EHM The Blue Line

Shindigs wrote: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?

Yes, i tried to draft the best available, and maybe i did prefer a swede once or twice! About the aging core, my main concern is to get players who can take after Zetterberg and Nielsen the two most important players in my tactic.. Larkin can play center and then Athanasiou maybe can developed to a solid second/third liner.
So in the draft i was looking to get a center with our #1 pick, and i hope Poehling can be that guy.. Kronwall didnt had the biggest role, and our defence core looks solid, not the greatest players, but a nice depth.
Actually i didnt thicked that box, so i dont know if its never happens that a newgen pops up already in the first draft?


I did resign Bobby Farnham, Drew Miller to cheap contracts.. Tomas Tatar signed 7yr/5.5mil. So the season two we have the same defence core and top 6 forwards.. The only one who didnt played last year is Eric Tangradi, who was in the AHL and now will be in the 4th line with Ott and Farnham.

bede420 wrote:Actually i didnt thicked that box, so i dont know if its never happens that a newgen pops up already in the first draft?

Huh, that is interesting. Didn't know that was possible.

Speaking of interesting, Christmas just came early for the Jets, after winning the cup by sweeping the playoffs (Leafs in the finals again) I was looking to move Tippett along before the draft, since this year's draft is soooo stacked on the forward side. We had about half the starting top NHL forwards retire over the last few years so there are a lot of quality players coming back in the drafts. Tippett ended up going to the Sens together with a 1st rounder and a 2nd rounder 5 years down the line for the Sens 1st + 2nd this year and next year. We also traded away our AHL backup and last year's 6th rounder for the Ducks and the Kings 3rd rounders this year (Anaheim had acquired LA's pick through an earlier trade). Since I picked up an absolute beast of a danish goalie in last year's draft the AHL backup wasn't going to be up to much of anything. And I have two players that I'm targetting in the draft that I needed those two early 3rd rounders for, so the deal just made sense; two pieces I'll never use for two I very well might. We also moved along a pseudo-exciting blueline prospect, a quite poor center prospect and a future 3rd rounder for Tampa's 1st round pick (29th overall) this year; again it's a pick targeting some very good early 2nd round prospects.

So what was the thing about Christmas coming early? Well, I still had that one 1st round pick from the Dubois trade with Florida, after finishing 2nd in the East last season, the Panthers finished one spot outside the playoffs this year:

and we all know that means there is only one possible thing that could happen...

That's right, for the 2nd time in this save we got a top pick from the 1% chance in the lottery, last time it was Carolina's pick winning us Lennon Blixt; this time it's the Panthers' pick giving us 1st overall. The guy ISS has at first is named DJ Jay, so I'm tempted to not pick him for that reason alone. Originally I was going to just cross my fingers and pray the guy expected to go 4th overall would drop all the way down to my 11th pick. The guy in question is a RW/C who scored 62 goals in 72 games this season in the OHL, seems like a solid Tippett replacement. Every single scout is projecting him as a more talented Sokolov, this is Sokolov in my save:

...I'd be fine with getting a more talented version of him to be honest. Whoever we actaully end up getting is going to slot right into my 2nd line at RW, so we're going to have two rookies on our 2nd line this year. Tiitinen will be playing def forward on the Left wing, Väyrynen will be the playmaker at center and the scorer we're drafting this year will slot into Tippett's old spot as 2nd line RW. We're getting close to having too much organisational depth at this point. Our 3rd line is on par with a fair few team's 1st lines at this point. Sebag doesn't seem like he's going to grow much, if any at all, so I'm going to try and steer him into being a very good 3rd liner rather than the 2nd line def fwd, as Tiitinen is more suited to that role.

Oh and Carter Hart is probably winning the Conn Smythe again this year, he ended the playoffs with a .948 save%, that's just disgusting. Meanwhile our new Danish goalie lead our AHL team to the Calder cup with an equally solid .948, I'm not kidding they actually both had the same save% in the playoffs:S

Pretty sick that you have all those first rounders.. Maybe I also have to trade for some first round picks, so we can be a contender every year with a nice depth of talents.. And speaking of depth, can you show me your depth chart on "view team report"?
Im thinking of trading away Bamberg, its more fun to have real players as long as possible!

bede420 wrote:Pretty sick that you have all those first rounders.. Maybe I also have to trade for some first round picks, so we can be a contender every year with a nice depth of talents.. And speaking of depth, can you show me your depth chart on "view team report"?
Im thinking of trading away Bamberg, its more fun to have real players as long as possible!

