Challenge #37 Discussion - Blowing Up The Canucks!

[kennec]

Stuck at the end of the first seasons draft, not sure who to pick. I have 4 picks in mind, any insight or help would be appreciated.

Auston Matthews, Drawn comparisons to Ryan Getzlaf. Has some good mental and physical stats, and mediocre technical stats. So far this is who I am leaning towards.

Jacob Chychrun, Compared to Ryan Wilson. Physical and Mental attributes are good, has 13 hitting.

Jesse Puljujarvi, compared to Jimmy Hayes. Decent mental and physical attributes. Okay technical skills. What draws me to him is his 6'4 in size.

Sean Kovacs, Comapred to Niklas Kronwall, but projected to be a depth defenseman. Mental and technical attributes are good, but his physical leave something to be desired.

So of the 4, who would you guys reccomend?

Jacob Chychrun i recommend. He got sick attributes in my game and good avr for a rookie. H e has also improved since i first checked him out.
i took matthews and he looks good but hes techs hasnt improved for a year so i am starting to get worried have a "zack hammil" draft pick haha

[batdad]

here we go...2017-18 season set to begin. Jackets first then Oilers.

2017-18 Lineup

Bartschi-Scheifele-Jensen
Shinkaruk-Eriksson Ek-Morin
Nelson-Rakell-Vey
Kassian-Horvat-Virtanen
Kenins-Petan

Muller-Trouba
Dillon-Tanev
Tomerennes-Clendenning
Stanton

Markstrom
Demko

I made my underage deal at the end of camp. Seemed I would not be able to get Grenier through waivers, so I dealt him to Rangers for a 22 year old LW (I am short on LW) named...

Marc Olivier Roy. Roy scored 26 last season for Harford in the AHL, and is on the verge of becoming waiver eligibile, however he was already in the minors, so will help out the Utica squad.

Call up list: Defense: Pedan, Tryamkin, Andersson
Forward: Blomstrand, McCann, Gaunce Connor, Neubauer, Roy
Goalie: Nedelkjovic, Fukale

*Pedan had a very good pre season, but just could not stick for now (4 points in 7 games, was 7.5 AvR. So did Gaunce....who my coaches hate, but was the best of the three centres listed for call up. Neubauer scored 4 goals.

Bonino signed with Ottawa.

NHL Season preview

Top 5

Pittsburgh
St Louis
Anaheim
Washington
Dallas

VAncouver has fallen from 6th to 22nd, despite our Cup win. So should be an interesting year. Big off season signings?

Bieksa to Anaheim, Marchand to Washington, Patrick Sharp to Minny, Kunitz to Colorado, Dmitry Kulikov to Winnipeg


Top Goalies: Rask, Price, Lundquist (except Markstrom has one the last 2 Vezinas)
Top Defense" Weber, Doughty, Ekman-Larsson. 2nd highest scoring dman last year Trouba nowhere to be found
left wing: Jaden Schwartz, Taylor Hall, Jonathon Drouin
Center :Crosby, Stamkos, Toews
Right Wing: Patrick Kane, Ovechkin, Perry
Prospects:

1. Demko-Van
2. Saros-Nas
3. Zacha-Det
4. Blackwood-Tor
5. Matthews-Edm
6. Eichel-Phx
7. Lazarev-Det
8. Kylington-Win
9. Hanifin-Buf
10. Chycrun-Cal

[visualdarkness]

One win between games 20-40 in the second season. I'm officially the worst GM in this challenge.

[bruins72]

One win between games 20-40 in the second season. I'm officially the worst GM in this challenge.

Well that makes me feel better. For a while there I thought I was the worst.

[visualdarkness]

One win between games 20-40 in the second season. I'm officially the worst GM in this challenge.

Well that makes me feel better. For a while there I thought I was the worst.

What? You are in the upper half.
I'm on a 19 games without winning streak, but I've stopped caring by now and just sim as quick as possible.

Edit: just won my first game in 19!

[batdad]

Ouch that is painful.

Start to year three

6 game win streak, then lose to Montreal 4-0.

7 games I have 3 guys with 7 points. Yes you know who is among them at 5-2-7. Atta boy Linden..


And I Have 6 guys with 6 points in the 7 games.


But my C ice position is a worry. All 5 guys (Petan, Horvat, Scheifele, Eriksson Ek, and Rakell) have had at least one 5 rating in the 7 games. Funny enough Rakell although he has 6 points, and points in all but 2 games leads the way with 3 of them.


Goalies are pretty much splitting duty. Markstrom has played 4 and Demko 3. But that is because of a two back to back games already, and a third is coming up. I play 6 games in 9 days from games 4-9

[visualdarkness]

Soon hitting 60 games in season two and I think I'll quit the challenge after the season, I'm simply not having any fun at all. I can't have any success at all in EHM:EA no matter what I do. It feels completely random what results I get and in the end I end up last in NHL. Dunno what I'm doing wrong.

