EHM The Blue Line

About to start a re-tool in Vancouver preparing for a life after Sedins era.

I finished in 6th place my first season with a record of 39-33-10.

Facing San Jose in the playoffs. And swept.

Lines heading into offseason:
Sedin-Sedin-Eriksson
Baertschi-Horvat-Virtanen
Burrows-Sutter-Hansen
Gaunce-Granlund-Nichuskin
Rendulic

Edler-Gudbranson
Hutton-Tanev
Tryamkin-Larsen
Sbisa

Miller
Markstrom
---------------
Miller informed he that he was ready to retire. Burrows is off the books. 10.5m to go towards extensions and possibly a free agent or 2.

I'm curious about the regens discussion. I'm now in 2023-24 and I felt like the last draft was kinda weak. All the goalies had zero potential, and I drafted 2 late 1st rounders that were pretty average to be honest. I may look into trading away most of my picks in the next 2-3 years then if what you guys are saying its true. I'll try to pay more attention to the draft eligible players during this season to see what's up.

Yet another first-place finish. Yet another 130+ pts season. We won the Cup against Arizona. Up to 4 straight now.


2022-23 top scorers


Patrick Kane signed with the Oilers as a free agent over the summer. Playing with McDavid. Probably the best league-wide duo we have seen so far in my story. Cant wait to see how they do.

Just managed to get myself a new franchise record, two 20+ game winning streaks in one season. The first one was the 22 game one that ended against Colorado thanks to Spencer Knight being the worst backup in the league. And I'm currently at 20 in our 2nd 20 game streak. Hart is up to 7 Shutouts in 47 games so far.

and this is what the leaderboards look like

Lennon Blixt is having an atrocious season offensively by his standards. Not sure if all the salary arbitration and whatnot has had a negative impact on him. But we just put pen to paper on a 9M $ a season 8 year deal. Hopefully that will make him get back to playing like himself. His rating is still >8.0 and he's going to be in the talks for the Selkie same as every year. But he's not even close to PPG this season. On the flipside McPherson is having the opposite of a sophomore slump. Ehlers is really in a league of his own this year, but McPherson is putting up some pretty insane points considering that he's sub 140 CA, maybe even sub 130. It's hard to say by eye, but he's being really good regardless.

And on the note of the poor drafts. You can still get plenty good enough players in the poor years. It's just that 1st round picks are a lot weaker in those years than they really should be. Though you don't really "need" high PA players as a human manager, the AI does though. So it's hitting the AI much harder than the player (as you can see in that leaderboard screenshot). Hence why I'm buffing the AIs picks to make them more competitive. I normally aim for 1st round picks in the mid teens rather than in the top 5 during the slump years. Because the mid 1st rounders are still somewhat similar, it's the top 5-10 that's very lackluster. Draft busts also seem a lot more common when the draft is all regens/newgens compared to the first few years with pre-made prospects. I've gotten 2 or 3 1st round busts so far in my save. There really is no way that I've noticed so far to tell them apart from the "real" 1st rounders. The bust that I traded away in this off-season still has his scout report saying he's going to become a franchise player despite being 25 and not having grown at all since the year after he was drafted. He's currently with the Coyotes, and doing awfully as a bottom 6 player.

Edit: By the Olympic break we were sitting on a 27 game winning streak, during the break all 4 teams that had players from our squad made the quarter finals, even Germany. It finally came down to a battle royale between Blixt, Thilander and Liljegren on team Sweden against Tippett and Hart for team Canada. Canada finally won it in the shootout after a 2-2 game. Hart was the starter over Price for the entire tournament and ended it on a .922 saves. After the break we came out the gates firing on all cylinders again and I'm pleased to say we have now reached the 30 win streak for the first time in franchise history!

Ehlers is currently dominating the race for the Art Ross and "Rocket" Richard with 95 points and 47 goals in 62 games.

Edit2: Ehlers just set a new franchise record by hitting the 100 point plateau after 65 games, the previous record of 72 games was held by Pierre-Luc Dubois.


Edit3: This is just getting silly at this point...

40 wins in a row is not something I thought I'd see with Spencer Knight still on the team. But since those 2 massive throws against Colorado he's actually been putting up solid backup numbers. Maybe the Official Warning I gave him after the 2nd one hit home. We had both our #1 and #2 center out injured for the last 4 games leading up to 40. So things were getting a bit too close for comfort.

Edit4: Ehlers officially joins the 1000 point club after having played 877 games. Putting him on a career PPG of 1.14. Considering he played the first 6 years of his career on the 2nd line, that's not too shabby.

He is the 2nd player to score 1000 points with the Jets franchise, the first being Blake Wheeler.

Edit5: Regular season is now officially over for us, some teams still have 1 game left to play. But nothing that will change anything of importance. Our winning streak was finally snapped at 47 wins. Spencer Knight put up a .857 against Boston and we played horribly enough that it was enough to lose us the game. Then we somehow managed to lose the next game against the Rangers due to some very, very questionable goaltending from Hart. At the same time as Brendan Burke, who is barely an AHL goalie in my save, put up a .936 against us. So that put a bit of a damper on the end of the season. We did however walk away with out best season record to date:

and we also had a few other franchise firsts, 3 players with 50 or more goals scored, 4 players with 100 or more points as well as the first PPG or higher performance from Defence as Liljegren ended the season with 85 points.

