EHM The Blue Line

Fifth season's over with Saskatoon.

After last year where we won the WHL Cup but lost in the finale of the Memorial Cup in OT the team destroyed everyone in playoffs to win all the trophies!

We went 16-3 in our WHL playoffs and 4-0 in the Memorial Cup tournament. Two of our defeats were in the finale. With nine-o tactic, the fact that I've had a very experienced and a skilled team of top of that helped alot. So it took me 5 years to reach my goal of winning the Memorial Cup before moving on. Thanks to nine-o, I think it came quicker than I expected with his tactic.

I'm still not sure if I want to move on though. Most of my stars players were at their last years before making the big jump and the team will be pretty empty. I almost feel bad to leave and let the team fall appart at the same time! I was thinking maybe staying a year to at least rebuild the prospects bank adequately.

The prospects, now this is something that is also makes me want to leave. The players the game generate are so bad that there is almost nothing good to put your hands on now. The skill level has dropped dramatically in the league and I'm guessing it will be hard to rebuild a decent team if you are not drafting in the top 5 to at least get one skillful player in the whole draft. That might be the biggest reason I'll have to leave the team even though they're going to have a hard time. I might stay for the off-season to try to tweak things a little bit but as soon as there is a job available in the AHL I'll try to make the jump. (No I don't want to coach in the ECHL )

What year are you in?

2022 now.

Shindigs: with all respect, you do realise that making the game favour the AI in trophy selection would require extra effort from Riz to implement, not vice versa. With this in mind, would it not be safe to presume that you just got unlucky?

philou21 wrote:2022 now.

Hmm, if the players are that bad then it is something Riz needs to be told.
Can you look at the saved game with the EHM Updater and check for league average CA?
I haven't played the game in a while and not that far into the years (I am a superslow player once I play the game)

MWE wrote:

#57 wrote:
BTW how do you guys post print screens? When I push prtsc on my keyboard it doesnt work when I'm in the game...

Alt + Print Screen works for me

Somehow when I take a print screen of EHM, it actually takes a print of my desktop background. As if EHM was not playing or being displayed.

Kinda sucks.

A9L3E wrote:Shindigs: with all respect, you do realise that making the game favour the AI in trophy selection would require extra effort from Riz to implement, not vice versa. With this in mind, would it not be safe to presume that you just got unlucky?

My point isn't that it's favoring the AI so much as that whatever algorithm it uses to decide who wins is flawed. Which counts as the game cheating us out of the Trophy, since logically it should go to the best player. I've had years where I won the Calder and it was equally BS. I had a Dman get it the year before that really just wasn't the best rookie that year. He simply had the highest AvR and +/- by a lot because he played on our team so it got inflated due to all the goals he just happened to be on the ice for. The Norris seems to favor something strange too, since it's very common to have "the wrong guy" win it. I've had my 3rd best dman (by stats) win it over my best one as well (essentially cheating myself out of it). So It's just all over the place. The really weird thing to me is that when our defensive record was worse, we had all three finalists be our dmen 4 years in a row. Then as it got better we no longer have that, which just seems very counter-intuitive to me. I mean sure it's random how well the AI's dmen do from year to year. But it feels quite unfair to improve your defensive record only to then stop getting the accolades for it that you got when it was worse.

Also most of the time when a game does something it isn't supposed to do it's not because of something the developer did. It's because of something he didn't do, or didn't do well enough.

In other news the Vezina is completely messed up too, the game puts way too much value on Games won and GAA. Which is why my goalie has won it the last 5 years. We simply limit shots so much (to rig the GAA in his favor) and have him win more games per season than any other team wins total games. So he simply cannot lose it even when he's barely top 5 on save%. At least with the Vezina the vote process lets you know exactly which stats the game goes off to decide it. Since logically they are the ones you can see in the vote window. Which makes it very obvious why the result comes out the way it does. Even though based on my goalie's individual performance he shouldn't even have been a finalist 3 of those years.