[visualdarkness]

I hate this team, I hate this game, I hate this world

Only Vadim10 and I are allowed to complain at all about performance, you guys don't know what suffering is.

[TheEpicOne258]

First season went horribly. We went 22-54-6 and were last in the league. Surprisingly our best scorer was Will Acton who had 42 points in 82 games on the third line. Conacher had 41 points and Burakovsky had 40. I can't seem to get get my defense to score, the best defenders in points were Barberio and Sbisa, they both had 11 points. At least I get a good draft pick.

[TheEpicOne258]

Here's how the 2016 draft went
#2:Jesse Puljujarvi
#31:Matt Hotchkiss
#91:Devan Inglis
#121:Paul Young
#151:Brad Morrison
#181:Topi Piipponen

[visualdarkness]

Time to do an Oilers and restart a big rebuild with a new one. Got rid of as much as I could as things simply didn't work out, even tough I probably way worse of on paper now.

Canned Hay as a headcoach and replaced him with the tough Znaroks. He can yell at the team in Russian, Latvian and German (only Latvian in the game but use your imagination) so maybe some words actually sink in.

Defense will be extremely inexperienced and pairing the fiasco Dillon with a 20-year old rookie can't be good. More defense-oriented than my last squad.

Andersson - Dillon
Lindbohm - Musil
Percy - Petrovic

The forwards are tough to rank and I may go with even ice-time as the lines are pretty much equal. Less two-way guys and more specialized ones. How bad will I do now?

Bärtschi - Scheifele - Saad
Nelson - Lazar - Yakupov
Grigorenko - Jenner - Görtz
Foligno - Girgensons - Kassian

[visualdarkness]

I had a couple of picks last draft, but they are mostly scraps at best.

[visualdarkness]

Lehner got his first outing this pre-season and I think he may have forgotten where he was. I almost thought a rating of one was impossible. Looking forward to an even worse season.

[m0fownz0r]

Soon hitting 60 games in season two and I think I'll quit the challenge after the season, I'm simply not having any fun at all. I can't have any success at all in EHM:EA no matter what I do. It feels completely random what results I get and in the end I end up last in NHL. Dunno what I'm doing wrong.

visualdarkness, you are not alone. Midway through the season, I find myself on the outside looking in, currently battling for playoff spot but the chances are getting low with every other game I play.

I'm trying hard to establish a defensive system but whatever I do, it seems I'm getting the opposite result. I have Seth Jones and Dougie Hamilton as my top D, which I thought would be a good place to start, yet I constantly end up in high scoring affairs.

I tried setting personal instructions for every players, for almost all categories. Then I thought, maybe this is going overboard and tried to simplified things. One game s1 get a 8 or 9 then it's back to 5-6.

The more I go defensive , the more goals my team allows. (Very defensive, very safe passings, dump normal/often, wider gap, less pressure for slower players and vice versa)
No one is explicitly instructed to carry the puck, no D is allowed to join the rush.

So far, the games I managed to do somewhat good, we on either defensive/ normal, normal aggresion, hard backhecking, normal gap, high pressure, normal passings, heavy/normal shooting. (safe for personal instructions) Then for breakouts, it all seems random to me. I can't use boardplay since the Canucks are pretty small team, and I tried to avoid crisscross and free flowing because of giveaways, thus I mostly change between positional and wings cross. For neutral zone - positional or grouped and for the Ozone I tried all 3 but nothing stucks out. Forecheck - 3/2 or 1-2-2, NZ - 1-2-2 or 1-1-3. In the Dzone, collapse proved more usefull than open, since It seems I can't put any pressure on them but rather get ...more open.

So yeah... You are not alone. Just my 2 cents

[radiskull]

I know what you're feeling guys. My first season and a half of the second were tough as well. But then I stopped and decided to find something about how tactics work in this game. I did a test save and picked 1 game in the regular season which I replayed around 600 times playing around with tactics. Did a one change — then replayed this game 20 times only with that change and wrote in the notepad the final record, GF, GA and stats on PP and PK. That way I found for myself some correlations between several tactical instructions and positive results. And I found that for me personal tactics just worsen my results so I don't use any now. And I started this challenge with everything set for everybody.
Of course at this point I have a very strong team, but still I could be doing much worse if I didn't do this "test tactics" stuff. Season 5 after 40 games is going insanely good: 37-1-2.
One of the most consistent things: we always have huge amounts of PP opportunities (leading the NHL with big-big margin) and ridiculously low amount of times shorthanded. I think for 40 games into season 5 we were shorthanded 36 times or less. Because I don't really know how to make a good PK (and current 88% doesn't mean anything) but I know how to make good PP. So playing for my strengths.

