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ACapitalChicago · 01-12-2024, 05:27 PM

Hard to believe it's only been two seasons since the last SOTU

Howdy, everyone! This is going to be a long one. Below you’ll find a list of various topics that we’ve completed recently, are discussing currently, and are hoping to tackle more in the future. In order, our topics are:
1. 4th lines & player counts
2. Tactics and their oversight
3. Changes to IFA player roster limits
4. What to do with people who drop in the draft
5. The future of SMJHL Budgets
6. Teams dropping punished players
7. Acknowledging the 425 cap for now
8. SMJHL administrative change

1. 4th lines, player counts, plans for future influxes
This has been a contentious topic to say the least. With a massive unexpected amount of players joining the SMJHL right after our Entry Draft thanks to the closure of the VHL (No not that one), we had a very tight situation on our hands. With little time and the possibility of players not being able to have a place on teams, we instituted an emergency introduction of 4th lines to have space for these players. We gave the GMs $3M extra cap for the purpose of signing active players, bots to put on the 4th lines that could only be replaced by active players, and upped the roster limits to make space for the difficult to predict surge of players. Regardless of people’s interpretations of the move or the reactions and consequences of said reactions to it, our purpose has always been to retain and develop our players in the SMJHL. We can’t do that if they don’t have somewhere to go. Our goal from the beginning was to introduce a measure to avoid another dramatic expansion of the SMJHL while giving these players a place in the League. Now that our numbers have stabilized and we don’t see a need for 4th lines anymore, they’ve been removed. With that done, now we can focus on the future. First we have a spreadsheet with the counts for actives, inactives, aging out, and other critical numbers for us to keep an eye on. At time of this writing, on average a team has 13.5 active players, 5.5 inactive, and are losing about 3.2 from age outs. We have 190 active players, 77 inactive, and 45 players on teams currently that will be aging out. Our average draft size for S72, S73, & S74 was 63, but that’s also due to the abnormally large draft size of 90 in S73. We’ve also had 24, 18, & 25 waiver creates in S72, S73, & S74 respectively. This is a lot of information, but the number one thing is that there is no golden number of what will trigger expansion or 4th lines returning. To tie us down in such a strict manner would result in a lack of adaptability and may ironically result in a rash immediate reaction that may not be necessary, repeating the unfortunate recent circumstances. I encourage anyone who has questions or comments regarding this move and our standards to reach out to us directly, as well as consider applying to SMJHL HO should you wish to weigh in on these decisions.

2. Oversight on tactics, roles, & lines
With the STL/ANC punishments regarding tactics turned on for an excessive amount of time, this led to a vocal request or two for better oversight on roster/tactics/lines/etc. regulations. We’re looking into codifying this responsibility in a sustainable manner, and automating it as much as possible. In terms of responsibility, we’re implementing a system where we’ll have regular checks based on both calendar as well as seasonal checkpoints. In plain terms, we’re going to have a regularly scheduled reminder on a currently TBD schedule, currently leaning both biweekly as well as at the start of the regular season, TDL, and playoffs, where a member of SMJHL HO will confirm that all teams are within our regulations regarding tactics, lines, & roles. We’ve already incorporated a reminder bot within the J HO Discord server for this, and have already begun searching for a suitable replacement as the current reminder bot is a dirty capitalist only able to do regular reminders for patreon supporters. In terms of automation, we’ve got the framework set up for an automatic spreadsheet that pulls teams roster compositions from the latest file without needing to open FHM. However we currently are unable to find a way for this to pull beyond player name & position, so fully automating this process is still a bit away. If anyone has more information that may assist on this front, be it a regularly reminding discord bot, finding a way to pull player roles & tactics info from the file into a spreadsheet, or anything else relevant, we’d love to hear from you.

3. Potential 155-IA player drought
This happened at the start of S74, but we made some changes to our IFA limits for the J. In the past, our rules were that teams could have an unlimited number of 155-165 TPE IFAs (relative to roster space), 3 166-200 TPE IFAs, and 2 201+ TPE IFAs. Thanks to the new portal however, we’ve seen a massive jump in the typical starting TPE of players, especially those who go inactive after their first stint on the site. Players can now very easily gain a large amount of TPE immediately with Team Training Camp, automatically applied CUTPE, Weekly Training, & AC all in one place. This created a circumstance where 155-165 TPE individuals didn’t exist on the normal wide scale. As such, we updated our limits for IFAs after some discussion with our GMs to be unlimited 155-200 TPE IFAs, 2 201-250 TPE IFAs, and 2 251+ TPE IFAs.

4. Discussing how people worthy of 1st round picks drop to 3rd/4th rounds
This one has been a problem for a while, and while we don’t have an immediate solution, we want to at least talk about it and show we’ve acknowledged it and are discussing it. In short, an unfortunately common problem of the SMJHL is that players can force themselves to desired teams without the team paying an appropriate cost.