The biggest surprise this season was probably McPherson, who's only 19 and playing in his sophomore season, putting up over 50 goals and 103 points. As well as that absolutely ridiculous +82 Rating.

Edit6: Just realized Carter Hart pulled off something quite spectacular this season. He was undefeated in regulation time all season. Despite starting as many games as I dared start him in:

Oh and Spencer Knight did not have 11 wins on the season. Or 26 starts, those are almost all due to that dumb goalie swap bug putting him in for about 1:30 at the end of every 5 or so games.

My longest winning streak just ended! 22 games. Not bad

Playoff just ended, we had huge injury issues so I played it safe only starting Spencer Knight for one game in the Semi-Finals. Ended up sweeping the playoffs for the 10th cup in franchise history, 9th in a row. We had a grand total of 67 days worth of injuries in the playoffs. 52 of them to top 4 dmen or top 6 forwards. Including a 2 week injury on Captain Ehlers himself. We had a lot of outstanding individual efforts to keep us going regardless. Ehlers had a 9.17 AvR, and Liljegren a 8.75 from defence in the playoffs. And Carter Hart put up .937 saves and a 1.46 GAA. Despite sweeping and only getting the 16 playoff games in, this is what the Playoff Leaderboards looked like:

Our stats were bloated by the fact that Thatcher Demko got injured for the Nucks in our first game of the series, leading to a 10-2, 6-2 and 8-2 victory against them in the following games.
Dubois performance both offensively, but especially defensively this season has made me reconsider the moves I'll make in the off-season. Add in that Tatu Väyrynen was willing to sign a 5.5M $ a year, 6 year deal and we have a bit more cap space to work with than I had anticipated. The issue is that McPherson is coming off his entry contract soon, and I have a feeling he'll want quite the raise. So maybe Dubois needs to move regardless.

The other band-aid fix is to trade Adam Thilander from defence since our two rookie dmen this year; Zee Callen and Cody Watkins both far exceeded my expectations. Callen put up a very good defensive game (highest time between GA of all our dmen) while still being more productive offensively than Thilander. And Watkins put up 30 PP points in his first season, including 15 PP Goals from the half-board position. That is scary good for a rookie dman.

The issue with the Thilander trade is that it fixes our cap for next season, but the year after we're looking at a minimum raise of about 4M a year to McPherson, at least that's the minimum I have to plan for. We would not even be close to able to fit that under the cap. So realistically the long-term fixes are: Trade Hart (never happening), Trade Ehlers (never happening), Trade Liljegren (never happening), Trade Blixt (probably never happening), Trade Dubois or Trade Thilander+Tippett. And really the only one that isn't godawful among those options is trading Dubois. Sure he's among the 10 best faceoff artists in the league, has a career high 115 point season. Is over PPG the last 4 or so years. But you can also say all those things (except the points) about Blixt while adding in that he's also a Selkie finalist every year and 0.8 PPG+ without PP every single year, maintaining a career AvR of 7.92 as a Defensive Forward that plays on the BP. Tippett is a very cost efficient Sniper on a 5.5M cap hit for the forseeable future while putting up 100+ points and ~50 goals from the 2nd line, which makes him pretty irreplacable. The Dubois trade is one of those trades you'd never make in a league with no salary cap. But the cap is there and it's the trade with the least negative impact on our overall strength as a team, in my opinion.

I really hope I can get a lot for him, because my board happiness is only at pleased, rather than delighted right now. because despite us sweeping the playoffs and setting new records all season long. The fact that we resigned Väyrynen on a 5.5M deal made the board very upset as they don't think he should be a member of our team due to having a poor rookie season on the 4th line, almost half a decade ago. Even him winning every award under the sun last year didn't make the "...thinks Tatu Väyrynen shouldn't be a part of our team." board feedback go away. I assume that's a bug because it makes literally no sense.

Edit: This year had a very deep draft, so hopefully this signals the end of the regen drought. We ended up trading Dubois and a 2nd round pick 5 years down the line for the Panthers' next two 1st round picks. Both are all but guaranteed to be top 10 picks. So overall it was a good bit of business. I've also come to the conclusion that 6 anticipation/creativity is the absolute minimum I'm willing to draft. I drafted a kid a couple year back who looked to be an absolute beast defensive forward. But he did have 4 in both Ant+Cre. He's got really good attributes for a 3rd line def fwd. But he just can't put up the performances. So I decided to trade him (35th overall pick) away for the Hurricanes' 31th overall pick this year, which we turned into Martin Cousineau. Who projects to be a very good two-way/defensive 2nd line Winger. Due to some trades made a few years back we had the 9th and 16th overall pick this year. This guy was projected to go 5th overall. But thankfully was still around at 9. And with a name like his, how can you go wrong?

I suddenly get an urge to get some coffee...