Sure, this far into the future there are not that many real players left in my save. So you probably won't know who most of them are. Our last two drafts have had a very high amount of very solid forwards though, my blueline depth is a lot worse due to us being in a little bit of a blueline drought at the moment. Last few years have had no good blueliners outside the high 1st round, and even those haven't really been my cup of tea. This year alone we picked up 3 forwards that all look like probable 100 point scorers.

Our RW and potentially C looks like it lacks some depth, but I really like drafting players who can play all three positions. So a lot of the guys listed as LW or C in the depth charts are equally fine playing RW. As far as I can tell, the difference between a player barely reaching accomplished and one being natural in a position is so small you don't even need to worry about it. Myers played on the wrong side as a blueliner for us every single season and won 2 Norris with with 2 70+ point seasons. Blixt has picked up Selkes from RW, LW and C, After Ehlers had played LW for about 5 years i just swapped him to LW in the db (the system for training new roles/players picking them up through playing is sooo broken in EHM it isn't even funny. Also you can never ever become natural in a 2nd position, unlike in FM where you can). There was no appreciable difference in his performance when I did though, all it did was make it easier for me to setup checking before each game, since it sorts players based on their primary role in that list.

The 12th guy on our "Top prospects" list that you just can't see is the 9th overall pick from a couple seasons ago. So that gives you an idea of just how good this year's draft was, all but three of the players (Pedersen, Tiitinen and Shea) on that list are from this year's draft. A bunch of swedes and fins have retired so we're starting to get them back in the drafts finally.

These are the attributes of the three potential 100 point guys, all three have high consistency and temperament as well based on their scout reports:
Top to bottom: #1 B.Bonar, #29 J.Mela, #12 D.Broberg

All of them are primarily RW but Bonar also plays center and Broberg can fill in on the LW. Based on how Broberg looks, he's most likely going to be the guy to fill Ehlers' spot in a few years when he's done. They are very similar players, both in size and attributes. Broberg is 180cm, Bonar is 191cm and Mela is 179cm in case you were wondering. It's very unfortunate that both Mela and Broberg have their Slapshot high rather than their Wristshot, as forwards don't ever use their slapper other than maybe for one-timers in EHM.

Edit: Award ceremony over, some pretty big surprises in this year's version. Liljegren obviously fell off a cliff production-wise this year with 24 less points than last year and "only" a +80 rating, apparently that didn't matter though. Because he was given a seat on stage this year.
Art Ross: Blixt(106), Ehlers(102), McPherson(98)
Maurice Richard: Tippett(59), McPherson(48), Kostin(Blue Jackets)(47)
Lester Pearson: Blixt, Liljegren, McPherson
Norris:Liljegren, Hedman(Lightning), Kayumov
Vezina: Hart, Fitzpatrick(Lightning), Tomek(Flyers)
Jennings: Hart, Gagne
Roger Crozier: Hart, Fitzpatrick(Lightning), Eriksson Ek(Oilers)
Selke: Blixt, Väyrynen, McDavid(Oilers)
Calder: Freimanis(Avalanche), Vrána(Sharks), Laperriere
Lady Byng: Ehlers, Blixt, McPherson
King Clancy: Ehlers, Blixt, Eichel(Sabres)
Adams: Boucher, Houle(Flyers), McCaw(Maple Leafs)
Plus-Minus: McPherson, Liljegren, Blixt
Hart: Liljegren, Blixt, Ehlers
Conn Smythe: Liljegren, Väyrynen, Ehlers

Yes, Carter Hart's .948 wasn't enough to get even a finalist spot for the Conn Smythe. That is just laughable. Liljegren did have a 8.81 Rating in the playoffs, but still it's .948! With those saves it doesn't even matter how we play. So Blixt and Liljegren pretty much split the big ones this year; Art Ross(1), Pearson(1) and Selke(6) to Blixt; Norris(7), Hart(3 in a row) and Conn Smythe(1) to Liljegren. More than half the awards going to scandinavian players is pretty funny. Hart obviously took home all the goalie stuff again, up to 9 Vezina in a row now. We're also up to the 11th Cup in a row now, so we only need 13 more cups to overtake Montreal, which would see the end of this save.

Realized I've mentioned our beastly danish AHL goalie a few times, but I haven't actually showed him.
This is what he looked like when we drafted him last year:

and at the start of this season:

We picked him up at 14th Overall, starting to look like a bargain.

braeden wrote: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
---------------

I made a couple trades and have pretty much re-shaped the team completely.