We see typically around the time of the Entry Draft a player will express their desire to play for only one or two teams and essentially force their ways to said teams through scouting conversations. This often results in the team(s) receiving the player(s) not needing to spend what is considered a fair pick for the player as they know no one else will want them. Teams can benefit from this significantly as it allows the team to focus on spending their draft capital elsewhere, like on other high value picks. This is a difficult problem to approach for a multitude of reasons, not just mechanically and thinking through regulatory approaches, but also because of the considerations of the broader SMJHL theories about team and player self determinations. Some people may not even see an issue with this, but to be frank such a mentality speaks not only to one's selfishness but also their inability to see the broader implications this has on the health of the SMJHL.

This falls into a narrow circumstance where currently it may not be widespread enough of an issue to warrant an immediate injunction, but continued abuse of this system can and will necessitate intervention. Just see the waivers system. The reality of the current circumstances are that one, should a player truly wish to play for a certain team bad enough they probably will, and two, teams deserve to succeed and fail by their own merit.

For the former point, the SMJHL doesn’t enjoy the same ability of the SHL for GMs to be able to hold each other accountable by drafting desirable players with perceived-appropriate picks if the users barely have a few days, if not a couple of weeks, worth of investment in the player. In the SHL players picked by undesired teams have a season’s worth of TPE pumped into their players and a solid amount of investment to dissuade such tactics. That simply doesn’t exist at the SMJHL level, and a player is practically free to retire & recreate almost immediately. Even should the player retire, recreate, and go through waivers, said threat of waivers won’t be sufficient enough as the player can simply retire and recreate yet again. Now their desired team is higher in the waiver order than the team willing to attempt to hold them accountable, for lack of a better phrase, and nothing much has changed. The reality of our current system is that if a player wants to play for a certain SMJHL team bad enough, they can find a way.

As for the latter point, it’s long been a personal administrative belief of mine that teams deserve to succeed or fail by their own merit. They deserve the autonomy to scout who and how they want, draft when and how, trade, sign, set lines, coach, and an innumerable amount of other little details of running a team, however they wish to within the regulations of the rulebook. This is specifically relevant when it comes to the ability of teams to draft or not draft whomever they want when they have the picks to do so. In the past when unpopular prospects & draftees have looked like they might go unpicked, our stance has been that we won’t force teams to pick said players. After all, our locker rooms are a foundational building block of developing & retaining our players, and teams deserve the ability to curate those rooms. However, this goes both ways. If we can’t force teams to pick perceived bad players, we also can’t force them to pick perceived good players. Even if we have the ability to point to X pick being a good one in the moment, teams have the ability to take risks, pass, and react however they wish to a constantly changing landscape.

Beyond that, any discussion regarding where a player should be appropriately picked starts at the value of a player and the potential pick used on them, which raises its own set of theory discussions and questions. Assigning a rating to a yet unproven player can be a difficult one, as I think many people who have scouted would tend to agree. While there exist many factors that can be examined to assess the likelihood that a player stays active and earning during their time with the team, so many variables and unexpected circumstances can arise to completely derail what was once a promising career. After all, real life comes first. This difficulty can be eased when it comes to players with a history in this league, or potentially even others, such as with recreates or well known users from the ISFL/PBE/etc. This is all to serve as just one more piece of the puzzle to attempt to quantify the desirability of a player.

The reality is that currently SMJHL HO has its hands tied when it comes to regulating when/where players are picked in the draft. Should teams want HO to intervene and prevent people from getting 1st round worthy players all the way in the 5th, that will inherently diminish the autonomy and freedom of our teams in the draft. Whether that’s a good thing or not, that’s a discussion for J HO & J GMs.

5. Potential elimination of the SMJHL Budget
Yes, you read that right. It’s very much still a discussion in its infancy, and any changes would be at least three if not four seasons away from announcement. Our discussion started because of the awkward situations our J GMs often find themselves in when it comes to inking rookie contracts. Every other contract in the SMJHL is standardized, our contracts for send-downs, IFAs, waivers, all are clean and simplified from a budget perspective. Only rookie contracts are susceptible to the budget cap, and right now I’d challenge you to ask yourself if you can even name what the SMJHL Salary Cap is without looking it up. Answer at the bottom.

