rainsilent

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Everything posted by rainsilent

  1. There are significantly better options than the one that you are suggesting to solve the problem at hand. One example would be players asking for larger salaries so that the better teams can't just stack their rosters and then not ever worry about cap issues. That would mean that there would be better players in FA, and more of them too. As for the SHL to GHL jump being big. Yes, it is the largest by a noticeable margin. But it is something that you can prepare for as a SHL manager to a degree. If you do a good job building your team at the SHL level a number of your players can be effective role players at the GHL level. That means that you only need 3-6 players that are capable of carrying your team. The easiest way to get one is your 1st round pick when you promote. The top 4 in most drafts are going to have players that you can build a franchise around. Bad drafts won't but they aren't common. Great drafts will have 8+ such players. At the current moment most FAs will only have 2-6 other such players that might be able to fill said role. This makes it really hard for new teams to the GHL to actually stick around. That said this means that it would probably be best for new teams to plan to bounce up, down and then back up again.
  2. Increased demands would include more 1 way contracts. As it is you can convince 87 overall players, and even higher if the player is green in greed, to take two way contracts and that is quite ridiculous. By 85 overall 1 way should pretty much be the enforced norm with players not willing to take a two way at all at that point. Getting player demands to be more in line with what they reasonably should be would really solve most of this. It would genuinely solve a good chunk of demoting teams trading players away too as there would be fewer teams with the cap space to trade for higher quality players. As I asked when the motion was put forth to increase the cap from 60 million so long ago; "What is the point of having a cap if it isn't forcing you to make difficult decisions on who to keep when you have a good team?" Edit: Look at how trading in the NHL has really dried up over the past two seasons. Why? Because most teams are very close to the cap. As in most teams are within ~ 2 million of the cap. In the past most teams had anywhere from 5-10 million in cap space and there were a lot of trades. One more thing I would like to point out in relation to players at 85 demanding 1 way contracts. Something you see when a player reaches 83 overall is the notion that they feel like they are too good for the affiliate. So why aren't they demanding 1 way contracts in negotiations then? Why are they accepting two way contracts on contract renewals?
  3. I can see a legitimate argument for 30 but not much more than that. The bigger thing that will go into fixing a lot in terms of player hoarding and a lack of FAs is having players demand more salary. To give everyone a perspective on how easy it is to keep an absolutely stacked team together top players ask for around 6-7 million a season tops, unless they are greedy. The cap at the GHL level is 71.5. So top players are only asking for typically, at most, 10% of the cap available to a team. That means that teams can easily hold onto 6-7 of the top players in the league and still have enough room cap wise to fill the rest of their team with high end players. Those high end players playing more depth roles will, because they are playing depth roles, never ask for much more than depth role money even though they are players fully capable of playing top line roles in the league. Compare this to the NHL where top players get paid at least, with new contracts, 15% of the cap when you ignore the AAV adjustments due to back-diving contracts. Crosby, when he signed his current deal, signed for 8.7 million against the cap, due to the contract being back-diving he was getting paid 12 million actual, when the cap was at 64.3 million. Cap wise he was getting paid 13.5% of the cap while salary wise he was getting paid 18.7% of the cap. It was rumored that Crosby was going to get 10 mil a season average against the cap. He would have if the last 3 seasons of his deal weren't 3 mil each. Either way, we can't back-dive contracts in this game so I am removing those 3 seasons from the discussion. Crosby demanded, and got, 18.7% of the cap. The next big contract to look at is Malkin. He signed for 9.5 the next season when the cap was at 69 million. That is a cap hit of only 13.8%. Why was his lower? He took a "home team discount," partially forced by Crosby's contract the season prior and partially because Malkin didn't want a back diving contract. His cap hit should be higher as he is clearly the statistical outlier as I will show later. The next big contracts were the duo of Kane and Toews. They both signed the exact same back-diving contracts of 10.5 aav and 13.8 actual when the cap was 71.4. Because we can't do back diving contracts the actual salary is what we are concerned with and 13.8 is 19.3% of the cap. The next big contract to look at is McDavid's. AAV of 12.5 but a slight back-diving contract means that his actual early salary is 15 mil when the cap was at 79.5. That is 18.9% of the cap. We are missing one massive contract example though. Ovechkin's 08-09 resigning. The AAV is just over 9.5 million but his contract was 13 years total with the first 6 being 9 mil a season and the last 7 being 10. So how do we calculate this one as it isn't back diving? It really won't matter as the cap was only 56.7 million that season. It is going to be 16.8% if you use the 9.5 something AAV or 17.6% if you use the 10 mil seasonal pay. That is what NHL players are getting payed relative to what the cap is. The closest example we have to go by to our cap in the game is Kane and Toews. If we go by that and compare what top player demands are for us in game you will find that top players are asking for about half of what they should be percentage wise. Imagine McDavid getting paid around 7 million a season and how much that would help the Oilers cap wise. That is what is going on in our game at the moment as top players should be asking for about double what they are actually asking for at the moment. This doesn't mean that all players should be asking for about double what they currently are. However, players that fall just under the top rate players should easily be asking for 7-8 million rather than the ~5 million that they are asking for at the moment while 3-4 million players should be asking for 5-6 million. Players asking for more appropriate salaries relative to their actual skill level, as well as relative to the cap, would go a long, long way into fixing both of the issues presented here. I'd even go so far as to say that a roster limit would be made redundant with the increased salary demands. Also note that I only think that player salary demands need to be adjusted at the GHL level. They seem fairly appropriate at every other level.