After also finishing up the award ceremony there were some surprises, but a lot of the same.
Art Ross: Ehlers(122), Tippett(112), McPherson(103)
Maurice Richard: Tippett(59), McPherson(53), Ehlers(52)
Lester Pearson: Värynen, McPherson, Hart
Norris: Liljegren, McIsaac(Flyers), Thilander
Vezina: Hart, Godla(Wild), Parsons(Maple Leafs)
Jennings: Hart, Knight
Roger Crozier: Hart, Holtby(Caps), Godla(Wild)
Selke: Väyrynen, McDavid(Oilers), Blixt
Calder: Callen, Watson, Sauvé(Devils)
Lady Byng: Ehlers(0 PIM), Väyrynen(4 PIM), McPherson(6 PIM)
King Clancy: Ehlers, Liljegren, Virtanen(Canucks)
Lester Patrick: It's random, who cares.
Jack Adams: Boucher, McQueen(Blue Jackets), McCaw(Maple Leafs)
Plus-Minus: McPherson(82), Ehlers(73), Väyrynen(70)
Hart: Liljegren, Ehlers, McDavid(Oilers)
Conn Smythe: Hart, Tippett, McPherson
Masterton: It's random, who cares.

I've never seen a dman get the Hart before, so that was a first. Väyrynen has eclipsed Blixt as the best two-way forward in the league. But they were both on the same line so it's fair to assume they were stealing some of each other's thunder. From next season onwards Blixt is centering the 1st line and Väyrynen keeps centering the 2nd line. I had Väyrynen fill in for an injured Dubois on the first line last season, and it just didn't click. I then tried putting Blixt up there, and he scored 4 goals in his first game. So that's the reasoning behind that. Plus we need to split our top scorers between lines, which means Ehlers and McPherson on line 1 and Väyrynen and Tippett on line 2.

Liljegren taking the Hart off Ehlers also snapped his 5 Hart streak, which is unfortunate. But at least he picked up his 7th Lady Byng, the 4 years he hasn't won it he was runner up to another one of our players; we've won it 11 years in a row. Hart picked up his 6th Conn Smythe, 7th Vezina (in a row), 6th Jennings and 2nd Crozier. As well as picking up an Olympic Gold earlier this season. I was also a bit surprised to see Zee Callen get the Calder over Cody Watson. Don't get me wrong, Zee deserved it more. But Watson had more points (51 vs. 38), AvR (7.4 vs. 6.98) and only a lower +/- (22 vs. 65). I guess the +/- was enough to push him higher in the voting. Which I actually agree with for once. McPherson putting up the 3rd place Conn Smythe in his sophomore season was made no less impressive by the fact that he played the entire playoffs through fatigue (the little "Rst" symbol) since his Natural fitness seems to be a bit of a weakness.

Edit2: Free Agent Frenzy has seen some interesting moves, on our part all we did was release the rights to our 4th line C that you've never heard about for good reason. We also resigned our BP specialist 4th line C/LW to a 1.1M$ a year 2 year deal. I don't "need" to keep hold of him with the pickups I did in this year's draft. But he's been a real trooper for us in the past half a decade or so, and I'm pleased we could keep him around. In the vastly more interesting AI news, Nuge and Eberle are reunited after many years apart...just happens to be in Jersey. And about 30 seconds ago this entirely likely thing happened, Crosby signed a 2 year deal with the Wild for this salary:

Which seems entirely realistic and likely in just about every single way>.> Especially when in the same free agency Rickard Rakell was signed to a 1 year 9.9M$ deal despite finishing last season with 33 points and a -8 rating...

#57 wrote:I'm curious about the regens discussion. I'm now in 2023-24 and I felt like the last draft was kinda weak. All the goalies had zero potential, and I drafted 2 late 1st rounders that were pretty average to be honest. I may look into trading away most of my picks in the next 2-3 years then if what you guys are saying its true. I'll try to pay more attention to the draft eligible players during this season to see what's up.

It isn't "regens" it's more a "newgen" system. Chara is the easiest one to pick out. 6'8 Slovak dman.

5 Stanley Cup wins in a row:


Won 13 games in a row to kick off the 2024-25 season:


Current line-up:

Can you show off your Russians Ermolov and Starikov? Profile+career

I guess you could say that your backup is...Stuck behind Gibson

Another regular season over, our new backup had a save% ~.900, a luxury we haven't had since the 19-20 season. But apparently Hart figured that was his queue to start slacking off, so although we set a new goalscoring record this season. A smattering of horrendous performances by Hart saw us revert back down to a .927 Pct season. We were scourged by injuries the entire season though. Ehlers picked up 4 or 5 injuries, he only ended up playing 69 games, but still put up 99 points. We had a total of 24 missed games in our top 6 forwards alone this season. Don't even get me started on the bottom 6 and the dmen.

The biggest surprise of the season (other than our new backup being mildly competent) was by far Lennon Blixt putting up his first 100 point season, despite missing out on 5 games due to two injuries that he mostly played through. It didn't come easy though, with one game left of the season I thought his chances of hitting the 100 point plateau were all but gone. Queue a 9-2 win against the Avs with Blixt, who was at 95 points prior to the game, putting up a 2+3 to end the season on exactly 100 points. What a legend.

This is what the Western Conference looked like at the end of the season:

we didn't change anything about our PP unit at all from last year. My PP just decided that this was the year to be absolutely horrendous, which makes the 382 goals all the more puzzling.

The leaderboards ended up looking like this, with Liljegren pulling off something quite magnificent:

I have to admit I didn't actually think the +100 rating was possible. Guess he proved me wrong.

