In the regular season, I met my expectations. My individual goal was to break 50 points again and I did. I think my player is the first defencemen to have multiple 50 point seasons since the FHM switch so that's kinda cool but a big part of that is thanks to Corey who has carried my player for seasons and my chemistry with him is a big part of my individual success. This is by far the most individual success I've had as a player in the league. You could even argue this season was the best offensive season by a defenceman in the FHM era, finished with 55 points which is 2 points off the FHM record but also played 2 minutes per game less than the record holder. None of that really matters since my player underperformed vs Buffalo in the playoffs in the last 4 games of that series. It was like we had 2 Jules Watt's on the team at once which really cost us. I'll take a look at my build in the off-season after IIHF and try to figure out what i can fix for next season so this doesn't happen again.


To me, none of these are even that memorable. They'll all get written down in the stats book and the story behind them will be forgotten to history by the next generation like the 45 cups that came before them since it happens with every era once the previous generation goes inactive. Revisionist history is also super prevalent in the league since basically whoever stays active the longest from a generation and has the loudest voice is able to shape the narrative around what happened during the previous era whether it's true or not. I guess from a historical perspective out of all of them I'd go with HAM in S51 since that was the year that broke STHS and forced us to switch simulations for the first time in league history. That probably had a bigger historical impact on the league than any other cup win in the history of the league.


I think the current setup is a major improvement on what we had in previous seasons. I don't know if people consider this better or worse but we should abolish conferences and divisions and just play with one big conference with all the teams. Conferences/Divisions and things like travel literally do not matter as it's a sim league (same reason the SHL should've expanded to places like Europe & Asia years ago). I think everyone playing in one conference, playing each other the same amount per season would give everyone the fairest shot at making the play-offs.



Gonna be biased and go with Chicago which is probably the truth based on regular-season performance and our play-off performance for most of the play-offs. People will say "blah blah Chicago chokes again", but if you actually pay attention to the league this is the first time Chicago has choked in a play-off series since we switched to FHM. We've always had to play Buffalo in the first round with a worse roster and no team besides Hamilton has even beaten FHM era Buffalo. This was the first time we've played them that an argument could even be made for us to be the favorite in the series. Shit happens in simulation leagues and we blew a 3-0 lead by losing to a great team, twice in competitive coin-flip over-time games. Realistically, this was the best chance we've had to make the finals since the team entered the league and it's incredibly disappointing to not be able to especially since we had a .500 record vs HAM in the regular season but shit happens in sim leagues.


Japan won its first medal last year and made it to their 2nd medal game in a row and first-ever gold medal game, they finished the round-robin with the 2nd most goals with 51, they also outscored their opponents 15-4 in the IIHF play-offs before getting shut-out in the finals. The roster is made up of a lot of Buffalo/Chicago players and a lot of them have only improved/stayed the same so expectations are big for the team going into this tournament. I think if we get a bit more depth scoring this tournament than the last tournament and our top players continue their performance from the previous tournament we could really have a great chance at winning the gold medal this year. Hopefully, we can show that we've grown from the previous two medal games and have a better performance this year because we've yet to have a great performance in a medal game.




T1LS