Isn't is uncanny that both defensive records started exactly 5 seasons ago though? (It isn't, but the reason isn't a good one)

In other save related news, Blake Wheeler signed for the freaking Canadiens. I just couldn't fit him under the salary cap anymore and at 38 there was no way I would sacrifice the key/core players I'd need to sacrifice to keep him around for another year or two until he finally retires. But we now have all but 1 of our key players tied down to 7 year deals that we can fit under the cap.
I'm wary of the upcoming wage demands of our 4 time Selkie winner and our new 2nd line C. He was willing to sign a 2 year bridge contract for 1.2M $ a year for some weird reason. But I'm going to need to somehow find about 9 million worth of cap space to fit them both in over the next two seasons. I think I'm going to have to drop 2/3 of my third line and have them be replaced by players on entries for the foreseeable future to even get close to managing that. We currently sit on 70.5M $ cap. I'm going to move on our 3rd two-way dman Kale Clague next season which will clear up nearly 3M $ of cap space, as well as out 3rd line two-way forward which will clear out another 1.6M $ cap space.
Hopefully that will be enough to fit Lennon Blixt's (the selkie winner) new contract. The issue comes the year after that when we will be looking at needing to sign a bridge contract with Mark Kayumov, our new 2nd Off Defenseman and a full-size contract with Tatu Väyrynen, our 2nd line C. There really isn't anyone apart from the aformentioned players that I feel comfortable moving along. Since I've grown quite attached to our young core by now.

But someone's gonna have to move on from the core in the next few seasons. That's just the reality of it. And it's not going to get any easier from there, since we have a new rookie RW taking over after Blake Wheeler. In another couple of years he will want a big raise. And because our oldest player is currently Nikolaj Ehlers at 28, it's not like we will have any old players needing to be moved along. Most of our core is 24-26 years old so they will still be our guys for another 8-10 years. But I think I'll need to cut down our top 6 forwards to a top 4 in the future with the 5th and 6th guy being rotating player's on entries too. So I'll need to make continuous deft trades to keep mid/high 1st round picks to refill those spots every 3 years if I'm to keep us peaked for the requisite 17 years to reach our lofty goal of beating the Canadiens for total cups. At this point in the save the admin side is the true challenge more so than the on ice shenanigans.

Oh and after 7 straight cups the season preview finally has us as the top team. Man the media is hard to impress in EHM.

philou21 wrote:Fifth season's over with Saskatoon.

After last year where we won the WHL Cup but lost in the finale of the Memorial Cup in OT the team destroyed everyone in playoffs to win all the trophies!

We went 16-3 in our WHL playoffs and 4-0 in the Memorial Cup tournament. Two of our defeats were in the finale. With nine-o tactic, the fact that I've had a very experienced and a skilled team of top of that helped alot. So it took me 5 years to reach my goal of winning the Memorial Cup before moving on. Thanks to nine-o, I think it came quicker than I expected with his tactic.

I'm still not sure if I want to move on though. Most of my stars players were at their last years before making the big jump and the team will be pretty empty. I almost feel bad to leave and let the team fall appart at the same time! I was thinking maybe staying a year to at least rebuild the prospects bank adequately.

The prospects, now this is something that is also makes me want to leave. The players the game generate are so bad that there is almost nothing good to put your hands on now. The skill level has dropped dramatically in the league and I'm guessing it will be hard to rebuild a decent team if you are not drafting in the top 5 to at least get one skillful player in the whole draft. That might be the biggest reason I'll have to leave the team even though they're going to have a hard time. I might stay for the off-season to try to tweak things a little bit but as soon as there is a job available in the AHL I'll try to make the jump. (No I don't want to coach in the ECHL )

Congratulations on the win philou! Know you worked hard with that team. Just a question on the prospects front. Do you have some scouts set to just rotate scouting Bantam leagues or just set on the "scout bantam draft" thing. Because you can find some undrafted gems if you look around. In my WHL save I couldn't sign my drafted players at all. So I had to refill my roster with undrafted players and I came across this little guy:

This was back when I let the AI coach do lines and tactics, so I'd expect well beyond 100 points from that guy using your own tactics and personal tactics. I got quite excited when my scout came across him. And he didn't fail to deliver. With his attributes he's pretty much good to be a top line AHLer, and he's just ended his rookie season in the WHL. I ended the save because I won the Memorial so no idea what he'd have turned into. Guess I could check the db since it's a finished save...Well then, he's a 187 PA 19 Off 3 Def Role player. So yeah, you can find some pretty good undrafted players.

Yeah I'm always on the lookout for unranked players but even there, the average skills of the players is so bad that the scouts are not finding much outside the rankings.