McPherson is continuing to make this league his in his 3rd year by picking up the 2nd fastest 100 points in franchise history, only beaten in pace by Ehlers insane effort last season:

When you picture the attributes of a consecutive 100+ point 50+ goal-scorer his aren't what comes to mind. But he gets the job done, he sadly had 4 pointless games during Ehlers final injury at the end of the season, since Ehlers is the playmaker on that line, which made him trail off a bit. He was on pace to actually beat Ehlers' record 122 point from last year before that happened.

And on our continued mission to make the Avs pay for what they did to my win streak last season. I give you one of the most eventful, yet one-sided, 2nd periods I've seen:



I'm a bit sad to see that Tippett fell off the point scoring pace as hard as he did this year. But at the same time I know why. It's the issue of having 2 playmakers and only 1 scorer on his line. We had no less than 3 new LWs this season, and the one who played on the 2nd line was about as pure a playmaker as you can get. And Väyrynen is also just about a pure playmaker. So there just isn't anyone for Tippett to get assists by passing to. He still puts up the 50+ goals though, so I'm not too bothered by it. On a more positive note though, our 3rd line put up a combined 191 (75+69+47) points, which was a pleasant surprise.

The new LW playing with Tippett is our highly probable Calder winner this season:

He was only 1 point off tying Ehlers and Tippett for the franchise record. For the longest time he was well in excess of 1 PPG, but he had a rookie slump mid-season that saw him sitting about 15 points behind 1 PPG, so to fight back as hard as he did was quite impressive. Oh, and he did it without PP time. Which means that he's the most prolific ES rookie we've ever had by some margin.

ebenton99 wrote:I guess you could say that your backup is...Stuck behind Gibson

Wow, just...wow

Edit: Another cup in the bag, ended up facing Toronto in the finals for the first time. Their playoff run was fueled by outstanding performances from two former Jets; Jacob Trouba and Linus Weissbach. We had probably our weakest playoff run yet. Hart had a sub .900 saves in the first series against Dallas, but we still swept them. It took Hart until the final game of the 2nd series against Nashville to even hit .900. Hart is always a slow starter in the playoffs, but this was a lot worse than usual. We also had injuries to Tatu Väyrynen, Donovan Smith (3rd line LW) and our German 6th dman Michael Fiedler. Ehlers barely broke 1 PPG this playoff, but we had a tonne of goals come from the 3rd line. Which made up for the lacking performances in the top 6. McPherson was top of the charts despite playing the entire playoffs through fatigue (again), and being rested for 2 games against Calgary in the Conference finals; to try and get him back to fitness for the finals.

Sadly the playoff is pretty much sweep central by now, since despite me buffing the AIs goalie picks, the quality of goalies in the NHL in 26-27 is just atrocious. The average shooting% of teams is almost 2% higher than at the start of the save, which is massive. There are only really a few teams in the league who still have good enough goalies that they can cause us issues in the regular season. Due to us making the Stanley Cup finals 12 years in a row all our players have such high playoff attributes that even the top goalies tend to just break under the pressure we can put on them. There are a few very promising goalies in the pipeline though, now it's just the issue of those goalies getting high enough rep that the AI will actually use them as their starter. Detroit has the 2nd best goalie in the league (after I fixed all his mentals for them), but they still play him behind Mrazek. So despite having access to a .929 regular season goalie Detroit didn't make the playoffs, because they players their sub .910 goalie as their starter over him.

This is what the Playoff Leaderboards ended up looking like, scoring by committee was the name of the game this year:

In other very annoying news, it turns out that despite having a middle of the pack AHL goalie as their starter, the Panthers managed to finish 2nd in the East. Making our 1st round pick from them this year quite poor. It makes no sense that they did that well, because their goalie is .875 lifetime saves against us levels of horrible. But since the average goalie in the league is so poor now, that's apparently enough to get 100+ points in the Eastern Conference.

Tampa has also stopped being a contender, which makes so much sense since their team now is objectively stronger than it was when they made the final just about every year against us. Stamkos and Mascherin just stopped scoring 90-100 points, and Evan Fitzpatrick went from being top 5 in the NHL as far as goalies go in Calgary, to being quite pedestrian in Tampa. As a result they got knocked out in the first round.

I'm curious about the pictures you used for your younger players. The picture of Sebag, for example, looks far too old for someone who would currently be 9 years old . I assume you took pictures of existing players and copied/renamed it for the new players?

ebenton99 wrote:I'm curious about the pictures you used for your younger players. The picture of Sebag, for example, looks far too old for someone who would currently be 9 years old . I assume you took pictures of existing players and copied/renamed it for the new players?

I just use the "face" and larger than 400x300 settings on google image search and search the players first or second name + sport ("Erwan Sport" for example), and pick the one that seems the most fitting, then I extract it in Photoshop and add it to the facepack folder.

Also when it comes to how old people look. Just have a toggle through the OHL's website. There are 15 year olds that look like they are in their mid/late 20's, stubble and all. I've come to the conclusion that a lot of hockey players don't look their age at all. So I stopped being as harsh on how "young" a prospect has to look. Another factor is the fact that most junior teams either have no pictures of their players, or have really awful low resolution shots of the player (with cringeworthy lighting). Compare the OHL to the QMJHL if you want to see it done acceptable (OHL), and absolutely unusable (QMJHL). After having added in the region of 2k images you simply start running out of good sources of Junior player images. Unless you draft Russians, the MHL is really in a league of it's own when it comes to player portraits. And unless you're russian the odds are you'll never ever see any of them, so very low risk of accidentally adding the face of a future NHL:er to your prospects. Which I may or may not have accidentally done twice when my knowledge of prospects was much lesser than it is now

Shindigs wrote:Also when it comes to how old people look. Just have a toggle through the OHL's website. There are 15 year olds that look like they are in their mid/late 20's, stubble and all.