VAN trades: RW Valeri Nichuskin+LD Andrey Pedan+3rd 2017 for 19 yo C/LW Jonathen Dahlén from OTT

VAN trades: LD Ben Hutton+C Markus Granlund for RD Travis Hamonic from NYI

VAN trades: RD Troy Stecher+2nd 2020+3rd 2019 for 21yo C Glenn Gawdin+22yo G Ville Husso

We also added Rickard Rakell in FA at 4.7M until 2025. And Marcus Foligno at 2.68M until 2022.
-----------------
Now my lines are currently:
Rakell-Horvat-Virtanen
Baertschi-Dahlén-Eriksson
Gaunce-Gawdin-Boeser
Sutter-Cassels-Foligno

Edler-Hamonic
Juolevi-Tanev
Tryamkin-Gudbranson

Demko
Markstrom

Also, here is the Chara new gen. His entry date to the HOF was 1.3.18

braeden wrote:Also, here is the Chara new gen. His entry date to the HOF was 1.3.18

Is there any way to find newgens that is old players?

bede420 wrote:

braeden wrote:Also, here is the Chara new gen. His entry date to the HOF was 1.3.18

Is there any way to find newgens that is old players?

It's pretty much seeing when they were inducted to the HOF and finding the player that plays their position and who is from their respective country. Obviously 6'8 Slovak defenders aren't an everyday thing. Some will be better, some will be worse. It's a way of providing new players to the game.

Mini update on my Red Wings save..
Zetterberg missed the first 10 games due to injury, so our center core was Sheahan, Nielsen, Vitale and Ott. I knew we should have a slow start this year, and we have conceled a lot of goals..
I think we have 13-3-4, and thats way better than i expekted. Sheahan is the goal and point leader in NHL, with 15+16 followed by Nyquist. Zetty is 1p/game since hes comeback, and our defence looks better.
Jonas Brodin has been a let down, with the lowest rate of defenders, at the moment he is the 7th defender.. Maybe I will trade him, it dont know yet..

Tatar-Sheahan-Abdelkader
Larkin-Zetterberg-Nyquist
Tangradi-Nielsen-Mantha
Miller-Vitale-Farnham

Dekeyser-Green
Sproul-Ouellet
Kronwall-Marchenko

Mrazek
Howard

Yeah some players are pretty easy to spot. I have Ovi's regen coming up as the #1 draft pick next season in my Jets save, it seems they no longer retain number and birth city like they used to according to the wiki. But it's pretty clear that my danish goalie is Andersen and that Ivan Tyutin is Ovi. We had Crosby, Kessel and co. go into the HoF this off-season, so the draft two years from now should be interesting. Price has also announced he's retiring after this season.

Edit: End of regular season update time, Brayden Bonar set a new rookie point record with 78 points, he was also 6th highest in the league in scoring in his rookie season with 43 goals. Both him and Tiitinen were off to a really slow start and I wasn't active enough in changing their personal tactic settings, once I did and both their shooting% went up to 10%+ that line starter firing. Since Tiitinen is stuck playing the def forward role as a rookie he wasn't able to produce the same numbers as Bonar, his season ended with a more modest 55 point total. Considering how slow he started that's still a pretty impressive salvage in the later half of the season. We were in a situation where we had a legitimate chance at our highest Pct yet as we were undefeated in regular time (2 OT losses) at around the 55 game mark, but then Carter Hart got injured and Jerry Gagne and Asger Pedersen had 1 loss each in that time period. One to Jerry putting up a .870 and the other to the opponent goalie doing something that had never ever happened before in this save, he shut us out:S And he's an awful goalie, so it was pretty bs; it was his only SO on the season...

This season actually didn't see a single player in the entire NHL hit the 50 goal plateau, which is rare by now. Maybe my goalie improvements are starting to come into effect finally, in our case it was just a case of scoring by committee to a whole new degree. Our 3rd line had 61 (25G 36A), 60 (26G 34A) and 73 (28G 45A) for a total of 99 Goals and 194 Points, that's more points than about 2/3 of the AI 1st lines managed this year. And we yet again set a new franchise record with 387 goals scored, sadly our goalie injuries coupled with an underwhelming early season performance from Hart left us with 151 goals conceded, which although the 2nd lowest in franchise history, is a big step back from last year. This is what the league table ended up looking like:

After the down season last year, Liljegren was back above PPG pace this year. McPherson was very dominant and Lennon Blixt put up his 3rd consecutive 100+ point season:

This is what Brayden Bonar looked like at the end of the season:

Getting 382 shots on the season with "selective" shooting from around game 35 onwards says a bit about how good Tatu Väyrynen is at playmaking, he just sets his scoring winger up non-stop. Speaking of which; Owen Tippett only had about 60 points and 30 goals in Ottawa despite being on the first line with Taylor Hall and Nico Hischier, to my great annoyance both Montreal and Ottawa made the playoffs on the final day of the season, so no lottery with my two 1st rounder picks this season. The draft is so stacked that Ovi's regen is ranked 3rd overall this year:S

As usual we had injuries more or less non-stop this season, barely had a full week without at least 1 core/key player injured, 13 games missed from forwards with 60+ points on the year, 29 missed by top 4 blueliners and I think 7 or so missed by Hart/Gagne since both of them had 2 groin strains in games this year. But we have a really solid defensive blueline prospect in the AHL that's gotten a solid 18 or so games in the NHL this season, so sadly his contract won't slide this year. But I've been having a bug where none of my AHL players contracts slide anyways, so not like that makes a difference:/

In other good AHL news we drafted a slightly undersized norwegian with the 210th pick last year, he's been PPG in the AHL and has grown about 20 attribute points in his first year. He's too big to be Zucca's regen. But he's looking like he might be a sleeper pick, can play in all forward positions too.

As you can see by Gagne and Watson still being on the team this season, they both signed reasonable contracts in the off-season. Gagne is on 2.8M/6 years which is amazing since he's by far the best backup in the league currently. Heck he's probably top 10 goalies in the league period if I actually played him enough, but Hart is just so good I try and do about 1 Gagne game to every 4-5 Hart games. I even play Hart in both games in back-to-backs when it makes sense, he's got the fitness/stamina to handle it. Watson signed a 2.5M/5 year deal which will see us hang on to him for the forseeable future. A very nice deal for an offensive defenceman of his caliber. We have a fair few contract clouds on the horizon though, Kayumov's 4M/year contract is running out in the off-season and we can't afford much of a raise, around 6M/year is probably the absolute maximum. 2/3 of our 3rd line also have their entries ending, so it remains to be seen if I can get some nice deals there or not. If not I might end up needing to let Erwan Sebag and Donovan Smith (the two 3rd liners in question) move along, we have so much depth that we can replace them without breaking a sweat. But they put up 61 and 73 points this season, so I'd love to see what they could do with another season together. But until Ehlers' current deal ends we are under very tight salary cap constraints. I've timed it so that his deal ends at the exact same time that Tiitinen and Bonar will come off their entries at least. So that's a positive...never mind, I forgot I had to play Tiitinen more than 10 games last year. Well then, that will make things interesting. Probably a slight blueline shuffle and Gagne being traded in two seasons then, that should just about cover it.

Managing the cap for what is planned to be a 24 year long dynasty really becomes a headache after a while. I get quite attached to my players so I really hate to ship the good ones along like this, but there's not much of a choice. I can only keep the super essential ones that I'm really invested in building a legacy for. That list currently only includes the following: Ehlers, Blixt, Hart, Liljegren, McPherson, Väyrynen. Kayumov and Bonar are both on the outside looking in, and if Tiitinen turns into the player I think he might, he probably goes on that list too. Ehlers will sadly have to go when his current 3 year deal is over despite being on the list. There's just too much cost to trying and keep an aging Ehlers on a 11.5M/year deal around. When I signed the original 7 year 10.5M/year deal with him I had no idea I'd stick with this save for this long. And I didn't know you could use RFA to lower player wage demands, so I panic-signed him on that deal thinking it wouldn't end up mattering. Well, it did!

We ended up meeting an old rival in the finals this year, Tampa was finally back! Yeah, they got swept... Turns out that Bonar is a bonafide playoff god, he rode a 22 game scoring streak through the playoff and ended the 16 game affair with 16 goals. Don't you just love it when your rookie is GPG in the playoffs? That's just not even fair, we totally demolished the Oilers in the Conference finals with an aggregate score of 29-2. We got very close to 70 shots in games against both them and Tampa in the finals. Probably the most dominant playoff run yet.

As usual Hart didn't bother to show up for the first two rounds, it's like he knows we'll win them so he doesn't even try. Then in the conference finals and cup finals he barely ever lets in more than a goal per game.