As an example. The first years when I start a research, I select intense scouting for 3+ stars players. When a scout report was coming out I had 30+ messages each time. Since 3 years I barely get 10 messages by reports.

philou21 wrote:Yeah I'm always on the lookout for unranked players but even there, the average skills of the players is so bad that the scouts are not finding much outside the rankings.

As an example. The first years when I start a research, I select intense scouting for 3+ stars players. When a scout report was coming out I had 30+ messages each time. Since 3 years I barely get 10 messages by reports.

That's rough. I did notice that the BCHL was almost completely empty in 2024 in my save as well. And they kinda have the same player inlet as the CHL (or the WHL at least). Overall the prospect quality at the NHL Draft seems better than it used to after 1.4 hit. But even that is a bit weird. After the premade scandinavian prospects are all drafted the amount of drafted swedes per year goes sub 10 and the fins are so low you can't even see them in the rankings after the draft. So it seems like the prospect pool isn't refilling as fast as it should be. I've given some random low rep swedes who are about to retire as free agents reasonable prospect PA values in my version of the db to delay that from happening a little bit. I think Lennon Blixt might be one of those guys, but I gave them no identifying marks, so I can't know for sure. I also make a pass every 3 years or so where I check for old scandinavian players who have the little "Ret" box saying they are retiring next to them and give them random prospect PA. So far I don't think I've seen any of them come through as there has been a grand total of 0 first round swedes in the last 4-5 years. So maybe giving negative PA values to already existing players doesn't work. I don't know.

In other news, Timothy Liljegren is apparently fuming that he lost out on that Norris, as he came out swinging this season. His record after 6 games is borderline disgusting:

Our "playmaking" forward rookie is also on 6 G + 1 A in 6 games. I'd take the "playmaking" part of his scout report with a pinch of salt. But I'm game for having an 18 year old rookie on a goal per game to start off the season. Especially since he didn't start scoring until his 3rd game.

At this point in time I'm fairly certain that the Blackhawks hate our guts with a vengeance, we just embarrased them again:

I mean sure, Kane was out with a Hip-flexor strain, but that's not really an excuse for whatever you'd call that kind of discipline and goaltending.

Found a job in the AHL with Cleveland, the Jackets's farm team. In mid-july there was only 3 jobs in the AHL and since I wanted a bit of time to prepare before the season so I jumped in.

I'm a bit sad to leave Saskatoon abrudtly like that but I didn't really had the choice if I want to be prepared. Mid-july is perfect for unsigned staff and players.

Another season over, had our new rookie on pace to beat the franchise record for points (rookie record currently sits at 74, a tie between Tippett and Ehlers). Then with 3 weeks left of the season he got a 3 week injury, then with 2 weeks left of the season Owen Tippett who was on pace to have his first 100+ point season got a 2 week injury...par for the course really.

In other news our board is still salty about Tatu Väyrynen having a poor rookie season with us, and they are not changing their mind anytime soon it seems like:

What's a guy got to do to get back in their good graces? He's already been 2nd runner up for the Selkie twice as well. It's not like he's slacking.

Okay, playoff, draft and award ceremony over now. 8th cup in a row, swept Tampa in the finals. Tatu Väyrynen was given his own chair on the stage at the award show, for convenience:


This year's First All-Star team is almost perfect, but as usual Drew Doughty is raining on our parade. Just retire already!

and in keeping with tradition Tatu Väyrynen doesn't get a spot. And the 1st team Center is someone who's played LW for the last half a decade.

Carter Hart took home the quadruple (Vezina, Jennings, Crozier, Conn Smythe) after this regular season performance (his first 60 win season, didn't even have that in the 92.3% Pct season):

Shoutout to Joel Eriksson Ek's younger brother for single-handedly making the Oilers a playoff team again.

This year's draft saw us with no early picks. But we got this dman 51st overall. Even if he doesn't grow at all I still consider that a win:


and finally, we got the Calder this year, after a stellar performance from Ted:

proving once again that high CA is completely superfluous as long as you're fast and have the right mentals/hiddens. If not for the injury the 80 point plateau was completely reachable. He also racked up 2 Hat-tricks in the regular season and one in the playoffs. He's definitely one to watch.

Finally figured out how to post screenshots.

My streak as the league's premiere team (that 119 season could have been much better, lost my starting goalie John Gibson from Feb to May)


Constantly scoring 300+ goals:


Re-establishing the Islanders dynasty with 3 Stanley Cups in a row:


Current line-up:


JT Miller's glorious run with the Islanders:


Josh Bailey having one heck of a career with the Isles:


Mathew Barzal doing amazing since entering the league:

How are the usual suspects doing in my Islanders story?

