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Rule change regarding parity in the M


Ledge

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                      GMS: DON'T BE OFFENDED BY THIS. I'VE SEEN EVERY SINGLE TEAM DO IT AND IT'S JUST BECOME A NORM.

 

                         Fresh off the VHL sims, feeling pretty good about Zetterstrom's performance, I check out the M sims and am blindsided by blowout after blowout. I'm seeing games that are 7-3, 8-3, 7-2, and a couple 5-2s. But this isn't really the problem, just an example of aftermath. The issue with the VHLM right now is that teams are trying to win or tank. It's that simple. It was especially apparent at this draft, where teams like the Bulls and the Storm were just piling up picks; while teams like the Marlins struggled with no picks until the seventh round. After I watched that draft happening before my eyes, as Houston literally drafted half of the first round, I knew this season was going to be rough out of the gates. And it has been. The Bulls have only lost one game, and the Storm 3. They're doing that while the Aces and the Wild flounder, both with nine losses. The parody in this league is gone. 

 

            And then we take a look at the differences in roster sizes. Let's compare the the team with the most players, the Storm, versus the team with the least players, the Lynx.

 

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                We're looking at 22 players versus 9. That's a 13 player difference. And it's not one we can take lightly. This is not only affecting the crazy high scores of the games, but of the retention of members. If you can look closely, you'll see Sean Ramirez on Minnesota. He's an EFL guy, and so far he has claimed only base TPE and an affiliate PT. But what we're really going to look into is his ice time while playing for Minnesota. 

 

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      Two minutes and 33 seconds. And he's not the only one. Jacob Oldenburger, Nathan Askarov, and Gary Tarantino ll also had under 3 minutes of ice time in the game. And let me tell you, this is not acceptable. Let's now look at the ice time a bot got on Ottawa:

 

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The highest forward, which applies to Askarov and Ramirez, got more than 8 minutes of ice time, as well as limited power play and penalty killing time. That's a 6 minute difference, which, spread across a 72 game season, is a *pulls out calculator* 432 minute difference. Four hundred minutes. And that's not the worst of it

 

      Then there's the defenceman issue. At the draft, there was a massive run on defencemen. They were getting prioritized over forwards more than one hundred TPE more than them. And, believe it or not, the teams like the Bulls and the Storm, hogged all the defencemen! You wanna know how many defencemen Minnesota has? Seven. Ottawa? ONE! This is not acceptable! A bot defencemen on Ottawa got 20 minutes of ice time! When a defencemen on Minnesota gets less than 3! There's no way this happens unless a team is trying to win, and another is trying to not.

 

     

                  So after all those statistics and comparisons, I'll finally get to the part where I recommend a rule change. What I want to come out of this is a player limit on VHLM rosters. Nothing too sharp, so that teams have to constantly trade guys to stay under, but one that prevents what happened with the Storm and the Bulls to happen. It will also prioritize the use of the Juniors, which have gone untouched so far because of the massive gaps on the rosters of non-contenders. The limit could also change by season, so if we get a  massive recruitment wave, we can expand the limit. I'm welcome to criticism from GMs and commishes about this suggestion.

 

          Just to nail it in: THE VHLM IS ABOUT RETENTION AND DEVELOPMENT, NOT WINNING AND TANKING. Apologies to any GMs I may have offended while doing this, just know that I have seen every single team do what I just described in the last couple seasons.

 

 

670 words. I just wrote a media spot.

 

 

 

Edited by Ledge_and_Dairy
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  • Ledge changed the title to Rule change regarding parity in the M

Wow, it's always been known as a problem but when you put it that way it's so... blatant? The numbers are mindboggling. I know "solutions" have been floated and aggressively shot down before, like doing the EFCA thing where teams recruit/sign vs draft players to fill their teams. I'm sure there's lots of good reasons not to do this, but one reason I hear often that makes me sad is that M GMs don't want this because then the VHLM wouldn't be fun for me as a manager. My response to that is often "I don't care, the league isn't about you"  which understandably pisses off the person on the other side of the debate, but shouldn't because my answer is the correct one.