This is what the journey has looked like so far:


There have been some ups and downs along the way, the breakout 92.7% Pct season in 19-20 was the first season after we hit the highest Reputation value in the NHL, then the year after we lost our backup goalie to Tampa, as I slowly reduced how much our new backup played we began climbing back up in win% until we managed to draft a competent enough backup in Jerry Gagne, his first season saw the beginning of the >90% Pct era that I hope will remain until the end of the save. It's been a learning process as this is the first save where I use my own tactics, I'd been using the AI coach to handicap myself until now. But I decided to just go for broke with this save and see how well I'd do, I never could have imagined this would be the outcome to be honest.

Shindigs, who do you have for coaches?

colinrsmall wrote:Shindigs, who do you have for coaches?

Boucher as head coach, originally Albelin, Burke, Walker and Jay Leach as assistants. Remember it's the 15-16 db though. I always use Boucher as head coach because he's got the best attributes in the game for tactics and offensive coaching almost every single time. He's also really young so he grows once and has about 20 years of coaching in him before he starts to decline, and to top it all off he isn't in the NHL so you can instantly sign him. Sean Burke is one of the best goalie coaches, and the youngest one, so same reasoning as with Boucher there. For Conditioning and Skating it's a bit random, but when Phil Walker rolls high CA/PA he's the best one in the game. But that doesn't always happen. For Defence it's almost completely random who's the best, there is no go to guy. You just have to find whoever rolled the best attributes in your save, in my case that was Tommy Albelin; however he's gotten too old so I brought in a newgen coach a couple years back. Also in this particular save there happened to be a guy named Jay Leach coaching some random team in Germany, I've never seen him be good before, but he had better off skill coaching than Boucher at age 32 or something like that, so I used him for Off skill, Boucher for Tactics+Shooting, Walker for Conditioning+Skating, Albelin for Defence and Burke for Goalies. I try and never have any one coach on more than 2 fields at once. Currently I'm forced into using Boucher for three since Walker got too old and there were no generated conditioning coaches at all. So Leach got shooting+Off skill, Boucher Condioning+Skating+Tactics, Brekke(the generated coach) Defense and Burke Goalies. Haven't really noticed any big decrease in practice performance from it though.

This is what they look like in the spreadsheet I use to select coaches:


Edit:
Huge blockbuster trade about to be finalized, I mentioned Ovi's regen was in the draft; this is what he looks like:

Because Ehlers will be retiring (from being a player in the Jets organisation at least) in two more seasons, we really need that star 1st line LW to lead us for the remaining decade or so before I finish this save off. Who better than Ovi 2.0? But the price I have to pay is not small, but as mentioned we have so much depth right now I literally don't have room for all our top 4 dmen and top 6 forwards. So my thinking is that I trade in essentially all the excess talent for 1 superstar, I'm like 99% certain It's Ovi's regen and with the mentals it rolled he's going to be a golden god, but it's a pretty big risk. Honestly even if I'm wrong and that isn't Ovi 2.0 we'd still be perfectly fine with just losing all the resources I'm trading. Here's the package:

I'm essentially giving the Islanders a full freanchise package, minus a goalie, for a single generational talent. Broberg was going to be the replacement for Ehlers, if we were to revert all these players back to the picks that got me them, the deal would be as follows:
13th Overall, 12th Overall, 29th Overall, 16th Overall and 30th Overall; for 5 mid to late 1st rounders.
34th Overall; for 1 early 2nd rounder.
for
1st Overall.

It's a huge trade and my board will be peeved at me for making it, but what do they know? The opportunity cost of the trade will be lessened by the fact that Mela would never realistically play above the 3rd line for me, because of roster space issues. Broberg would play 3rd line RW this season and next, then take over 1st line LW from Ehlers. But since that's the exact same spot Ovi's regen would play, that essentially means Broberg is traded at full value; he would be a first liner for us if we didn't trade him, Donovan Smith was on our 3rd line and has no upward momentum; we have to trade him regardless for cap management and finally Huges Guillot-Diat was a 2nd round pickup that I didn't expect would grow as he has; this means we have no real room for him in the lineup. So in terms of what we're trading, we're trading one 3rd line rental (Mela), one guy who's going for cap reasons (Smith), another guy who as good as he is; we simply don't need (Guillot-Diat), two picks that I really didn't have aimed at anything I want that much and finally the guy that Ovi's regen will fill the exact same role as (Broberg). So really from my point of view we're only trading a single full value piece for a generational player (if I'm wrong and that's not Ovi, this will suck).

Would you make that trade? Even if it blows up in my face we still have enough talent in the wings that it largely won't matter, so it seems like a win/win to me.