Crosby's doing decent, but capable of much more. Hasnt led the Pens anywhere


Kane has constantly been among the NHL's top scorers


McDavid's doing surprisingly average, and hasnt done anything of note with the Oilers in the playoffs either


Why yes, Matthews is a Senator now. Leafs actually let Matthew become UFA lol. They had to pay Marner, Nylander and Tavares, whom I had traded to them for Rielly, picks and prospects. Matthews is actually doing pretty bad, considering his potential. Looks like he's picking it up this year though


Ovechkin's only managed one 50-goal season since the start of my story

McDavid's rating is also pretty low. Do the Oilers have a decent team or he is simply bad?

philou21 wrote:McDavid's rating is also pretty low. Do the Oilers have a decent team or he is simply bad?

He has very good ratings, and he does have some good forwards to play with. They are still a very young team though. They got Meier, Virtanen and Hischier to replace RNH, Draisaitl and Eberle. Puljujarvi has developped well. Lucic isnt not bad.

Problem might be on D and in net. They never had a dominant backend. Now they do have Burns but honestly he isnt as good in the game as in real life, and he is getting older (37 yrs old). They just got Hellebuyck, who is perhaps a top-15 or top-20 goalie in the league, but they were very weak in goal before that.

I dont know, it's just not clicking in Edmonton. I guess having a very young forward corps doesnt really help.

Speaking of young teams, Arizone has built a very good-looking team. J.Veleno, Nolan Patrick, Vaakanainen, Keller, Chychrun, C.Fischer, C.Dvorak, R.MacInnis, DeAngelo, Fabbri, C.Cassels, Domi, Kuznetsov, OEL, Rieder. With that roster they should be dominating. They did make the SC finals last year, but I crushed them, and right now they are 7th best in the West.

I'm sorry when I say rating I'm speaking about is performance ratio. He barely gets over 7.20. For a player like him I was expecting he would be close to 8.

philou21 wrote:I'm sorry when I say rating I'm speaking about is performance ratio. He barely gets over 7.20. For a player like him I was expecting he would be close to 8.

I find the AI very rarely gets good ratings out of their forwards. Also apart from when I was playing the Oilers myself I've never seen McJesus be even close to dominant in any save. To try and remedy the issue I've set his off/def roles higher and his PA to a manual 194 for my own db so maybe he will be better in the future. In the 15/16 db both crosby and matthews had no role set in the db, not sure if that's fixed in the 16/17 db. So it was random what they would end up as. Certain roles are abysmal. For instance, if you have a player with playmaker(physical) as his role and swap it to sniper(physical) for science. He will pretty much double his point production over night. It's not exactly ideal.

For some Jets updates, it was a very annoying Free agency this year. We had Kayumov and Blixt go to RFA (we had qualifying offers on both). Kayumov eventually settled on a 2.5M$ a year 5 year contract in early August. That was very nice of him, having Liljegren 2.0 on that money is sweet. Since by sometime next year they will be near identical, giving us a top 2 offensive dman on 2.5M for 4 years.

Blixt on the other hand...those 4 Selkies coupled with his 80 point season without PP time last year really went to his head. He came out the gates asking for a modest 11M$ a year, 7 year long deal. And I countered with a 8M/7 year deal. He filed for salary arbitration and we kept upping our deal by 250k. By the time of the arbitration we had a 8.5M/7 year deal being discussed and the independent arbitrator came out with an 8.231M$ deal for 1 season that I happily picked up. Next year Blixt will be an RFA again, hopefully he will be more reasonable this time. We're already going to have to chop some heads to fit the current contracts under the cap. We had to move on long time servant and 1st pairing two-way defenceman Chad Krys, whose numbers had really dropped. He used to score mid 40s points. Last year he only put up numbers in the high 20s, making him the worst point contributor/time on ice from our defensive corps. Since we picked up Zee in this year's draft we could just move our current 2nd pairing two-way dman up to first and slot him into the 2nd pairing together with Mark Kayumov.