Our idea here would be to eliminate the ability of teams to negotiate different contracts for our SMJHL Rookies, and instead give them one clean and simplified standardized contract to be accepted after the draft. In the broadest sense of pros and cons, this makes this administratively easier on everyone in the SMJHL, allows us to guarantee that all rookies can get a sizeable amount of money up front, and avoids the growing issue we’ve seen of the necessity of teams to adjust the status level of their contracts should an active player go inactive before they can sign a contract when GM tasks are due. Setting our rookies to a flat expected amount gives our mentors and other roles a hand in being able to point out how much money a prospect should expect, how far it’ll last them, and how it can point them in other directions to sustain themselves. Yes, some rookies enjoy negotiating. But being realistic, only very few rookies are legitimately aware of what’s going on during those negotiations. The reality is that most rookies, regardless of first gen or recreate status, smile and nod as they post accepted. To quote one of our SMJHL HO members, “We forget a lot of the times how many different pieces there are to sim leagues, especially if you aren’t coming from another similar league space. Removing something and just letting rookies know ‘Yup, you’ll get x money’ is easier for mentors, easier for GMs, and easier to ease people into the process.” There’s a lot more that we’ve discussed that can go here, such as the reality of SMJHL GM budget keeping not being a fair learning tool for SHL GMing, the changes that’ll be necessary for our DFA/UDFA process, and the actual numbers of the contract as well as potential bonuses for staying active throughout the season. But, this SOTU is already lengthy thanks to overindulging in theory talk thanks to a previous section, so as usual I ask anyone to share any questions, comments, or concerns, with myself or another member of SMJHL HO!

6. The ability of teams to drop punished players
This one has been a discussion with both SMJHL HO as well as SHL HO in a few different venues. To attempt to keep it brief, the current standard when it comes to a user and their player getting suspended is that for as long as that player is suspended the user cannot earn any TPE nor SHL money. However, this creates an awkward circumstance where a player who is not on a team gets suspended, either because they were freshly dropped, they were a FA, etc., they actually can’t serve the terms of their suspension. This results in the user needing a team to sign them so the player can sit for the necessary games before they can even go back to earning money or TPE. While a very niche case, this is something still on our radar and still needs to be addressed, ideally before the next inevitable suspension.

7. 425 cap
Just wanted to put this one here, we’ve had a nearly perpetually tabled topic on the 425 cap. Every few months or so we kick the tires and see if any perspectives and priorities have changed, but as of now we don’t see an immediate need nor desire to change the 425 cap for the foreseeable future. While I personally would like to change from a 350-350-425-425 setup to a 350-375-400-425 or similar system, ultimately we don’t see a need here. Just wanted to at least touch base on that one.

8. SMJHL administrative changes
It’s been a while since we’ve had one, but there’s no better time than the present. Her very first message to me about SMJHL HO was about the Co-Commissioner position, and I can’t think of another person better for the role. @SchwarzNarr has been an incredible voice of reason and stability in SMJHL HO. She’s constantly working to make sure that everyone is treating each other with respect and holding both herself, our GMs, as well as our HO members accountable for the good of the SMJHL. Her promotion to SMJHL Co-Commissioner will be a fantastic boon for our communication needs and creating another reliable source for the smooth operation of the SMJHL. I can’t thank her enough for all the hard work she’s already put in, and I’m so excited to see what good for the J she can do in the future.

...

So, there’s a lot here. At time of writing, this is about 7 pages and 3k words on the Google Doc. We’ve covered a lot here, but this isn’t the be all and end all for us. We’ve got other conversations we want to look at and more work to be done on implementing some of the aforementioned changes. There’s a lot of big shakeups happening here in the SMJHL, and I highly encourage anyone who has an interest to apply for our J HO positions. We always need dedicated people with ideas and the drive to see them through. We want to hear from people and make the SMJHL a better place. Keep an eye out for our SMJHL HO & Interns hiring post within the next couple weeks, this is shaping up to be a massive season and we’d love to have new voices in our discussions. As always, don’t hesitate to reach out to myself or any other member of SMJHL HO.

And also, it’s $46M.

S66 Damian Littleton

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***aleks*** · 01-12-2024, 05:31 PM

Nice

***Reno*** · 01-12-2024, 05:32 PM

i knew the salary cap total do i win a prize

thank you for dropping this though ACAP

***Seany148*** · 01-12-2024, 05:33 PM

FUCK I guessed $45M
How about TPE cap is moved to 500 (for legal reasons that's a joke)
Congrats Schwarz!
RIP our bots
Shame on ANC

Kalakar · 01-12-2024, 05:56 PM

Quote:ideally before the next inevitable suspension.

how do I speedrun a suspension so we can test this out?

***Shiamus*** · 01-12-2024, 06:23 PM

Nice

Troy_McClure03 · 01-12-2024, 06:43 PM

Very interesting read, I just want to point out a solution to the recreation issue in the Jr's.

You create, retire, create and try to retire again in the same season... you don't get to apply tpe on the 3rd player for that season.

If you wanna be on a team so bad, and a team wants you so bad that they are willing to cheat the system to do it, make it so that team has a season of dead weight.

Then for season 2 they are auto retired, but leave that part out until the day before the season starts.

