S64 Milestones

Done


I think of course you have to go with the Challenge Cup as being more prestigious. That's the one that counts. It's hard to win a Challenge Cup because there's a lot of good teams in the SHL and it can take a lot of timing and luck to get there. It doesn't mean that it's easy to win a Four Star Cup, but the SMJHL has a much faster cyclical nature than the SHL does. Plus only 2 teams miss the playoffs in the SMJHL. It's a lot of opportunity in the SMJHL to get that timing right, and because of the caps the difference between top and bottom teams is much smaller. In addition, teams with a lot of rookies will slowly catch up over the season because those rookies keep earning and applying TPE while the vets are capped, so by the end of a season even teams lower in the standings can be a lot closer to the teams at the top. There's just overall more opportunity in a given season to win a Four Star. I do think though that a trophy case with 3 Four Star cups is more impressive, because there's just so few opportunities to win them in a career. Across 3 players I've never won a Four Star. So to win 3 in 1 career is very impressive. There's just more time to win 3 Challenge Cups, though that's not to say 3 Challenge Cups isn't impressive either.  (247 words)


I chose Finland for a few reasons. Christian Kinsinger hails from Denmark, but as they have no team qualified for the SHL's IIHF tournament, I've had to pick a different nation in order to play in the IIHF tournament. Kinsinger had a few requirements of the IIHF nation he signed with, most importantly being close to his Danish home. While yes, they are generally considered rivals, language barriers can be difficult and keeping languages from similar regions would help. Sweden, Germany, Norway, Finland were all towards the top of the list for Kinsinger. Finland was the only team that reached out, and gave him the opportunity to team up with many of his fellow S62 SHL draftees. (117 words)





I mean I could say the playoffs went as expected, because overall I don't think it was too surprising that Chicago won... but I did only get like 5 TPE on the playoff predictions. The 1st round went mostly as I expected, I knew a close series would be on the table between SEA/SFP, I picked Seattle but it ultimately went in 7 games to SFP. I also had TBB beating ATL (yeah maybe I can't say it wasn't too surprising, I had a finalist out in the 1st round). They were very close in the standing during the season though and it should have been quite a close series. From that point on I got everything wrong, though largely due to the close series. Aside from the finals, every series went at least 6 games, 3 of them went 7. I had both Texas and Buffalo winning, but knowing those were going to be close series I'm also not that surprised they lost in 7 games.  I had Baltimore as my cup champs, so them dropping to Atlanta in the 2nd round was definitely the biggest surprise. Getting the other series all wrong basically meant I wasn't picking anything like what actually happened. I figured though the winner of TEX/CHI would go to the finals, just got it wrong on TEX. (224 words)


I mean despite basically everyone saying otherwise, talking to people who were on Newboundland, I think they were actually worried their streak could end. It's the playoffs and only 7 games, so anything could happen. I think most people believed they just couldn't be stopped, and I think QCC could go in with basically no expectations, but I think Newfoundland may have been the only people who had any doubts. (70 words)