It seems my board actually agrees for once:

I was not expecting that.

To try and make sense of the board being so fine with this I just had to lookup the PA of the players I traded away, since I can't trade for players in this save it won't change any future decisions I make. I think we just did get a steal, didn't look at Tyutin, so still not 100% sure he's Ovi.

Mela, Jérémy : 144 PA, valued at **** in the trade by Islanders.
Broberg, Didrik: 152 PA, valued at ***** in the trade by Islanders.
Guillot-Diat, Hughes 142 PA, valued at ***** in the trade by Islanders.
Smith, Donovan: 136 PA, valued at *** in the trade by Islanders.

All of them were scouted to be A LOT better than that, so I think I just traded 4 pseudo-busts for Ovi, neat!

Our free agents have now been dealt with, I misremembered Kayumov's salary, it was only 2.5M a year and we finally agreed on a 5.25M/7 year deal. I also got Erwan Sebag on a 1.8M/3 year deal. We ended up trading Zee Callen away for a 2nd rounder; as good as he has been, he's always injured. Until this last season he didn't have any injury proneness in his scout report, but he has played less than 70 games two seasons in a row now. At some point last year he picked up a recurring anterior knee pain injury, as well as putting up his worst season both in points/time on ice and time between GA. With Shea Earl (the AHL prospect who got 18 games last season) coming along nicely as well as us picking up a dman who is scouted as a more talented Werenski in this year's draft means it was time for him to move along. I also shipped out our 4th line RW Edith Fraser for a 3rd and 4th rounder. The final bit of business was trading Stefan Magnusson, our 4th line LW for a 2nd rounder; a steal if you ask me.

When all was said and done we should end up with a Cap of 71.3M a solid, healthy 100k below the cap. Not scary at all! That's according to my spreadsheet, since I have prospects up in the main roster using our training schedules in the off-season that breaks the in-game cap calculation so I won't actually know if we're going to be under the cap with the weird rounding errors in EHM until around a week before the season starts. If we're over it I'll just traded Jarod Ayotte and bring in Joakim Bonneau who has a very wide spread on his scout reports, the best one saying "like Tatu Väyrynen with a smaller frame".

In other news Ivan Tyutin is already growing like crazy, at this pace he will be 1st line material by the time the puck drops on our first game this season; regardless he will have to bide his time on the 3rd line and PP2 units until Ehlers moves along, knowing EHM he will probably play until he's 40 and has 4 acceleration; just not for us.

almost forgot, since I was so preoccupied with the cap management, here is this year's awards:
Art Ross: McPherson(116), Blixt(100), Eichel(Sabres)(99)
Maurice Richard: McPherson(46), Ehelers(46), Eichel(Sabres)(45)
Lester Pearson: Liljegren, Ehlers, Blixt
Norris: Liljegren, Kayumov, Tracol(Coyotes)
Vezina: Hart, Eriksson Ek(Oilers), Fitzpatrick(Lightning)
Jennings: Hart, Gagne
Roger Crozier: Hart, Fitzpatrick(Lightning), Eriksson Ek(Oilers)
Selke: Blixt, Väyrynen, McDavid(Oilers)
Calder: Bonar, Tiitinen, Mäkelä(Red Wings)
Lady Byng: McPherson(2 PIM), Blixt(8 PIM), Ehlers(8 PIM)
King Clancy: Ehlers, Eichel(Sabres), Liljegren
Adams: Boucher, Cooper(Lightning), Yeo(Oilers)
Plus-Minus: Kayumov(92), Ehlers(82), Liljegren(80)
Hart: Liljegren, Ehlers, Blixt
Conn Smythe: Bonar, Ehlers, McPherson

The big stories being the regular season sweep by Liljegren with Pearson, Hart and Norris. Bonar pulling off an Ehlers with Calder+Conn Smythe and us signing the Plus-Minus winner/Norris runner up on a measly 5.25M/7 year deal. Eichel was also having the best season of his career in Buffalo.

Another season over, we ended up facing Boston in the finals. It' was nice to face a new team but they really don't have the goalies to deal with us, so it was a very comfortable sweep. Sadly Lennon Blixt stopped producing in the cup final and went out with an injury in the final game after having been on the ice for all 3 of their goalie, completely killing his chances of breaking the only single playoff record we haven't broken yet; Gretzky's +28 rating, we simply don't ever play enough games in a single playoff to reach it. But this year Blixt was on +27 heading into the last game. Ehlers did manage to hit +28 and since he did it in less games that probably means he technically has that record now. But heading into the final series against Boston Blixt was on 2.0 PPG in the playoffs so I'd really hoped to see him break it properly, no such luck though.

