It comes up about once a season, so with the restructure and lacking activity, why not bring the idea back up: Rivalry Games back in the sim.

IDK what the rivalries would be, 4 per conference and 8 interconference ones, max. Possibly have it auto that the previous Cup contending teams be rivals. Have the games structured out like so:

R1 setting for rivalry games in the first 10 games of the season
R2 setting for 11 - 20
R3 for 21 - 30
R4 for 31 - 40
R5 for 41 - 52

Makes things interesting and different headed into the home stretch.

Also, other idea to maybe have a TPE sink: why don't we play around with Experience and Leadership? Talk to the VHL about their morale settings and work on something like that. Make Leadership something you can gain from being a captain or assistant captain and experience be a scale according to how many seasons you've been in the league and how much TPE you earn.

Base Stat: 40 EX
EX TPE earned/season = (#SHL games played/5) + (#SMJHL games played/10) + (#SHL playoff games played/2.1) + (#SMJHL Playoff games played/4.2) + (#IIHF games played/5)
You can still add whatever TPE you want in there. Most attainable without adding TPE in 1 season would be 20 TPE (40 -> 60)

Base Stat: 40 LD
LD TPE earned/season = ((#SHL Playoff wins) * (1 if no Cup, 2 if you win the Cup)) + ((#SMJHL Playoff Wins/2)*(1 if no Cup, 2 if you win the Cup))
Temporary Boost of 5 LD attributes for Captain, 3 for Assistant
You can still add whatever TPE you want here. Most attainable without adding TPE in 1 season would be 24 TPE (40 -> 62)

I know captain and assistant captain are very subjective, and there is some motive to vote for a player that doesn't have the captaincy, but I think the temporary boost makes it less likely to have people rigging the votes or assignments. It takes 268 TPE to get to 99 in either stat, so if you hit max TPE for both every season, it'd take 14 seasons to get to 99 in EX and 11 seasons to get to 99 in LD. We could also have it work with regression to be reduced at the same rate as the total TPE count and have the same hard caps as the rest.

<a href='index.php?showuser=1157' rel='nofollow' alt='profile link' class='user-tagged mgroup-4'>Bojo</a> just to make sure you read it