***PapaSorin*** · 01-12-2024, 06:57 PM

Let me bounce a scenario off of y'all that somewhat breaks half of what was addressed. Say theres a player who wants to revolving door play for the same J team without touching the SHL. Retire after 4 seasons at 425tpe, recreate for the draft. How would that be handled as a SHL team would likely not want to shoulder the cap hit of a player thatll never see the ice for them?

*JURT* · 01-12-2024, 07:07 PM

01-12-2024, 05:27 PMACapitalChicago Wrote: Such a mentality speaks not only to one's selfishness but also their inability to see the broader implications this has on the health of the SMJHL.

Love seeing HO telling it like it is.

01-12-2024, 06:43 PMTroy_McClure03 Wrote: Very interesting read, I just want to point out a solution to the recreation issue in the Jr's.

You create, retire, create and try to retire again in the same season... you don't get to apply tpe on the 3rd player for that season.

If you wanna be on a team so bad, and a team wants you so bad that they are willing to cheat the system to do it, make it so that team has a season of dead weight.

Then for season 2 they are auto retired, but leave that part out until the day before the season starts.

Maybe not exactly that, but definitely something like that. There's no way to control who goes where when, even less so judge people's draft value before or during a draft, but you can restrict what people can and cannot do with retiring and recreating.

I like the idea of not being able to apply TPE for a while, I was going to say people just shouldn't be able to recreate between being drafted and the next TDL/Offseason. Maybe both: you can either retire and recreate at the TDL, or play it out at 155 and retire and recreate at the offseason post (cause you couldn't have your drafted player and a DFA in the league at the same time).

Bfine · 01-12-2024, 07:07 PM

01-12-2024, 06:57 PMPapaSorin Wrote: Let me bounce a scenario off of y'all that somewhat breaks half of what was addressed. Say theres a player who wants to revolving door play for the same J team without touching the SHL. Retire after 4 seasons at 425tpe, recreate for the draft. How would that be handled as a SHL team would likely not want to shoulder the cap hit of a player thatll never see the ice for them?

Odds are they get drafted in the SHL in the late 2nd or early 3rd, get the free contract, and then the J team has to pay them for the other two seasons.

ACapitalChicago · 01-12-2024, 07:08 PM

01-12-2024, 06:43 PMTroy_McClure03 Wrote: Very interesting read, I just want to point out a solution to the recreation issue in the Jr's.

You create, retire, create and try to retire again in the same season... you don't get to apply tpe on the 3rd player for that season.

If you wanna be on a team so bad, and a team wants you so bad that they are willing to cheat the system to do it, make it so that team has a season of dead weight.

Then for season 2 they are auto retired, but leave that part out until the day before the season starts.

I like the idea, this is personally not something I had considered and would be an interesting way to curb this Behavior should it happen enough. Logistically, our portal team might have a fit about trying to implement this

S66 Damian Littleton

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*JURT* · 01-12-2024, 07:08 PM

01-12-2024, 06:57 PMPapaSorin Wrote: Let me bounce a scenario off of y'all that somewhat breaks half of what was addressed. Say theres a player who wants to revolving door play for the same J team without touching the SHL. Retire after 4 seasons at 425tpe, recreate for the draft. How would that be handled as a SHL team would likely not want to shoulder the cap hit of a player thatll never see the ice for them?

Currently the SMJHL AFA minimum contract for a 200+ TPE player and the cap hit of a send-down player on an SMJHL team's budget are the same.

ACapitalChicago · 01-12-2024, 07:13 PM

01-12-2024, 06:57 PMPapaSorin Wrote: Let me bounce a scenario off of y'all that somewhat breaks half of what was addressed. Say theres a player who wants to revolving door play for the same J team without touching the SHL. Retire after 4 seasons at 425tpe, recreate for the draft. How would that be handled as a SHL team would likely not want to shoulder the cap hit of a player thatll never see the ice for them?

This would need to be discussed to a further extent before any concrete solutions would be implemented, but it would need to be addressed. As stated above, instances of repeated or frequent abuse of the system can and will necessitate action. We've removed the fifth season and other similar things that don't support our overall goals of retention and development, so should a player truly try to embrace the J lifer lifestyle we would need to intervene.

S66 Damian Littleton

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*JURT* · 01-12-2024, 07:14 PM

01-12-2024, 07:08 PMACapitalChicago Wrote: I like the idea, this is personally not something I had considered and would be an interesting way to curb this Behavior should it happen enough. Logistically, our portal team might have a fit about trying to implement this

Get rid of the portal, go back to the old ways /s

ACapitalChicago · 01-12-2024, 07:15 PM

01-12-2024, 07:08 PMJURT Wrote: Currently the SMJHL AFA minimum contract for a 200+ TPE player and the cap hit of a send-down player on an SMJHL team's budget are the same.

Also, yes, this, thanks JURT. Yeah the majority of our contracts have standards or minimums, and logistically don't impact the overall cap situation of teams

S66 Damian Littleton

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