That's true. I played hockey with someone who had a full beard at 15, so appearances can be deceiving.

I never considered doing this in my EHM saves before, but it seems like a nice way to make the newgens feel more like real people. I'll have to give this a try.

ebenton99 wrote:

Shindigs wrote:Also when it comes to how old people look. Just have a toggle through the OHL's website. There are 15 year olds that look like they are in their mid/late 20's, stubble and all.

That's true. I played hockey with someone who had a full beard at 15, so appearances can be deceiving.

I never considered doing this in my EHM saves before, but it seems like a nice way to make the newgens feel more like real people. I'll have to give this a try.

For me it's a weird mental thing. When I look at a prospect without a face picture. I try and remember him by his attributes, so rather than actually look at his attributes with a scouting perspective I end up looking at it as an identifying marker. As soon as I add a face I can suddenly "see" the attributes, because I have the face as the identifying marker. It's really weird, but that's what it's like for me. Also I feel it gives the players more character just like you said; that grey face makes all regens feel like the same person. Not to mention how aesthetically unpleasing it it to see nothing but grey faces in the Leaderboards, makes it feel like an unfinished product to me. And to top it off it gives me a reason for keeping my Photoshop skills from getting too darn rusty, which is always good.

ebenton99 wrote:I guess you could say that your backup is...Stuck behind Gibson

Excellent.

Alessandro wrote:Can you show off your Russians Ermolov and Starikov? Profile+career

Ermolov's stats.


He was drafted 36th overall in 2021. Still has 5 stars for potential. Not very well rounded defensively, but awesome shootings stats. Great size, too.


Starikov's stats.


Starikov's ratings. Drafted 13th overall in 2019. Was hoping he would have developped a little further more by now. Amazing size and skating. Reminds me a bit of Tyler Myers I guess. Not good enough defensively, will probably be traded soon as he is asking for too much money as a RFA this summer.

So I am thinking of rebuilding my team after this season. Been having a lot of success but the guys are getting older, and I have a bunch of prospects who are all NHL ready. Dont think I'll be as dominant with them on the team right away, but in the long run it could be interesting.

Leddy is like 33 now, Gibson/Rielly/Murray 30 and Barzal 27 but is pretty overpaid. I'm thinking I would only keep Rielly on the team as my captain, clear the rest. Keep Ermolov, Vilardi, Schmaltz and the other young guys. Should probably be enough to fill out a team that can challenge for the playoffs.

Main thing would be to deal Gibson for a young blue chip goalie. Restart the cycle. When Gibson came in he was like 23 and has been on top of the league for goalies stats ever since. This is the key right there. Young top-5 goalie ala Vasilevski/Gibson/Murray right now in the NHL.

Its gonna be interesting to see all my top AHL youngsters in the NHL next year. I'll let them do their things. Some of them have really interesting potential despite my never drafting very high. Also will be interesting to see what I can get in a trade for all my main players.

Thank you. Both players are a bit LOL in their own.
Love how Ermolov moved from SCTA (what league it is? I have never heard of it) directly to being a PPG player in the KHL
You've also gotta love the 6 in strength for Starikov, but at least he had a realistic career path.

Alessandro wrote:Thank you. Both players are a bit LOL in their own.
Love how Ermolov moved from SCTA (what league it is? I have never heard of it) directly to being a PPG player in the KHL
You've also gotta love the 6 in strength for Starikov, but at least he had a realistic career path.

South Central AAA League. That is a midget(U17) league. And a lower one at that
Funny that he started in bantam then took a year in Swedish U16-league(how did he end up with Jonstorp?, a very small team, though good with their locals)

I have currently been running a game as GM of the Vegas Golden Knights (which I added in as a 31st team through the EHM database editor) and it's gone pretty well for me. One of my top prospects had an extremely productive year in the AHL last season





For most of the 2021-22 season, he was at a gpg and 2 ppg pace but slowed a bit at the end of the season. I don't think I've ever seen this kind of production in the AHL before. His first year in the AHL, too.

ebenton99 wrote:For most of the 2021-22 season, he was at a gpg and 2 ppg pace but slowed a bit at the end of the season. I don't think I've ever seen this kind of production in the AHL before. His first year in the AHL, too.

I mean he's pretty much 20 in all offensive tech, so it makes sense. I've had a swedish player who wasn't even good enough to reach the NHL put up one of those seasons in the AHL. Which made no sense. Some players just have those once in a blue moon seasons where they go above and beyond though.

In other news, this just happened:

That's my exact first line and first defensive pairing, if you ignore the fact that it's playing both defenders on the wrong side.