  4. The way I see spirit is along the lines of what is described here from 7:50 to about 8:05 and I'd rather have a team that fits what is said here than pretty much any other kind of team. Basically I see spirit as how much effort the player puts into the play, how willing they are to give the extra effort, et cetera. I'd rather have a team like the 2000 Wild or the late Bruke lead Flames team where they are known for how hard working and playing the team is, how committed they are, how willing to do the extra stuff, et cetera. That is just how I like my teams though and how I would rather my teams be known for no matter how they otherwise might play.
  5. So the opposing goalie stole 2 of those games. Oof.
  6. Were you at least close in those games? How did your team on the whole and players individually play?
  7. While there might be some truth to it there is a massive negative drawback that goes along with it. Holding on to those players is an active restriction to what you can do in FA while also being an active handicap to your teams performance. You are holding on to a player, bringing several detrimental side effects to your team in the process, just for a, most of the time, modest trade value. It isn't worth holding back your team because of that. Yet the reason the latter part of 2 and the entirety of 3 is true at all is because managers hoard players that don't work for them when they shouldn't. If they let them go to FA the FA pool would have many more players in it and so long as you went in looking for what you needed rather than strictly the best overall player there wouldn't be many bidding wars. The only getting lucky there would be would be in outbidding for the top players. Which, to be honest, should be how that sort of goes anyways. It is literally a self perpetuating issue. The fact that there is no real cap crunch for the really deep GHL teams only serves to add to it. If I had this same mindset I never would have gotten any of my current 4th line players. A 4th line that is, performance wise, one of the best 4th lines around. I traded better overall players for Stubna, Stang and Reason. I traded those players because they weren't working in the role that I had them filling. I didn't trade for Stubna, Stang and Reason knowing, or even thinking, that they would be as good as they are. I traded for them thinking that they had the skill set to perform good enough on the 4th line for the duration of the contracts that they were on. Meaning that they would fill that role until I let them go and filled their spots with better players. Some of those players were from AI teams. The rest Anders created because the player pool that was generated at the start was strictly to fill the teams meaning that there were no extra players to go around at any level. As I said above though, if managers weren't hoarding players that they didn't need or players that weren't performing for them the FA pool wouldn't be nonexistent. Top end players would still be a rarity, as they should be, but quality 2nd and 3rd line players would be notably more abundant if managers didn't unnecessarily hoard players. This is really going to become a pointed problem in the GHL the further we go because teams with great depth are allowed to keep their rosters due to players not increasing their salary demands enough. It was a serious problem in the past and it will be a problem in the future too if the two faster leagues are any indication.
  8. I hate games like that Paul. I get that they will happen but I still hate them none the less. You did end up getting the consolation of a 1-0 loss rather than a bad blowout.
  9. Quite a cool graph you put together and quite interesting results. I know for a while my team in Biscuit was a slow starter nearly every season. One season my team was so slow out of the gate that I wasn't out of the bottom 4 by the 15 game mark and wasn't in a playoff position until after the halfway mark. I don't look at it in terms of quarters. I look at it in terms of individual streaks. The only time I have ever had a streak happen to one of my teams that I didn't really see coming due to the trend in how my team was playing was 2 seasons ago with my Buzzer team. After winning 5 of the last 7 or 8 games, including one win against the 3rd ranked team in my conference, my team just randomly tanked the last 10 games of the season with team confidence randomly going from blue/ok to yellow/crisis.
