D u m m y: A Comprehensive Report on Thiccness in the VHL

[Gustav 6,407]

I planned on starting off this article with a bunch of screenshots of people asking how height and weight affect sims and stats, but when I searched it up in the league server I found out that the bot displays a player's height and weight when one does the .player thing and that filled up just about all the search results I got for either term. So, just picture a series of screenshots here.

 

Now that you've done that, let's talk about being THICC. I saw a Reddit post a while back ranking NHL captains based on thiccness (height divided by weight). I then thought, hey, why not do a VHL article on this? I can make a spreadsheet, talk about what I found, and get some sweet-and-spicy TPE dropped on Taro for the next few weeks. Let's get on with this--oh, and for those wondering, Alex Ovechkin would be the VHL's 4th-thiccest player. 

 

For anyone who wants to just look at the sheet and doesn't care to read my article (shame on you), the sheet is here.

 

No, I'm just messing with you. It's actually here (if you just clicked the first link without continuing to read, then double shame on you!). The second page is very messy because that's where I played with things to generate the charts that will come later, but the first should be fairly presentable and easy to follow. For those who don't care or don't understand, I'll use the rest of this article to go over the highlights.

 

From what I have heard, weight has a slight positive effect on checking. I've also heard that height has zero effect whatsoever--we'll see how true that is. The general trend, if it's present, should be shown reasonably well by thiccness, as more weight = more thiccness in general (we'll also take a sample look at weight later on, and see if numbers are influenced more closely by weight than by thiccness).

 

Choosing maximum height and maximum weight for your player (6'8"/250) will get you pretty high up on the thicc list--in fact, you'll be in a nine-way tie for 5th. Let's highlight the league's thiccest, and see how their careers have progressed until this point.

 

4. Jared Spaz |  | @Spaz

Height: 5'10" | Weight: 220 lb. | Thiccness: 3.14 lb/in

Spaz came along after the S69 VHLM draft and played that season and his draft year, S70, in the minors, before making the move up. An underrated player and the third-highest in TPA among Helsinki forwards, he's hit the point-per-game mark twice, hitting a career high in points and goals this past season. One might think that being thicc would lead to a physical build here, but that's not the case--with 40 CK, he's been less than noteworthy in the hits column and has primarily focused on offensive output.

 

3. Joe Proto |  | @Proto

Height: 6'3" | Weight: 236 lb. | Thiccness: 3.15 lb/in

Proto came into the league as one of the most promising new members in recent memory, max earning from the start and finding himself in team management positions fairly quickly. A first-round pick in Vancouver (perhaps the first red flag given the history of first-round picks in Vancouver), he disappeared altogether from the league soon after over some personal disagreements. Playing for five teams over his four VHL seasons, his career has been up-and-down, reaching a career high in points in S74 with Davos and Vancouver but being relegated to a depth role this season in London and seeing limited production as a result. He hasn't put up much in the hit column, save for S74, but that's likely more due to number inflation than thiccness as he hasn't shown up to nearly as great an extent in any other season.

 

2. Edwin THE Encarnacion |  | @Tagger

Height: 6'2" | Weight: 235 lb. | Thiccness: 3.18 lb/in

Encarnacion came along as one in a line of many incarnations of legendary Blue Jays power-hitting meathead Edwin Encarnacion, and being a top earner from a respected player agency, went first overall to Calgary in S70. Putting up a respectable career as a defender until this season (breaking the point-per game mark in S73 and 74), he switched to forward to fill a positional need for the Wranglers and put up a career high in points this season yet again. Yet another player who wasn't built to hit, Encarnacion has been relatively unimpressive on the stat sheet when it comes to checking, and as such also cannot be looked at as a player whose two-way game has been helped significantly by thiccness.

 

1. Micah Adrienne |  | @Poptart

Height: 6'6" | Weight: 250 lb. | Thiccness: 3.21 lb/in

Yes, the VHL'S THICCEST PLAYER is Micah Adrienne. The Wolves' top defender went 3rd overall in S73, and has played fairly consistently since--each season has registered between 53 and 58 points. Something interesting to look at, though, is the fact that he's the only player in the top four to actually have Checking upgraded to even a semi-significant extent. So far, Adrienne hasn't put up anything eye-popping, but this may be something to keep an eye on in future seasons--if thiccness has a positive effect on checking, Adrienne could be one to have in your predictions.

 

That being said, though...it's not like the top of the board as a whole would make one think based on a look at the stat sheet that thiccness is helpful at all. None of these four run away with any category, and it's not like the builds of three out of the four would support any kind of physical game by themselves. What we need to do now is to take a look at the data.

 

 

I'd first like to preface this statistical analysis bit by saying that in no way does anything I'm about to say prove anything. Correlations are very loose and any "effects" which may be hinted at or speculated on are very slight. In fact, it is my personal opinion that effects are slight enough that this is not something even worth mentioning when talking about player builds. R-squared values are practically nonexistent, and for anyone who doesn't know what that means, we cannot draw any sort of conclusion from this set of data.

 

Anyway...