For the rest of this year's awards, this is what it looked like:
Art Ross: McPherson(114), Matthews(Blackhawks)(100), Blixt(100)
Maurice Richard: Tippett(51), McPherson(50), Ehlers(50)
Lester Pearson: Liljegren, McPherson, Ehlers
Norris: Liljegren, Thilander, Pouliot(Predators)
Vezina: Hart, Demko(Canucks), Holtby(Caps)
Jennings: Hart, Gagne
Roger Crozier: Demko(Canucks)(.925), Holtby(Caps)(.925), Hart(.924)
Selke: Blixt, Väyrynen, McDavid(Oilers)
Calder: Sebag, Yunkov(Avalanche), Smith
Lady Byng: McPherson, Blixt, Ehlers
King Clancy: Ehlers, Liljegren, Domi(Coyotes)
Adams: Boucher, Arneil(Panthers), McCaw(Maple Leafs)
Plus-Minus: Liljegren(106), McPherson(97), Thilander(96)
Hart: Liljegren, Ehlers, McPherson
Conn Smythe: Hart, McPherson, Ehlers

Liljegren is just going crazy with the awards, two Harts in a row now. Carter Hart is up to 8 Vezinas in a row, mostly because GAA and Wins makes it so he can't lose. Blixt being the Selkie winner, Byng runner up and Art Ross 2nd runner up tells you just how good his all round game is, that's why I kept him over Dubois. In the draft we picked up a very promising Danish goalie that may or may not be Andersen's regen. We also picked up a quite promising Finnish 2w forward that can play in any forward position.

In the off-season our 6th dman Fiedler went to RFA, and we signed him back on a 3 year 1.5M$ a year deal, which is reasonable considering how well he plays. McPherson also went to RFA and after a month of back and forth we managed to tie him down to a 5 year 5.5M$ a year deal. Very affordable for a 100+ point producer if you ask me. As I touched upon at the end of last season there was only a matter of time before we needed to move Adam Thilander along, as much as he is one of the Norris runner ups every year, we have enough young skilled defencemen that we are perfectly fine without him. And as he wanted a raise from 4M a year to 8M a year, I decided it was time to part ways. I looked at a few teams for good deals, and upon realizing that Price' contract with Montreal ran out this off-season I went with Adam Thilander+ our 1st rounder 5 years from now for their next 2 1st rounders. Unless they make some very deft business in the Free Agent Frenzy they shouldn't be a playoff team anymore. Not to mention they are stuck with a 7 year long 8M a year deal on a dman who based on history will probably turn into a 20 point a year player who struggles to hit 0 +/- after he leaves us. Our system just makes defencemen seem so much better than they actually are with AI teams.

This is the finnish player that the first of the 2 1st round picks I got for Dubois turned into:

Currently all our scouts agree that he should turn into roughly a mid 160s in term of PA. I do have a strong suspicion that his scout report is bogus and he's close to his full potential. But the way our team looks right now we don't "need" top 6 forwards. We need really, really good bottom 6 forwards to rotate. I've pretty much turned using quality bottom 6 players as long as their entry lasts and then trading their rights for picks to replace them into a system by now. It means that our 3rd line is pretty much always of 2nd line quality, but at a fraction of the cost. And with guys like Tiitinen who may end up only being in the high 130s PA wise, it's sometimes possible for them to be fine with sitting on about 1.5-2M a year deals even after their entry, making for some more long term quality 3rd liners. We currently have two players who fit that mold putting up around 70 points a season on the 3rd line. Adding a 3rd to that would be very good indeed, and may finally push us that final bit to get a 400 goal season.

On the horizon for next season are some quite troubling contract situations. We have our 1st pairing two-way defenceman's entry running out, our backup goalie's entry running out, our 2nd pairing Offensive defencemen's entry ending, our 3rd line center's bridge contract ending, Ehler's contract ending, our 3rd line RW's bridge contract ending, our 4th line BP specialist's bridge contract ending and Tippett's contract ending.

That's a lot of raises to fit; Ehlers shouldn't want much of a raise, but in EHM star players are never reasonable when it comes to wage demands. Tippett should want at least an 8M a year deal, he's on 5.5 currently, so that's an issue. I mean I think we can just fit that; but it's close. Both defenders should be fine with ~2.5M bridge contracts, but we can't fit those AND Tippett at once. Our backup goalie may or may not want way too much, but then we just trade his rights and bring in our new danish goalie, so I'm not too bothered. Our new forward prospects should be good enough to be ready to step in and take the place of Ayotte and Grant, our two 3rd liners. But they both had in the region of 70 points last season, so those are some big shoes to fill.

The biggest issue in all those is that this year had a very weak defenceman draft. The goal heading into the draft was to pick up enough new blueline prospects that we could, if needed, let Zee Callen and Cody Watson go to RFA and trade their rights if their wage demands were too high. But there simply put wasn't enough good blueliners in this year's draft. I don't like having to rely on that not being the case next year to have a way out. We may end up in a situation where Tippett goes as a UFA, which I really want to avoid. But I don't think we'd suffer too much if that happened. But at the same time I don't want to let a 50 goal scorer walk out on a free. But if my scouts are right and Tiitinen grows to be the player they say, he would just be a better option in Tippett's spot anyways. It really comes down to whether the red flags in his report are real or I'm just being paranoid.