  10. The only thing I can say in regards to late season collapses is that every team tends to go through hot and cold streaks. Long runs, like the one my team is currently on, are rare and teams usually go 5-10 games to the good, then back and forth for a number of games, then 5-10 games to the bad, then back and forth again before the process repeats. Players tend to do the same with some players more up and down than others. The best I hope for in those regards is that my team doesn't enter a slump going into the playoffs. If anything I would rather my team be digging out of a slump going into the playoffs rather than starting to fall into one. That way falling into a slump late in the season doesn't bother me so long as I have around 10 games before the playoffs so my team can dig out of it. Ideally you would want to start to get on a hot streak going into the playoffs but we have no control over that. Edit: Just to note; 5-10 games is not the winning or losing streaks themselves. It is the general trend that the team is going in terms of play.
  11. Alex I don't think your backup is good enough to really be a good backup at the GHL level. He is a really good overall goalie regarding his skill set but 86 reflexes is bad when a lot of the shooters facing you have 95+ shooting. This is because a number of managers resign pretty much everyone on their roster, usually until they get really old, no matter their actual performance. It is, frankly, a stupid practice. If your team has issues why are you going to keep bringing back the same players and the same team and expect something different? If there is an issue with the performance of a player trade them or let them go when their current contract is up. I don't mean to bad mouth Erzac but his team is a prime example. After his S1 championship his team has been struggling to get the results despite the talent. At what point do you stop banging your head against the wall and accept that you need to change up the roster in some way? You don't have to go chasing 'better' overall players to get better results either. If I had his team I would have turned over almost the entire lower half of that roster a season ago because many of them are just playing poorly for whatever reason. Too many managers get too overall focused and also get too locked up in the team that they have. As for your goalie issues, I think it is down to a lack of endurance in both goalies. Your backup is actually playing rather well on the whole. When both goalies have low endurance giving adequate rest for your starter is quite difficult when the backup has an occasional bad game. When my buzzer team was in its second season, down in the IHL, my starter and backup both had low endurance and a chain reaction happened where both goalies ended up yellow tired. Both of them got hurt in the next game that they started. In my opinion, finding a goalie you wouldn't mind splitting starting time with Amick would be the way to go. Try to get a two goalie system where your second goalie has more endurance and can play a few extra games like what I have with Wilcot.
  12. I don't. I look at it to see if a player is comfortable in their role if they are struggling. Beyond that, it is interesting to look at. As for your team doing well defensively and losing by 3 goals, look at a few things. Did your goalie have a bad game? Alternately, do the game and player stats match up with that? Your team can still play well but be outdone by a few skilled players. Or the opposing team's special teams can get all of the goals effectively bypassing your team's D.
  13. Edit 3: Everything finally updated.
  14. Personally, I agree with you on Rask vs Thomas.
  15. Ah, sorry. Freddy is a top 10 goalie in the league when at his best. The team in front of him is only 2nd to the Red Wings in terms of how bad it is defensively and yet he gets the stats that he does. Frankly, that is incredible. Without his goaltending the Leafs wouldn't have made the playoffs those three years that it has with him. There is a reason that the only backup that has been remotely decent behind him is McElhinney. If Freddy weren't an elite goalie talent the Leafs would be taking the spot of the Oilers in the joke of the league department. In all fairness, that is top 20 all time with what looks a 200 game filter applied. Look at Andrew Hammond's career stats. 56 games played, .923 save percentage and 2.31 GAA. While he isn't an elite goalie, I don't think he has gotten a fair chance to stick in the NHL either. I see him as another Thomas Greiss at best. It doesn't help that the teams he has gone to since he left Ottawa have had either established backups or had someone from seemingly nowhere show up and play amazing. That said, in terms of that list. While not all are all time greats, and are a byproduct of the era to some degree, that doesn't mean that they aren't highly skilled goalies. Looking at that list, only two players stand out as potential question marks or otherwise statistical outliers. Kuemper and Khudobin. Schneider has been effectively killed career wise by injuries. Lehner is a world class elite talent that is fighting mental demons. Lundqvist has been finally caught by age as it looks like he can barely move around in net compared to in the past. I could go through each. Outside of home plate save percentage, general save percentage is the best stat to look at for goalie performance in general in my opinion. It is the only one that otherwise gives a relative clue as to how good the goalie is actually performing. If you look through goalie stats by era you will find that the best goalies of the era are almost always the ones with the best save percentages. GAA can vary wildly but save percentage is rather constant. Granted, save percentage can be inflated to some degree as well however constant numbers can't be ignored. Ultimately though, we are trying to split the hairs of greatness. Like players, goalies don't get great stats consistently by accident.