Moving forward we will need to cut at least one of our proper key/core members to keep cap space manageable. I thought about it a lot before going to sleep last night, and the only real logical option is to move Pierre-Luc Dubois on, sure he had that franchise record 115 point season year before last. But that was an anomaly. He's one of the best faceoff talents in the league (.6x win rate every year). But his defensive record isn't quite up to par and his production per time on ice is good, but apart from that 115 point season it's never been standout. This will let us actually move Lennon Blixt into his preferred Center position as 2nd Centerman and move Tatu Väyrynen up to the 1st Center role, it's a bit overkill to have the Selkie winner and 2nd runner up (3 years in a row) on the same line. And Tatu is showing that he's more than capable of leading the team from the first line, and he's still got 1 more growth phase left before he's a finished player. So realistically having him and Blixt be our top 2 Centermen is the best combination. And Dubois should net us at least 2 early 1st rounders, so we'll recuperate the talent.

Making that move also means that we make space for our new offensive defenceman Cody Watkins on the 2nd PP unit and move Tatu Väyrynen up to the 1st PP to take over the left handed netfront slot that used to belong to Dubois, while freeing up the 2nd PP line left handed netfront slot for Blixt. With PP time maybe Blixt can start chasing that 100 point plateau. Having two 100 point Selkie finalists in the lineup would just be dirty.

It will be interesting to see what we can get done this final season with Dubois, since currently we have 4 or 5 forwards who are capable of 100+ point seasons if the stars align (Ehlers, Dubois, Tippett, Väyrynen and maybe Blixt). Last year was a low-scoring year. As you can see by how high the top goalies save% was and that no one hit the 100 point plateau for the first time in about 3 years or so. Maybe this is the year where we go for our first 400 goal season? I doubt it, but you gotta dream big!

We're always on pace to do it, but when you hit 30 games played and have a win rate above 80% (or 90% in our case). The game starts doing really, really funky stuff with goalie save%. It's pretty obvious when it happens since it also makes your PP% take a nose-dive of epic proportions. Last season we went from 27% PP to 16% in a month between games 30 and 40ish. At the same time Timothy Liljegren who was at 47 points at the 30 game mark fell off a cliff. He was the 3rd highest scorer in the league on the same points as Ehlers at the time. But since a large part of his points were from the PP, the tanking of the PP% meant that by the time we hit the 50 game mark, Ehlers was at 67 points and Liljegren was at 50. 47 points in the first 30 games and 3 in the following 20 seems totally reasonable...

Tampa just picked up Evan Fitzpatrick as a UFA. I guess we'll be seeing them in the finals again this year. Fitzpatrick is currently roughly in the top 5 goalies in the NHL. But we faced him as a Calgary Flame almost every year in the playoffs and he always chokes against us. So I'm not too scared. Though Tampa are so much better than Calgary at limiting shots that it might become a close final this season.

Manimal wrote:

philou21 wrote:2022 now.

Hmm, if the players are that bad then it is something Riz needs to be told.
Can you look at the saved game with the EHM Updater and check for league average CA?
I haven't played the game in a while and not that far into the years (I am a superslow player once I play the game)

I don't think it is an "issue" I've made it through to 2049 currently and there are a lot of years where the quality of player in the draft sucks, Like #1-10 never made it to the NHL bad. then there are some where the draft is chock full of talent that you get two 100 point capable D-man near the end of the second round

We weren't talking about the NHL level. It's with my save in the WHL that talent is currently a huge problem. I'm glad though to know that at the NHL it's not that bad after a while.

philou21 wrote:We weren't talking about the NHL level. It's with my save in the WHL that talent is currently a huge problem. I'm glad though to know that at the NHL it's not that bad after a while.

Right but it is a trickle down effect, the CHL's best players during that span were garbage, I went from never drafting Euro/Russians, to Always drafting Euro's/Russians because of how lacking the talent was during those years. The CHL for a while was lesser than even the non-playable NCAA leagues in terms of player quality.
It eventually righted itself with the CHL again becoming the dominant development league, it just took a while

RyanSmythe wrote:

philou21 wrote:We weren't talking about the NHL level. It's with my save in the WHL that talent is currently a huge problem. I'm glad though to know that at the NHL it's not that bad after a while.

Right but it is a trickle down effect, the CHL's best players during that span were garbage, I went from never drafting Euro/Russians, to Always drafting Euro's/Russians because of how lacking the talent was during those years. The CHL for a while was lesser than even the non-playable NCAA leagues in terms of player quality.
It eventually righted itself with the CHL again becoming the dominant development league, it just took a while

Then I'm glad to know someone experienced the same thing as me. The bad thing is that in junior I can only draft 2 foreign players and most good USA prospects wants to play college. So you're stuck with the bad players coming from the CHL.