 

The other argument you make:

43 minutes ago, Ledge_and_Dairy said:

THE VHLM IS ABOUT RETENTION AND DEVELOPMENT, NOT WINNING AND TANKING.

is countered by: But players like winning so winning = retention and the conversation usually stalls there with both sides digging their heels in.

 

There's no easy answer without a complete overhaul of the system. There's a metagame in everything, and the M GMs have learned over the many, many past seasons that the way to win is to tank hardcore. As long as the draft exists, and managers have those draft picks as assets to be played with, teams will always buy and sell them in excessive amounts.

 

I love waiver signings because the players choose the situation that's best for them. If a team like Minny pitches you bottom-6 minutes and Ottawa promises you a spot on the top line, no duh I know where I'm going. But because that dynamic only happens with the literal worst players in the league, and only for a very short amount of time, it really doesn't move the needle in any meaningful way.

 

I think over the course of arguing with myself in this response, I've talked myself into wanting a free-for-all VHLM where players sign on waivers and stay with that team until graduation. It forces organizations to make themselves attractive to potential players. The player has to choose them, and not the other way around. This gives players a lot more agency in creating opportunity for themselves (which is huge since we've had a handful of new members recently complaining about a lack of ice time.) By players choosing to take spots on empty teams, the roster imbalance slowly disappears. Of course there's always negatives, like a Vasteras-style situation forming where a team gets such a bad rap that players refuse to sign there, but that becomes a problem that affects the GM and not the brand new member we're trying to engage and retain.

 

It'll never happen because I'm justbigAL, but for what its worth, I think you raised a good point using science and objective data that really merits a response and serious discussion by those in power.

Edited by bigAL
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5 hours ago, bigAL said:

I think over the course of arguing with myself in this response, I've talked myself into wanting a free-for-all VHLM where players sign on waivers and stay with that team until graduation.

I like the concept of all creates before TDL are signed on waivers and stay on their team until graduation. All creates after the TDL go into the draft, so recreates particularly are more able to be spread out and not overload a team. Can also have a rule implemented to ban draft and trades until after 10 games into the M season. Few random ideas.

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Season 75 was quite possibly the best season the VHLM has ever had. Ordinarily, there's maybe four or so teams with a real shot at the Cup, two or three more that are decent, and one team that makes the playoffs by accident. But last season, we had the deepest draft ever, no exaggeration. There was enough talent for eight teams to legitimately stake a claim to make a run for the cup. Parity was at an all-time high because there were enough players for multiple teams to field strong rosters. 

 

As you mentioned, that wasn't the case this season. Without the tremendous depth, less teams got filled up. I got stuck without a goalie because some teams drafted multiple goaltenders, and a free agent decided to sign with a team that already had a goalie on it because he likes boats or something. No new goalies have been created either, likely because of that red box that explicitly states not to create goalies. It more or less took an act of mercy from @Zetterberg for Saskatoon to get a goalie after mercifully just three games with an AI bot. We're 4-8-1 since then. Definitely not as good as last season, but I'd hardly call that floundering when a vast majority of the team graduated or returned to the draft, with many of this season's picks used to compete last season. It's difficult to consistently compete, and what you see here is the result of eight teams having big seasons and four others building looking ahead. 

 

We can't force members to play on teams either. Teams are required to offer on players until they're full, which means you'll have members who want to be on a team that's likely to win a Cup, even if they're a glorified waterboy, than get top line minutes on a team where they're gonna get destroyed every game. A member can choose to turn down a team where they'll get 72 starts for another that has a goalie with similar TPE and split starts because they like the logo of a team whose performance is calculated with code. It's one thing to trade for and stash talent, but if a member is happy to be where they signed, it's all good. Happiness is retention. 