  16. He doesn't. His career playoff save percentage is only .918. Absolutely incredible for the time but it doesn't come close to Rask's .927. Edit: Brodeur has a career playoff save percentage of .919. Edit 2: Career playoff stats of every goalie with more than 10 games from the past century ranked by save percentage; http://www.nhl.com/stats/goalies?reportType=season&seasonFrom=19191920&seasonTo=20192020&gameType=3&filter=gamesPlayed,gte,10&sort=savePct&page=0&pageSize=50
  17. Actually, the Tim Thomas comment didn't bring it up. Just the harping on Rask. In terms of Thomas; Boston dominated 5 of the 7 games against Vancouver yet only won 4. Boston lost a game because Thomas had a sub par game. It isn't like Thomas was perfect. As for Rask, he is the only reason Boston was able to beat Toronto two years in a row in the first round. One series he stood on his head to keep the Bruins in the series at times. The other, he stood on his head in game 7 allowing the Bruins to win a wild game 7. The Philly collapse was as much, and even more so in my opinion, the team in front of him rather than him. The Chicago loss wasn't his fault at all. Both late goals the D left him out to dry. Same goes for the loss against the Blues. One goal Marchand left the team out to dry. Every other goal Rask had no chance on. For whatever reason, you put more blame on Rask than is warranted. For a passionate fan I guess that is to be expected to some degree. Hard for me to truly say when I am not a fan of any one team over another unless we talk international hockey.
  18. I would argue he does and he is quietly the best goalie in the world currently but what do I know I guess. Look at his career stats, both regular season and playoffs. Regular season wise he currently has the 2nd best career save percentage all time behind only Dominik Hasek with an amazing .922. That is if you ignore the career stats of Chris Driedger, Igor Shesterkin (who I think is the modern Dominik Hasek), Andrew Hammond, Calvin Petersen, Pavel Francouz and Elvis Merzlikins. With over 500 games played that isn't by accident. Playoffs wise he is 12th best if you limit it to goalies that have played in at least 10 games with a .927 save percentage in 89 career playoff games. The 11 goalies in front of him? Manny Fernandez (11 games), Olaf Kolzig (45 games), Tomas Vokoun (22 games), Braden Holtby (89 games), Ben Bishop (49 games), Craig Anderson (46 games), Jonas Hiller (33 games), Cory Schneider (14 games), Tim Thomas (51 games), Robin Lehner (10 games) and Mike Smith (24 games). If I may say, you are almost sounding like a Leafs fan at the current moment with their doom and gloom statements about their team and how their players are overpaid and thus bad. I never thought that the Leafs were a cup contender coming into this year. How could they be when they got significantly worse as a team? Their team D got much worse and their offensive depth got worse too. They are complaining about Matthews and Marner being overpaid when those two have been two of the best players all season for the team. I see the current Leafs team the exact same way as I saw the Caps in the early Ovechkin era. They even have similar team composition problems in general. The biggest difference is that the Caps didn't spend a massive chunk of cap on 4 players. Them overpaying Nylander and arguably Marner wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't signed Tavaras. It isn't that Tavaras is a bad player. It is that signing him never made any actual sense. Toronto needed D badly and instead they spent 11 million on Tavaras when they had Matthews and Kadri. Had they not spent that 11 million on Tavaras they could have gone after Calvin de Haan or John Moore that offseason. No, they aren't top 4 dmen but how useful would one of them be for Toronto currently? Alternately, this past offseason they could have gone after Stralman, Nemeth, Myers or Shattenkirk. Shattenkirk would have been a great stand in for Barrie, at a cheaper rate, while also not losing Kadri in the process to get him. The only reason Shattenkirk didn't work in New York is that his skill set can't carry a team. However it is a great skill set to have to compliment skilled offensive players. Relatively low risk with relatively high reward. To add on, look at the upcoming FAs on D. Pietrangilo, Vatanen, Edmundson and van Riemsdyk to name 4. 18 million in cap space and a potential top 4 D group of Reilly, Pietr, Muzzin and Shat could have been had with say, 7 million in cap space left. Instead Toronto fans are stuck with a massively flawed roster for the next 4 seasons at least.
  19. Well done. That is not an easy thing to do.
  20. The expected finish time is for a normal report of the given category. A more thorough report will be one day longer.
