management and believe it or not, good line management. Throughout the tournament as I loaded other teams lines, and granted there was an error in the first sim where it defaulted Haterade to auto lines (I discovered this was due to them having a 3rd goalie, and at the request of their GM I swapped Mertz to play back up over Davison in a couple of occasions early in the season, those games for whatever reason became automatic lines for Haterade.) But in general, even after other GM's finally sorted their lines out in terms of getting them correctly submitted, what I'm talking about is more strategies.

 

The Brand tournament featured a lot of first time GM's and because of that, a lot of GM's clearly didn't understand how lines were supposed to work. Early on I had a couple of teams who left CPU wingers on lines assuming that Centers LW and RW all had to play at their natural positions. That is false. The other thing I would often see is even if CPU's weren't loaded on lines often teams to players weren't playing top minutes. One team had their top two forwards playing on the second and third line respectively. Perhaps it was the GM's familiarity with VHLM players on the roster? Lastly, and the big ticker, VIKING actually set strategic lines. I believe only two other of the GM's on my collection did so. Many teams were rocking the "defaulted" 2 offense, 2 defense, 1 physical strategy on all lines, and if you go to the other tab to see team wide strats depending on if your up or down in the game, defaulted to the same thing. 

 

Hopefully these are the type of growing pains that these new GM's grow from and learn. It only seems fitting that we have a bunch of new GM's learning the ropes with this just as I'm learning simming, that way when we all make mistakes (myself included) we don't all look as bad.  

 

Anyway congrats to VIKING, it was well deserved Tfong had his eye one the ball the whole time and I can easily say without hesitation that it is super fitting that he and his team won the first Sponsor's Shield tournament, as Fong was one of the most, if not the most, engaged members regarding Brand from the get go.