I had enough time to do a story on here a few years ago on a modified database where I played as NHL Seattle Thunderbirds (Thunder in the West http://www.ehmtheblueline.com/forums/vi ... =90&t=8759)...I still play this game almost daily (since I got it in late 2007 I think) because it's perfect as a background game, can play for 5 min or 5 hrs, still addictive and engaging. Database is TBL 8.2, currently in Jan 2026 with the New York Rangers, took until 2020 for my first Cup, then won the last 3 years.

Doing my best to build an entirely drafted team, I'm VERY close. Within a year or 2 some of my d-men should be developed into top pairing guys (or close enough), most of my forwards are MINE! Goalie is my big struggle. Very few drafted goalies have made it as starters in the NHL...most of mine either develop a little and dominate the AHL but aren't good enough for the AHL (and they are outplaying their atrributes), or they develop halfway decent, but struggle at the AHL level even (<.900 SV%) and are pitiful in the NHL. Anyway, here's my lineup and how each player got on the roster:

FORWARDS:
R. Ahonen (#81, 2018) // A. Matthews (#2, 2016) // T. Toffoli (UFA, 2025)
C. McNab (#30, 2020) // R. McDonough (#98, 2017) // H. Jacobson (#51, 2017)
A. Hennessey (#90, 2019) // A. Iafrate (#51, 2018) // H. Ermatinger (#176, 2019)
S. Arsenault (#86, 2019) // L. Ahola (#183, 2016) // Z. Boutet (#90, 2020)
EXTRA:
- R. Kovacs (#62, 2015) - Only Ranger draftee on the roster from before my reign. He had 5 good seasons of about 40 points, no complaints, but I wanted MY draftees on the roster!
- M. Eskelinen (#164, 2017) - Solid 4th line LW, roster spot stolen by Arsenault

DEFENSEMEN:
J. Morrissey (UFA, 2022) // I. Provorov (trade, 2021)
C. Campoli (#21, 2018) // J. Edwards (#56, 2019)
A. Tilander (#14, 2017) // B. Wild (#111, 2018)
EXTRA:
- R. Huovinen (#52, 2018)

GOALIES:
E. Fitzpatrick (trade 2025)
O. Eriksson Ek (trade 2022)

NHLers by draft year (players not with my organization):
2016 - 2
2017 - 5 (W. Silfverberg - 2x yr NYR, 2x yr BOS) + 2 had time in NHL (B. Williamson - 2x yr CAL, back in AHL, M. Carney, 3x yr OTT, back in AHL)
2018 - 6 (Golaie J. Holm, 2x yr NJD)
2019 - 5 (K. Wlater, #26 in 2019 - decent not great attributes/development, same for AHL performance, signed with Nashville 2024, 125 GP - 63G - 41A - 104 pts, whhhhyyyyyy????)
2020 - 4 (L. Lind - 1st yr WPG, not doing great; R. Paterson - AHL goalie in 2nd yr as CAL backup lol)
2021 - 2025 - Several potential candidates, minimal room unless they outperform a roster player

RyanSmythe wrote:

Manimal wrote:

philou21 wrote:2022 now.

Hmm, if the players are that bad then it is something Riz needs to be told.
Can you look at the saved game with the EHM Updater and check for league average CA?
I haven't played the game in a while and not that far into the years (I am a superslow player once I play the game)

I don't think it is an "issue" I've made it through to 2049 currently and there are a lot of years where the quality of player in the draft sucks, Like #1-10 never made it to the NHL bad. then there are some where the draft is chock full of talent that you get two 100 point capable D-man near the end of the second round