 

Something that I found interesting, before we get into the physical aspect of things, is that thiccness may have some very limited positive influence across the board--the trendlines for goals, assists, and points for each position group have a positive correlation to thiccness. These trendlines are more extreme for forwards, though this is likely due to the fact that forwards simply put up more points, so an increase of, say, 3 points per season is more significant for a defender.

 

Here's an example:

 

Distribution here is very close to random, suggesting that thiccness has no effect on goals..

 

HOWEVER! This does not mean that thiccness is the cause--it could just be TPE. I'm too lazy to do anything beyond the eye test, but simply looking at the distribution on page 1 of the spreadsheet makes me think that higher-TPE players tend to be more on the thicc side--the top 10% of players by thiccness have a good number of players who I know to be high-TPE veterans, and just about all high earners in the bottom 10% are young enough that they're still lower in TPE as a whole. This could simply be the league's TPE distribution at work, rather than thiccness.

 

But what about the physical part? That's what I mentioned in the first place. Can we say that, as a player gets more thicc, they become a better checker? An initial look suggests that this might be the case:

 

 

But we do have to take into account that there's something else influencing hits as well, that being the lovely stat of checking. What if we do our best to take checking out of the equation--say, by dividing hits by checking rating to get us a stat that's more independent of the influence of CK on hits and allows us to evaluate the influence of thiccness more purely?

 

 

...yeah, that's less promising. What little there is left of the R-squared value gets almost divided by six, and the trendline flattens out significantly. An uneducated opinion might be that yes, thiccness influences checking, but the distribution we get by actually taking checking rating into account just about proves that it doesn't.

 

...but Gustav, you said you thought height is completely worthless, and thiccness involves height! You're correct! Let's take a look at this distribution, but with pure weight substituted for thiccness.

 

 

Even more worthless! R-squared is even less, and the trendline is even flatter.

 

 

So, to conclude, height and weight do not matter. New people ask all the time and are told many different things about it. I'm here to tell you, perhaps more definitively than ever before, that it will not do anything for your player. Go forth and be thicc (or not, I don't care).

 

1,509 words/3 weeks

[Beaviss 4,957]

I feel like a smarter person for reading this... 11/10

[Bobo 514]

Loved the new info. T H I C C 

[Spaz 297]

Fun fact I didn't mean to make my player weigh that much I didn't know what I was doing at the time, also you're too kind to me gustav thank you

[bigAL 2,176]

Gawd damn I hope you get some sorta college credit for this

[Bayley 419]

[BOOM 8,745]

What? 

 

[Beketov 9,025]

I’ve always kinda figured they’d didn’t do much for skaters but it would be interesting to see the same in depth look for goalies and see if it changes anything.

[Garsh 1,190]

1 minute ago, Beketov said:

I’ve always kinda figured they’d didn’t do much for skaters but it would be interesting to see the same in depth look for goalies and see if it changes anything.

 

According to the holy book of Simon T himself it's useless because goalies have the size attribute.  That's from the V3 manual and I don't know enough about STHS to know if that means V3 of the manual or V3 of the engine or whatever.  Also who knows if he knows.

 

Weight & Height - No Impact. The rating Size is use instead.

 

This is what he says about it for skaters

Weight & Height - The heavier and bigger the players are, the more hit he'll give.

[Beketov 9,025]

8 minutes ago, Garsh said:

 

According to the holy book of Simon T himself it's useless because goalies have the size attribute.  That's from the V3 manual and I don't know enough about STHS to know if that means V3 of the manual or V3 of the engine or whatever.  Also who knows if he knows.

 

Weight & Height - No Impact. The rating Size is use instead.

 

This is what he says about it for skaters

Weight & Height - The heavier and bigger the players are, the more hit he'll give.

The manual says a lot of things that don’t seem to actually be the case.

[Jubis 1,348]

My player too thin 

[Berocka 2,263]

3 hours ago, BOOM said:

What? 

 

Glad to see you've really jumped on the Blues as your team

[Gustav 6,407]

3 hours ago, Garsh said:

This is what he says about it for skaters

Weight & Height - The heavier and bigger the players are, the more hit he'll give.

 

Get dabbed on Simon

 

3 hours ago, Beketov said:

I’ve always kinda figured they’d didn’t do much for skaters but it would be interesting to see the same in depth look for goalies and see if it changes anything.

 

I have things reasonably well set up to look at goalies too, but I figured since he straight-up says it doesn't do anything (and the sample size is comparatively low), anything I'd put out would be more misleading than helpful unless there's somehow a super close correlation.

[BOOM 8,745]

45 minutes ago, Berocka said:

Glad to see you've really jumped on the Blues as your team

 

 

[Gustav 6,407]

Week 2

[rory 1,916]

how does the 5'10, 158 lb legend jeffrey pines factor into this

[Gustav 6,407]

9 hours ago, rory said:

how does the 5'10, 158 lb legend jeffrey pines factor into this

 

If you check the spreadsheet, Pines is below the 10th percentile in thiccness and comes in as the league's 192nd-thiccest player.

[rory 1,916]

Just now, GustavMattias said:

 

If you check the spreadsheet, Pines is below the 10th percentile in thiccness and comes in as the league's 192nd-thiccest player.

thanks I don't read spreadsheets

[Gustav 6,407]

Week 3/3