kennec wrote:shindings-> whut creativity does liljegren have in your game? and whut roosters did you start that game with?
my liljegren is a 5-6dmen with some capability for PP2 with hes 11 creativity.
It's definitely one of the better Liljegren's I've had; But even when his PA is lower I still really like what he brings to a team. This is what he looks like in my save, he's got a really awkward PA though which causes his Teamwork to pinball between 17 and 18 throughout ever season, because his total allowed attribute points clearly involve a decimal point somewhere. And this game doesn't deal well with math in pretty much any aspect.
As far as the db goes, I'm using my own version of the 8.2db with the 15-16 start date. I've spent way too many hours removing miss-spelled named from the db, fixing almost all the european wages and reputations as well as rebalancing prospects (especially goalies) for me to really want to move to the new db. As Liljegren was mostly unknown to your average NHL fan when that db was made his attributes/PA made no sense for a guy who is generally ranked #2 Overall on lists that don't favor all Centers for the top 5. In my save he ended up being a 172 PA guy, picked him up 6th overall in his draft year. He's been running the point set as the playmaker for my PP1 unit since he was 20ish years old, so he's got over a decade worth of experience at that. I think he started his career with us at like 13-14 in anticipation and creativity, so he's come quite far. The biggest reason for the performances he's been putting up is the personal tactics though, but I honestly am not sure why he's so far beyond everyone else in the save; They also have personal tactics setup to suit their attributes. I guess playing 6 minutes per game on the PP this season did help him pick up that 8.52 (highest on the team, including forwards and goalies). He also had more assists than any other blueliner had points this season, which is a bit crazy.
If for whatever reason you'd like to try the db I'm using you can get it
here
Because dropbox has a very silly user interface there isn't just a download button visible, you have to go to the top right corner and click this:
I haven't really showed the spreadsheet I use to judge performance at the end of a season, but this year it does do a very good job at highlighting just how obvious it is that the 3rd line was getting shafted, and how insane our other lines were defensively:
The highlighted Min/GA tab is just the total amount of minutes played in even strength divided by the amount of conceded goals with that player on the ice. In my experience it's the most useful stat for figuring out how a player's overall defensive performance stacks up. The 3 guys who are dead last by some margin on the forward side all played the 3rd line, the only other guy sub 30 played about half the season on the 3rd line. It's not the manpower on that line that makes it bad, it's the line being cursed this season. It happens, had it happen before in this save; It's also what caused the board to hate Väyrynen, because it happened to the 4th line in his rookie season. The same thing with the 3rd defensive pairing, Hedlund and Gerling were both on it last year and significantly better. Nothing changed, but they are just being scored on for fun this season. Meanwhile the top 6 and top 4 have absolutely unreal defensive records. McPherson played over 20 minutes per game for 82 gamed and was only on the ice for 18 goals against.
The other tab that I use a lot to judge performance is the N.Inv. tab, it's essentially just a mathematical formula to get a % value of how many of the goals that would have been scored while that player was on the ice (all things equal) he was involved in (though either assist or goal). For a forward par is ~60% (since 60% of the players on the ice are forwards) and for defencemen it's ~40% (because 40% of the players on the ice are defencemen). Generally speaking there will always be a bit of a slide causing the top 6 forwards to sit closer to 80% and the bottom 6 closer to 40% due to the difference in skill and the compounding effect on scoring that more ice time has.
But it's a really useful tool for figuring out who's overperforming and underperforming; This season the standout is Eklund who had a 84% Normalized Involvement (N. Inv.) from the 4th line, that's insane! But I have already tried moving him up to the 3rd line previously and despite getting almost twice the ice time his scoring didn't increase to match. Some players are like that, they are incredibly good at overperforming with low ice time. But they don't scale with ice time at all; Because of how rare those players are it's quite valuable to hold on to them for your bottom lines as long as it is feasible. Eklund signed a 2 year 800k a year extension in the playoffs, which I was very pleased with.
Finished up the playoffs, we got absolutely shelled with injuries. I stopped counting after the 15th injury in our 2nd series, no idea how high it eventually went. Regardless Liljegren put up 23 points despite only getting 12 games; Bonar put up 26 in 13 games. I'm expecting one of them to get the Conn Smythe, but you just never know in this game. We ended up facing Philly in the Finals, it was a very one-sided affair as usual. They suffer greatly against us due to having the vast majority of their scoring coming from only two players, and we just check those two players out of the game with our style. In other playoff related news we're currently on a 61 game winning streak in the playoffs, spanning back almost 4 years.
This is what the leaderboards ended up looking like:
We're probably going to have a fair few bottom 6 players leave us this off-season. In more major news Cody Watson has sadly played his last season for us; I tried signing him to a reasonable deal in the 4.5-5M range, but he just wasn't interested. With Watson going to Free Agency I'm going to look to Gerling to take on a slightly bigger role in the team. He's not been particularly great playing on the 3rd pairing, but during the injuries in the playoffs he did show some flashes of brilliance while played at the point in PP2 and on the 2nd pairing in ES. We also have a wealth of young talent coming up from juniors over the coming years so we should be able to refill nicely. Beaulieu, a player I don't really talk about much; Is a very solid two-way defenceman who is coming off his entry this off-season. I'm hoping to be able to resign him on a reasonable bridge contract, but if he's not having it that's certainly not the end of the world. Now that I look over it again I actually see that Gerling's entry is also ending; But based on his performance thus far he shouldn't have the craziest wage demands. We're also losing both our 3rd line and 4th line Centers to RFA, I don't think I'll look to resign them; Trading away their rights seems a lot more likely.