This is what the playoff leaderboards ended up looking like:

we did also manage to set a new franchise record for biggest playoff win in the first game of our Western Conference Semi-final against Nashville:


The regular season on the other hand was just absolutely abysmal by our standards, in the first 4 games of the season Hart posted a .706 and a .789 meaning that for the briefest of moments we were at .500 Pct, that's a first in this save. By the end of October we had 4 losses (all goalie related), by comparison we had 5 losses all season last season and 4 the year before that. So morale wasn't exactly great. We managed to salvage a .900+ Pct in the 2nd to last game of the season to keep the streak alive, but it was way too close for comfort.

The Olympics happened again this year and that was really the turning point in our season. Carter Hart backstopped Canada as usual and put up a .951 over the course of the tournament; when he came back to us after that he was back to his normal self and managed to salvage a .922 on the season to just grab the Roger Crozier in his last start of the season. But until around the 30 game mark he was just barely breaking .900, and he essentially had two possible modes for games, either he got a shutout or a sub .900. So there was absolutely no consistency at the back, Gagne was sitting on a .866 at the same time and our team shooting% was barely 10%, it's normally in the mid 11s. So we were being incredibly hard done by with goalie results going against us, we actually ended the season with the best shot +/- we've ever posted and still had less goals scored and a boatload more goals conceded than our best seasons.

It was quite frustrating, add in that Ivan Tyutin has had a really tough time adapting to being in america and this was just a season to forget. In the playoffs Tyutin showed up with a PPG performance and he has started to pick up English so I'm hopeful for next season. Both him and McPherson were sitting at ~3% shooting at the 30 game mark, we also had a solid 11% PP at that time. Everything that could go wrong was going wrong before the Olympics, we also had Cody Watson out 2 months with a broken ankle to start off the season just to make things even better. But we really turned it around and Ehlers posted his 2nd highest point total, Blixt posted his highest point total ever. After I lowered McPherson's shooting to selective he managed to fight back and actually ended the season on 38 goals, despite having less than 10 scored at the 50 game mark; he just went nuts and saved his 3% shooting up to a low 10s at the end of the season. Tiitinen has really gotten his offence going this season as well and was sitting around PPG pace the entire season while still performing the defensive duties on the 2nd line.

Bonar managed to put up a 83 point sophomore season despite only playing 76 games. He's suffering from the same issue McPherson did at the beginning of his career with us; his natural fitness is so low that playing on Overload almost the entire season makes him stuck in fatigue towards the end of the season. I decided to rest him for 6 games down the stretch while having him on no training to try and get him back to fitness by the playoffs, sadly he was so fatigued that I couldn't even get the "Rst" box to go away by the playoffs. He still managed about PPG in the playoffs though so it's alright. And since natural fitness seems to improve quite rapidly with how much ATOI I give my top 6 forwards it should only be an issue for another year or two, assuming he follows the same pattern as McPherson did.

This is what the standings looked like when all was said and done:

and the leaderboards:

McDavid was carrying the Oilers so hard this year, he just managed to steal the highest assists off Blixt in the final day of the season with a 1+2 game, Blixt only had the 1 assist in the final game; they both had 82 games played though so no idea what tie-breaker gave it to McDavid.

In the off-season we're going to make some moves, Ayotte's rights will be traded post-draft. Jerry Gagne will be traded for a decent 1st rounder more than likely, since Asger Pedersen has hit the cap for how much he can develop in the AHL, and quite frankly he's good enough to be a Vezina candidate by now. We will also more than likely trade the rights to our 3rd pairing German Off Def Michael Fiedler as he's starting to ask for too much money, I'm probably looking for either a 2nd rounder or a 3rd+4th when parting with him. The rights to Tim Horton will also be changing hands, he really never developed beyond what he was on draft day; which is unfortunate because he looked like he could have become Lennon Blixt 2.0. Still he's had the dubious pleasure of centering our 4th line for a few years. So we got good enough use out of him. We have a fair few contracts that need to be resigned this off-season, the biggest being Tiitinen. But our new 2nd pairing (for now) Defensive blueliner will also need a new contract and since Ehlers still has that one year left on his massive deal we're still in a very tight cap position. Since for whatever reason putting people on the IR doesn't actually remove their cap hit I haven't been able to bring up AHLers to fill in for injuries at all this season, so we have played a fairly large portion of the season with either 11 forwards or 5 blueliners since we have gotten a bunch of injuries as usual, as least the injury master Zee Callen was traded away; but his 2nd pairing partner got that 2 month injury instead...if it's not one, it's the other.