In other news, Blake Wheeler retired last season. Despite scoring over 1k points with the Jets and me making sure no one was using his number after he left; we didn't end up retiring his number. He did go into the Hall of Fame though, but pretty much everyone with over 0.5 PPG and 800+ games does in EHM, so the Hall of Fame holds absolutely no prestige what-so-ever in my eyes. I really wish there was an option when talking to the board to suggest retiring a player's number.

As a Red Wings fan, i wanted to try turn things around in the club! I have some rules, i will not sign free agent players or trade for 1st round picks. Will build my team with draftpicks and trades (only one for one).
Trades:
Jonathan Ericsson <-> Seth Helgeson
Brendan Smith <-> Jonas Brodin
Tomas Jurco <-> Curtis Lazar



I know its early, but i didnt expected this start! We are a streaky team, 9-10 wins then a loss, and another winning streak after that.. I know much can happen still, just wanted to share at this moment.



At the moment my biggest concern is the offseason and the contracts thats ending, its gonna be tought to handle, and also a fun challenge!

Edit: I did two more trades, before the trade deadline..
Darren Helm <-> Bobby Farnham
Seth Helgeson <-> Eric Gryba

Edit: Split off the new season into a new post, the old one was just getting way too long.

New season just started and I'm noticing an uncanny theme, we're only 6 games in, but in the two games we've faced players we recently traded away; namely Dubois and Knight, this has happened:


if this continues, it will be quite the season. Currently sitting on 36 goals in 6 games. The goaltending really is atrocious this far into a save.

The run did continue for some time, we were on 1GAA until around the 28 game mark, and Hart was on .95x until around the 30 game mark. Then I knew trouble was brewing when Hart had ~.900 saves 4 games in a row. The game after when we put in out backup he put up a .870 while the Red Wings rookie goalie put up a .966. And the streak was finally over. Because we ended the playoffs on a streak this is what it looked like before that eventual loss to Detroit:

the run was fueled by some absolutely insane solo performances, sadly Ehlers went out with a 3 week injury. He was neck and neck with Blixt before that happened, and he's still not back.

It's safe to say keeping Blixt over Dubois was the right move. He's loving it on the first line, kind of stealing some of McPherson's thunder with how dominating he's being. But I'm not about to complain. Gotta love having your backup with the 2nd best save% in the league, behind your starter. Not something we were used to with Spencer Knight as our backup.

After the loss to the Red Wings we went on another 30 game winning streak, this time Tampa were the ones to end it, we outshot them 57 to 28, but Evan Fitzpatrick put up a .965 in net for them. Not much you can do about that. At around the 45 game mark Blixt was on pace to finish the season with 140 points, but he's fallen off the pace a bit lately.

that's what the table looked like before Tampa had to go and goalie us.

The chance at an 80 win season was squashed only 5 games after the loss to tampa, with a very poor game to Nashville of all teams. After that we went on another winning streak until the Blackhawks beat us in the 2nd to last game of the season, courtesy of a .808 game by our backup goalie.

Blixt's point production really took a nose-dive at the end of the season, it wasn't helped by him picking up an injury either. Much like last season injuries have been plenty, our top 6 forwards have missed a combined 20 games this season, and our top 4 dmen have missed 24 games. Despite all that, the overall season our goalies put up made for a new record season:

3 less goals scored than last season, but a massive 25 fewer goals conceded than our previous tied records of 155 from last season as well as the 19-20 season. Our PP was the least bad it's been in a fair few years, which is always nice. Looking back at the season we did have that one defeat to Nashville due to playing poorly, they actually deserved to win that game. The other three losses were two to their goalie having .966 and .965 saves, with me targeting their weakness; so nothing we could do there. And finally the loss to Chicago due to Gagne's .808. We have actually won several games with save% in the 80 range this season, but our luck finally ran out.

A small stretch goal I've had is to have every single player on the +/- leaderboards be one of ours, we finally got there this season. No one over +100 this season though, we scored by committee too much for that.

it also turns out my new finnish prospect wasn't close to finished; at least it doesn't seem like it from his growth this season. I've mostly played him in the AHL, at first I was meaning to play him less than 10 games in the NHL this season to let his contract slide, but with all the injuries he ended up needing to play more than that. I did keep it under 25 games though for the sake of him having a shot at the Calder in his "real" rookie season; which will be next season. When he was up he was at 1PPG pace and could maintain that playing either 1st line (filling in for Ehlers/Blixt) or 2nd line (filling in as the def forward for Sebag) or even playing 3rd line RW (filling in for Grant). So he can score, he can be a playmaker, he can defend and he can do it as either LW/C/RW. Not bad for the 28th overall pick.
This is what he looks like at the end of the regular season:

Throughout the season I've been trying to tie down as many of the players as I can to new contracts, Tippett did indeed want a 8M$/7year deal. I gave it to him, but depending on how certain other things develop, he may be getting traded in the off-season. The thing that's developing is Ehlers, he's already started losing his legs at 32. I was hoping that wouldn't happen for at least another 2 years. Since Ehler's game is speed I don't think he'll age as gracefully as Wheeler did. Regardless of if Ehlers does/doesn't age well, there is a much bigger issue. He won't sign a contract extension. Ehlers is the only remaining player from the first cup in 2016, and to me he is synonymous with this team. But at the same time he's on a bloated 10.5M a year contract, and seems to want a raise. I just don't know that we can deal with that. Especially now that Blixt has developed into a near perfect captain who's put up 100+ points two years in a row. Our 1st line's production didn't actually drop much at all when Ehlers was out and Tiitinen was in his place. If Ehlers decides to sign an extension during the playoffs I'll keep him and drop Tippett. Tippett is slightly younger, but not by enough that it's a huge factor. Ehlers on the other hand recently hit both the 1200 point milestone as well as the 1000 games milestone. Every single one of those points scored as a member of the Jets, he's also our captain. His goal-scoring was down a lot this year, but the playmaking is still there. Same thing as with the Dubois trade; if there was no salary cap, I'd never trade/drop to free agency either of them. But as it stands one of them has to go, It's really in Ehler's hands which one it will be.