  21. A pure offensive with a pure defensive? No. However you can put a two way that is good offensively or defensively with the other.
  22. If you want to have the best chance for your goalies to have good stats have a good defensive team in front of them. That is the case with Lang last year. A better defensive team is going to reduce the number of quality shots against and make it more difficult to get to a position for a quality shot. Having low positioning and athletic can be overcome with a better defensive team. Personally I am more willing to trade positioning over athleticism. That said knowing the team that I have is why I felt somewhat comfortable in getting the backup that my GHL team currently has. Wilcot, talent wise, is not too dissimilar to what Lang brought in terms of style. While I would never expect him to get the same results as Lang I think I can get decent numbers out of him. That comes down to knowing my team and players. That said, by the end of the season, I fully expect Wilcot's numbers to be worse than 2.30 GAA and 925 save percentage. I'll be quite pleased if he stays below 2.5 GAA and above 915 save percentage. From my experience reflexes is the most important goalie skill. I've never seen a goalie with low reflexes relative to the league standard have good stats consistently. From there the team in front and how it plays is going to go into determining what other skills need to be high and the relative performance of the goalie. One final thing to add. I don't think nervous is BS. I think people try to put too much into it. They want it to be an easy or straightforward answer to why or why not when there is no such thing as an easy or straightforward answer in a complex sim. I do think that nervous played a role in Lang's poor playoff performance last season. It wasn't the entire reason for it though.
  23. Energy line is about 60% of your answer. Shut down is that but only to the skilled players on the opposing team. The last 40% is the players you put on that line. Most managers seem to be wary of making such a line as the players in question typically lack skill for physicality and spirit. Edit: The next thing is that you have to give the players enough time on ice to make a positive difference. I see a lot of 4th lines playing 6-8 minutes a night. That is too little time on ice to have a positive impact in the desired role. Don't be afraid to give your 4th line 10-12 minutes a night. So long as you have them in the right role playing the right line style and they are comfortable playing in your system they will do well. Case in point Matthew Stang. Remember when another manager was raging at the fact that Stang essentially won a playoff series for my team? His performance rating is in the green for a very good reason despite his apparent lack of skill.
  24. Could have been a system related issue in that he didn't do well in yours. If we don't run the same systems that me not be true for me.
  25. Truth be told I was going to trade Lang either this season or next. The core of my skilled forward group is almost all 30+ right now and he was the best trade piece I had to address it. While I could have asked for Lamoureau or Chene in return, as I would have wanted a center back if I got a player, I wanted to go the more diverse route that gave me more options. I have Grimard at where Lang was at S1 with a, for the moment, better team in front of him than Lang did during S1. I'm not expecting quite the same miracle play from Grimard like I got from Lang as the league is better as well but I am hoping to get something between last season and the season before in terms of performance from Grimard. If he gets off to a good start I should be fine relative to my expectations. If he doesn't, this could be a difficult season. While the picks I got for Lang don't add up to Lamoureau or Chene themselves the loss in the performance from not having Lang should take me lower in the standings which should improve my own draft picks. I'm hoping to pick around 12th in the draft with my pick and no higher than 25th with the other 1st round pick. If the upcoming draft is as good as the last that potentially means I will have a crack at a mid 80s overall player with my first 1st round pick. If I pick below 16th with my pick either I got shafted in the draft order or... Well, to be blunt, you all suck. Edit: I joke. If my team does end up in the middle of the playoff bracket I would be amazed at the performance from my team to have done that but I am not expecting that. I wasn't expecting to finish 1st in the conference and 2nd in points overall last season with the ~20th ranked team talent wise either though so who knows? Then again I did try this vaguely similar thing with my other team. It was looking fine with 10 games left in the season and more than 10 points up on the team in 11th place. However the players inexplicably quit playing after a sudden drop in team confidence from blue 'ok' to yellow 'concerned' after losing to a top team in a fairly respectable manner. The prior 3 games were all wins, with one being against another one of the better teams in the league, and my team had a positive record over the last 10 games, including those 3 wins. Yet for some reason the game said, "Nope, screw you" and I said "ok" as nothing I did changed anything. Granted, that team I intentionally built flawed from the outset with no proper playmakers what so ever and I went rather cheap on a few fill in players as well. However, after starting off very poorly I did actually sign a playmaker from FA and my team was above .500 from that point on until the final 10 games of the season where the players altogether stopped playing. Such is how it is. It actually doesn't bother me that much as I get to play a few players on my main roster this season that I really like and couldn't play in the SHL.