[bitterjoy]

There's a problem here. I forget to take screenshot for standings, stats, and playoffs in my season 4 (2018/2019), and the saved game is now at July, 1st 2019 (the beginning of 2019/2020 seaso).

My other saved games is dated back in 2017. Should I restart the 2017 season or keep going but not posting the screenshot of season 4?

[kennec]

Lehner got his first outing this pre-season and I think he may have forgotten where he was. I almost thought a rating of one was impossible. Looking forward to an even worse season.

ouch a 1 hurts!

[sao.phim]

wow, first time I see "1" rating

[sao.phim]

I know it is bit too early, but in the middle of Q2 in second season Canucks are holding playoff spot so far. Before the season I added to our roster only G. Reinhart and later called-up H. Shinkaruk due to injuries. Both are doing fine.
Compared to first season I made several tactics adjustment and somehow the team start to work much better - currently we have around 0.557 Pct! (our first season was utter disaster, Canucks ended dead-last). Some of our young guys have definitely matured.

Meanwhile Comets are leading their Conference.

Daniel Vladar looks very promising - I signed him in the beginning of first season as 17 years old and used him as a backup goalie in AHL. His attributes are just skyrocketing! And we still have not signed Demko. We will have to deal away some goalie after the season. But no trades until we are in the race for playoffs.

[bruins72]

There's a problem here. I forget to take screenshot for standings, stats, and playoffs in my season 4 (2018/2019), and the saved game is now at July, 1st 2019 (the beginning of 2019/2020 seaso).

My other saved games is dated back in 2017. Should I restart the 2017 season or keep going but not posting the screenshot of season 4?

Yikes. That's not good. You've got to go that far back? We can't count a season without the screenshots. Please PM me where you need to have your stats reset to.

[Asher413]

This team is mind boggling- I don't know if it's my coaching, the team, or the version of EHM, but I'm at a loss! We're 3-11 so far, but it's the level of suck that's shocking.

Some 'highlights': Tierney 0 goals, 0 assists. I didn't expect Crosby from him, but how can you play on the 2nd line, 2nd PP, 2nd line 4v4 and not even have a point? I guess he has 11 hits, 11 shot blocks and only 3 giveaways... and 41% on draws. He had two goals in 3 pre-season games, 61 points in 57 games last season in Utica, it's seriously baffling to me how that happens. I forgot to mention his wings- Jensen (6 even strength points) and Conacher (5 even strength points). The part that kills me is I don't have anybody else to play top six in his spot.

Forsberg is doing nicely, he's now up to 10 points in 14 games on a bad team. In fact, on my team needs screen he's the only 1st liner not being said I need (You need a starting goalie, a top two defensemen, a 1st line left wing, and a first line center.) Maata has been steady (plus a hat-trick against the Penguins), 9 points, so that's positive.

So a bit of a rant, but I'm truly at a loss. I expected to lose but I didn't expect to be dominated, then beat two talented teams, and go back to being dominated.

Now for the really weird. We start out 0-7. I change up some tactics, and we beat the Penguins and Kings two games in a row... then go back to total suck. That did move our powerplay UP to 11% though (it was 5% before those games), we've given up TWICE as many goals as we've scored, averaging 18 shots for and 39 shots against. I didn't expect to rocket into the playoffs, but this level of suck is shocking.

[bruins72]

20 games in season 3 and I'm struggling again. Demko isn't performing as well as he did when I brought him up in season 2. I've had to play Eriksson a lot more than I've wanted to.

Tarasenko and Bartschi have been a force! They've been trading league's top scorer position between each other the whole way so far. Lazar has done okay between them. He had 19 points in 20 games. He's only got a 7 avr though and his linemates are in the 8's. Maybe it's time to try Bjugstad back on the top line again? Wikstrand has been a fairly solid addition to my defense.

My PP seems to be clicking more this season. I'm running at about 21% right now. My PJ isn't that great still though. I'm still under 80%.

[visualdarkness]

By season three most of the guys here are in the playoffs but my team is stuck sucking 1-9 to start the season. Oh, that uninstall button is tempting. Like I said before this challenge is lost for me and I will end up last place every season, I just know it.

[kennec]

By season three most of the guys here are in the playoffs but my team is stuck sucking 1-9 to start the season. Oh, that uninstall button is tempting. Like I said before this challenge is lost for me and I will end up last place every season, I just know it.

how does your lines look by s3? and whut star/core players have u brought in? If u only have young players it takes a few sesons for em to gel and devolp.

[kennec]

11-1 win http://s725.photobucket.com/user/Mikael ... b.png.html
My team dec 2017 , game 25 or so of seson 3. My 3rd line finaly works after two years of underperformance

how do i change the link to name 11-1 and remove the link name? looks terrible.