On the more positive side, Zee Callen signed a 2 year 1.5M a year bridge contract earlier in the season. He's an absolute steal at that wage. Grant, our 3rd line RW, seems to want silly money to stay at the team; in the region of 5.5M a year. I've put in a qualifying bid and will let him hit RFA. If he becomes more reasonable there, I'll sign him back. But I'm fairly certain this will be his last season with us. Ayotte, who centers Grant on the 3rd line, was willing to sign another 2 year extension for 1.7M a year, only a 300k raise. So he will keep the job as the defensive forward on that line. Our 4th like PK specialist, Henriksson, is finally old enough to hit UFA. So I don't see him returning for next season either. Our backup goalie wants in the region of 2.5M a year for his new contract, which is fair considering how good he is. But again, I've put in a qualifying offer and depending on how things develop I'll look to sign him back from RFA. And the final contract that really matters is that of our 2nd line Offensive Dman and half-board PP specialist Cody Watson, he wants more money that the board will let me give him as his current role. So I just put in a qualifying offer, I'll deal with him as an RFA as well. But with either 4.6M or 9.4M of cap space clearing with the departure of Ehlers or Tippett, as well as the 2.4M we have left in this year's budget, we should be able to fit all the RFAs, other than Grant.

For anyone wondering about Erwan Sebag, our Calder winner from last season. He did indeed have a sophomore slump, not so much because of anything he could control though. He was out injured for 16 games this season. He's not even injury prone, just awful luck I guess. He also got injured in the pre-season, and he's one of those players that start declining super fast when he's out injured. As a result he hasn't developed at all this season. In fact for most of the season he's been at lower attributes than last season. I really hope that trend won't continue and he can start growing. There was also a change made around half-way through the season. At first Sebag was playing in the more advanced playmaker role while Väyrynen was dealing with the more defensive duties, he is a two time Selkie winner after all, but that just wasn't working out. After swapping Sebag to the def forward role, and putting Väyrynen to the playmaker; we saw noticable gains in the production of that line. Tippett almost managed to make it to 100 points, despite being sub 1 PPG at the 42 game mark. Väyrynen also managed to up his production enough to make the leaderboards again. Next season with Värynen in his playmaker role for the entire season I definately see him hitting the 100 point plateau again, unless he gets a new linemate and they don't have instant chemistry.

I just finished my first season with Detroit Red Wings.. At the start i wanted to get a good season and the chance to do a nice pick in the draft. I also wanted to offload some players with big contracts who isnt good enough.
Jonathan Ericsson, Darren Helm and Brendan Smith was traded..
And now June 3e, we are standing with the presidents trophy and the Stanley Cup! Just wow..



Stats and standings..


Playoff tree..


Playoff stats..


Captain fantastic!


The winning team/lineup..


Will add the individual trophies, if some of our players get any.. And a update after the draft, that includes our picks and maybe some trades.


NHL Awards
Rocket Richard: Gustav Nyquist
Lester B.Pearson; Gustav Nyquist
Jennings Trophy: Petr Mrazek
Plus-Minus Award: Gustav Nyquist
Lady Byng: Gustav Nyquist
Jack Adams: Jeff Blashill
Conn Smyth: Justin Abdelkader

One thing i about the awards, i cant see why Toews got the Selke trophy.. Both Nielsen and Zetterberg has the better numbers in all categories.. Well well.

The draft resulted in these players:
#30 Ryan Poehling
#60 Emil Westerlund
#62 Filip Lestan
#120 Inge Bamberg
#150 Tim Söderlund
#167 Zach Poirier
#180 Olle Eriksson Ek
#210 Jiri Rapac

And one trade was made..
Luke Glendening
<->
Anthony DeAngelo

Now the offseason starts, and my biggest mission will be to get Tomas Tatar resigned!

Quite the swedish connection in the draft, makes sense as the Red Wings though. What are your plans for how to deal with your aging core? I haven't tried playing as the Red Wings myself but the theme I've been seeing is that they are very competitive year one, and maybe year two. Then they lose so much fire power. Also who's Inge Bamberg? Only name I don't recognize from your draft prospects, what's his scout projection? I assume you have "extra youth players" ticked and he's a newgen?

Edit: Playoff updates, Ehlers signed a 3 year 11.5M/year NTC extension after we swept the Blackhawks in the first round. I guess this is goodbye for Tippett then. One thing I haven't touched upon with Tippett is that he has the most PIM every single year, so getting rid of him will make us have to deal with BP even less than usual. The only other player who takes more than about 20 PIM a season on our team is Jarod Ayotte on the 3rd line. He's still going to be around for another 2 years.