The issue is that a lot of those trash years will be in a row, and they will be from around 2019-20, until about 2024-25. It's because of an inherent issue with the regen system. Naturally the idea of the regen system is to maintain a constant talent pool no matter how long into the future you play, and you kinda do. The issue is that the former high-end players that will retire in the years following game start are all old in the db, and as such their PA will be lower now than it was at their peak. This means that after you run out of the "pre-made" prospects that will go in the first 2-3 drafts. There will be no real high-end players until the current high-end players at game start retire. And since that's taking a lot longer now that old players seem to deteriorate slower, it leads to there being a ~5 year gap when there are almost no high-end players entering the regen pool at all. Since a lot of people won't have the time or will to play through that many down years in a row to get past that somewhat awful era, it's a pretty big issue in my opinion. It also makes the overall player quality in the NHL a bit lower towards the end of that era. Which is completely opposite to the whole idea of the regen system with a constant level of skill. It also makes it so the optimal way to deal with draft picks is to frontload all your 1st/2nd round draft picks into the first 3 years and then push the new draft picks that come available forward until that era ends. And that's just silly. But as you said it does eventually even out and fix itself, before it repeats again in the next cycle. I'm curious though, how good/bad is the overall goalie quality in 2049? Since a lot of the must-have goalie attributes aren't carried over to regens. There should be a lot of high PA goalies that are quite bad due to poor attribute distribution.

I'm in 2025 right now in my save and we only have enough starting goalies for half the teams, if that. And the only player who isn't mine that's entered the league and can make a real run for the Art Ross or "Rocket" Richard is Adam Mascherin. Earlier in the save Ovi, Kessel and Perry would give us a run for those awards. But no players of that quality are coming into the league to replace them. And Perry just retired, about 4 years late. No-legs Kessel is also still around, but can't score anymore. Ovi the Journeyman has been a rental for poor teams since his Caps contract ran out, and never really made 50 goals after losing the partnership with Bäckström. Hopefully the lot of them will retire in the next off-season and we'll have the most stacked draft in history in about 2 years time. But knowing my luck they will all just keep playing until they're 45 and the regen pool is completely empty.

So until they hang up the skates I'm stuck manually editing the bottom AI teams' top picks in the draft to be good enough to give them a chance to comeback. As well as filling the skill void left for those 5ish years due to the inherent flaw I described above. The 1st overall picks for our last three seasons have been a 124 PA dman, a 156 PA goalie missing all the required mentals and a 128 PA 2-way C with horrible anticipation and creativity. Part of that is the Rangers being a draft bust magnet, but that's still concerning.

coasterholic14 wrote:Doing my best to build an entirely drafted team, I'm VERY close.

That's the same thing I'm doing in my Jets save. I really like prospect development, so it feels a lot more rewarding than picking up already developed UFAs or making blockbuster trades. The only player left from the original team is Ehlers, but since he's a rookie in the first season (I'm using the 15-16 db) he still feels like "my player".

But in EHM 07 there wasn't this kind of problems. The good players tjat were retirinv maybe 2-3 years after the start of the game had good regen still. Anyway, we are drafting off-topic here.

To get back on topic, the 2025-26 season is off to a flying start. We're carrying a win streak from last year's playoff still. And started the season by having 3 of our top 4 dmen out injured for anywhere in the 2-4 week range in October. This gave us a chance to show off our organisational depth, as we were able to win every single game in October in regulation time. Our backup goalie Spencer Knight has actually had a .909 over his two starts this season. Maybe, just maybe, he's finally going to start living up to his potential. In other news, our PP is horrible due to 2/3 of the playmaking engine on our PP1 line being out injured, and the pointman on our PP2 line too. Since all but one of them returned we've started a resurgence on that front though. Is this going to be the first time I take a streak to 21 wins in the NHL, or will we get completely demolished by the Sharks? It wouldn't surprise me since we've lost to worse teams while at a 20 streak not once, but three times so far with the Jets. But hey, maybe this is the year! Carter Hart had a somewhat rocky start to the month, but then really took off towards the end, already posting two shutouts on the season. He also celebrated his 500th game, and 400th win just the other week.


FINALLY!!! The 20 streak curse is broken. Fourth time's the charm.


...well, that celebration was short lived. I swear to god Spencer Knight is the bane of our existence:

Man does it sting when your opponent's goalie has a .929 and yours puts up a .826 and it's still only an odd goal defeat. Like how much more can our skaters do to try and make up for him being so atrociously bad? We do have a promising new backup in the AHL that should be ready to be called up next year. 9 games into the AHL season he's sitting on a .943

I hate him so much...

We practically outshot them 60-12 and lost, that's not even fair. And no, Varlamov is not supposed to be that good against us. We have 2231 shots logged against him lifetime and his save% is at .913

Revenge is a dish best served cold...in a mile high city.

...nice job taking 13 minor penalties you absolute clowns.