09-13-2023, 08:21 AMhhh81 Wrote: The point no one else will say (in part because I think many people, HO in particular, don't agree with me) is part of this is we don't have enough active players to fill 20 SHL teams without forcing users up after less than 4 seasons. HO already abolished the 5th J season as part of this. I think if we took the actively updating players off Manhattan and Toronto from this past season and had them join one of the other 18 teams, I'm fairly confident the few active users wouldn't have trouble finding a spot elsewhere. The exception might be the few very old (s40s) players still poking around chasing records.

That is actually something I though when I got back and checked how much the numbers had dropped from the peak covid numbers. As I think that when there are less active players around more teams are likely ending up in rebuild as they can't get good active core together leading them competing vs each other for picks and making rebuild likely longer or more likely to fail when you cannot just stack like 5 1st round picks for a season. But like you said removing 2 teams would be very though call and I understand why it isn't done when things aren't absolutely broken at the moment. So I think to increase parity there would need to be something that forces the actives to spread around more which itself usually isn't great for the players involved. One such thing that would come in mind would be dynamic salary cap that would be tied to number of active users and would go down in cases like this. That on the other hand would feel like punishing the teams that do well and be pain in the ass for the long term planning so while it could help with parity even I don't like it as a solution to that.