For the 3rd line I'll be looking to bring in a more offensive minded Center for next season in the form of Ivan Sadoun; Another draft steal from the same year as DeBoer and Smyth. At the time of drafting him I thought he was Couture's regen, but he's way too tall for that now. Regardless he's looking like an amazing playmaking two-way forward. For the 4th line spot it's more up in the air, but it's probably between two of my late round swedes that have been growing quite nicely in the AHL; If the guy I picked up 210th Overall last year grows just a little bit more over summer he's going to get the nod.
The final contract ending that's somewhat major is that of Välisalmi. I'm really not quite sure what to do with him, but trading his rights looks somewhat likely at the moment as I won't have a spot for a pure RW in the top 6 for at least another 6-7 years. By that time I'll essentially have finished the save's goal of 25 Stanley Cups, so there isn't much point in trying to finagle a weird bridge contract with him until then to play him as an overskilled player on the 3rd line. On paper he's just better than McPherson in every way, but McPherson is stupidly consistent at putting up 100 points a year. I have no real doubt Välisalmi could sniff around those numbers too if he was given top line minutes, but McPherson is only 27; I'm not going to trade away someone who already has the best defensive record on the team while also being one of the top offensive performers to give his spot to someone who might become even better just because his attribute screen looks a lot more exciting. The only way I see for him to stay in the team is if I retrain him to play LW and have him slot into the 2nd line Def fwd slot after Blixt leaves us and Smyth moves into the 1st line C slot. Actually, that makes a lot of sense and also makes the amazing RW/LW swede I picked up in last year's draft superfluous. I guess the swede will be the best 3rd line RW there ever was. I haven't had one of those since Benny Grant left us a few years ago to become a top 6 player in Nashville. Now I just have to see if Välisalmi goes full Felix Tiitinen on me and wants a 6M a year bridge contract. If that's the case he's getting traded so hard he won't know what hit him.
Edit: Well, I'm pretty sure I just struck gold in the draft. You know how I mentioned Crosby went into the HoF a few years ago? Well we still haven't seen his regen pop up, this was the last possible year for a sub 180 Center from Canada that shoots left to show up in the draft. There was a grand total of 1 player who fit that description this year, but he was going 4th Overall and my first pick was 10th Overall. Imagine my surprise when said Center fell all the way to 10th:
He doesn't look like all that yet, but by process of elimination this has to be Crosby's regen. If so we're about to see some silly amounts of growth happening, and if that is the case this throws all my roster plans out the window AGAIN! I shouldn't complain though, if this is Crosby 2.0 we have the ultimate Blixt replacement.
Award ceremony is over for the year, apart from an unlikely Calder candidate and both the 2PPG playoff performers not being Conn Smythe finalists it was a pretty standard year:
Art Ross: Väyrynen(127), Bonar(111), DeBoer(105)
Maurice Richard: Bonar(59), DeBoer(52), McPherson(46)
Lester Pearson: Väyrynen, Bonar, McPherson
Norris: Liljegren, Watson, Beaulieu
Vezina: Hart, Pedersen, Lintula(Canucks)
Jennings: Pedersen, Hart
Roger Crozier: Pedersen, Hart
Selke: Väyrynen, Blixt, McDavid(Canucks)
Calder: Rozmann, Razum(Penguins), Smallwood(Devils)
Lady Byng: Bonar(0 PIM), Väyrynen(6 PIM), DeBoer(6 PIM)
King Clancy: Liljegren, Väyrynen, Milne(Canucks)
Adams: Boucher, Wright(Panthers), Houle(Flyers)
Plus-Minus: Väyrynen(114), Bonar(102), Beaulieu(96)
Hart: Liljegren, Bonar, Väyrynen
Conn Smythe: Väyrynen, DeBoer, Smyth
Liljegren picked up his 8th consecutive Hart, 9th consecutive Norris. Pedersen broke Hart's Jennings streak. The biggest surprise, mostly because I just hadn't really paid attention to it this season was Silvio Rozmann picking up the Calder from the 4th line with no PP. He was our 210th Overall pick a few years back. Not sure if he's the first Austrian to get the Calder? I honestly don't know. The runner up was Croatian, so it's nice to see some of the smaller hockey nations getting representation in that award. I actaully wanted to draft that Croatian myself, but he was taken a few picks before me. Rozmann put up 36 points (16+20) and a +32 rating with an average of 8:12 ice time. That's pretty sick for a guy who went last in his draft year. The only reason I even drafted him was that all my pre-scouted players got picked earlier than expected, so I was left with only players for positions I hadn't targeted. He really stood out from the rest with his pace and mentals, this is what he looks like currently:
His playoff performance was even more impressive. When our top guys were out injured the 4th line really stepped up and gave us that scoring depth in the first two series.
The All-Star teams were quite homogeneous this season too:
The distinct lack of rookies besides Rozmann may have had something to do with him being our only rookie this season. A.Nixon of the 2nd All-Star team is the guy we missed by 1 pick the year we ended up picking Tommy Gerling instead. Kinda stings considering the player Aaron Nixon turned into, can't say I'm surprised seeing as I knew he was either Chewie or Big Buf's regen. He turned out to be Chewie based on adult weight.