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2 hours ago, Spartan said:

I like the concept of all creates before TDL are signed on waivers and stay on their team until graduation. All creates after the TDL go into the draft, so recreates particularly are more able to be spread out and not overload a team.

 

A lot of members are likely to sign on a loaded team knowing they can get a Cup, then be drafted elsewhere and avoid the rebuild. I think other teams would stand a better chance if prospects got to stay on that team, knowing they're getting good minutes and helping for a run the next season. 

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1 minute ago, Doomsday said:

 

A lot of members are likely to sign on a loaded team knowing they can get a Cup, then be drafted elsewhere and avoid the rebuild. I think other teams would stand a better chance if prospects got to stay on that team, knowing they're getting good minutes and helping for a run the next season. 

I would contest that point that a team that is loaded would have reached that status by being aggressive on waivers and prior drafts. I don't know how it would be any worse than our current TDL recreate situation, where most find their ways onto contending teams regardless. It would also give recreates a little bit of freedom for like, a quarter of a season to pick where to play and who to play with. I don't think the issue is avoiding a rebuild, since that's more on the GM to be managing their team with their goals and whatnot in mind, than on a TDL+ signing to be trying not to make or break a team's future. Not sure if that made sense, but I don't think that a quarter of a season would make a massive difference.

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1 minute ago, Spartan said:

I would contest that point that a team that is loaded would have reached that status by being aggressive on waivers and prior drafts. I don't know how it would be any worse than our current TDL recreate situation, where most find their ways onto contending teams regardless. It would also give recreates a little bit of freedom for like, a quarter of a season to pick where to play and who to play with. I don't think the issue is avoiding a rebuild, since that's more on the GM to be managing their team with their goals and whatnot in mind, than on a TDL+ signing to be trying not to make or break a team's future. Not sure if that made sense, but I don't think that a quarter of a season would make a massive difference.

 

I'm referring more to the pre-deadline guys. It becomes less about the now and a bit more about the future as well. A team built to win now may not be able to play you much, but next season you could be a big player on a suddenly-poor team. As opposed to a team that doesn't have much the first year, where you get two seasons of being a main guy, along with a potential run the second season. It throws a major wrench into the process, one that could maybe restore some balance. 

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1 minute ago, Doomsday said:

 

I'm referring more to the pre-deadline guys. It becomes less about the now and a bit more about the future as well. A team built to win now may not be able to play you much, but next season you could be a big player on a suddenly-poor team. As opposed to a team that doesn't have much the first year, where you get two seasons of being a main guy, along with a potential run the second season. It throws a major wrench into the process, one that could maybe restore some balance. 

I think we both agree with the idea suggested lmao. But yeah, the SHL uses this system for their minors and I think it works very nicely since it treats both waivers and drafted players equally in importance.

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The lack of parity in the VHLM is something that really gets on my nerves. It's tough, but possible for teams to remain competitive for multiple seasons, but a lot of teams just decide to go boom or bust, rebuild, repeat. It's not fun to watch, and to be honest, for me at least, it wasn't much fun to be a part of. When my player was in the M, I was on a pretty stacked Houston team. We ended up getting bounced, and the team proceeded to go into the basement. I wanted to stay with the team, even if they weren't going to be that good, because I knew my player was going to get a lot more minutes, and in my opinion, playing time > Winning. With how the M goes, however, I was traded to another stacked team in Halifax. Guess what happened to Halifax after that season. Now Houston is looking amazing again while Halifax is sitting close to the bottom of the standings. It's just not entertaining to see 1-3 super teams, 1-3 completely tanking teams, and then a bunch of "eh" teams in the middle. There's always going to be a really good team, and there's always going to be a really bad team, but it shouldn't be a nearly unbeatable team and a team that couldn't win a game even if the other team had a soccer goal. Parity needs to be promoted, supported, and eventually become the norm. We can't have just one season every ten where the league actually looks balanced.

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