As much annoynace as this season had, it did also have some very bright spots; the first one being our 2028 4th round pick Måns Eklund manging to fight his way onto the 4th line this year, because of all the injuries he also got a fair bit of time on the PP2 and 3rd line. He ended the season on 35 points (15G 20A) with barely 12 minutes of playtime per game, and scouts have his upside as David Pastrnak (who is a 1st liner in my save). Our other 4th round pick from 2028 the Belarusian Nikita Kashkar came in to take over the 3rd pairing defensive role after Shea Earl was proving to be slightly too slow to get the job done. He was our 2nd most effective stopper with an average of 31 minutes of icetime per goal conceded, and he decided the playoffs were as good a time as any to pick up his first 2 NHL goals. I really didn't expect him to become this good, especially not this soon, when I drafted him 120th overall two years ago. I really have stumbled upon a lot of draft steals in these last few drafts, the guy I picked 210th overall in 2028 currently projects to be on par with Tyler Soy (2nd liner in my save). The Austrian I picked 210th overall in 2029 is projecting to be on par with André Burakovsky (1st liner in my save) and has just been growing like crazy. The 5th and 6th rounders from the same years are looking like they will be very good bottom 6 guys just in time for when my current guys down there will need to be moved on for salary demand reasons. So things are looking good for the future. Assuming we get the cup next year too we'll be down to 10 remaining to take the record for most cups off the Canadiens. Other milestones of note this season includes Ehlers hitting 1400 points, McPherson hitting 600 points, Väyrynen hitting 700 points, Blixt hitting 800 points and Liljegren hitting 800 points.

With Ehlers going into his final season with the team this next season it's nice to look back on the career he's had with us; the numbers really speak for themselves as to how much of a force he has been over the last decade+:

Honestly the biggest one for me has to be either the AvR he's put up consistently or the +1134 he has so far in his NHL career (regular season + playoffs). It will be tough to let him go, but it's time to pass the crown along to our younger players that will be with us until the end of the save in (hopefully) 11 seasons. Blixt will be the one to take over the captaincy once Ehlers leaves.

The draft has just concluded, we ended up trading Jerry Gagne and our 1st rounder 5 years from now for Florida's 1st rounder this year, next year and their 3rd rounder this year. Tim Horton and Joe McNeill both left in the same deal for Boston's 1st round pick this year and their 2nd round pick next year. With the 1st round pick we got from Florida (14th Overall) we actually had our original target sniped with the 13th pick; so we ended up going for the backup plan:

as you can see that guy was supposed to go 34th overall, but he's incredibly similar to the guy that got sniped in 13th. Absolutely insane mentals and very developed tech. Even if he doesn't grow at all he'll be an amazing player for us. The only thing really lacking is a bit of pace, but based on his scout report that should grow by a few points.

Our board and fans got upset about us trading Horton (4th line C) and McNeill(4th line LW) for the Boston picks, the 1st rounder turned into this guy:

Even if we didn't get that 2nd rounder for next year I'd consider that a huge win. But the AI really isn't smart enough to be able to judge trades, which begs the question; why does it try to? It's just annoying when the board gets on your back for making good trades to deal with cap management while still bringing in new talent.

As usual I went over the AI's top 5 picks and made sure to de-bust any draft busts they got to make sure the bottom teams can start rebounding. There wasn't a single player picked in the top 5 with over 140 PA, that's how many busts are in the draft at this point. And the AI has turned finding them into an art. I've also started a new thing where I'm turning the bottom team of each conference's final pick of the draft into a draft sleeper. Again, since they draft so poorly and always lose the draft lottery they need help.

For anyone wondering the Caps were dead last this year, they stopped being a contender in the playoffs after they lost Ovi, when they lost Bäckström they stopped being a playoff team; when Holtby left they just became the worst team in the league. If the guy I gave them as a 7th rounder doesn't start turning them around I don't know what will. He ended up rolling really high on roles and PA, so they got a 185 PA 16/19 role winger coming up now. The goalie they drafted 3rd Overall was obviously a bust too, so I made him a starter level goalie. All they need now is a top line center and they should be back on track.

The award show is over, results weren't exactly surprising:
Art Ross: Ehler(111), McDavid(Oilers)(109), Blixt(107)
Rocket Richard: Ehlers(56), Drozg(Flames)(47), Laine(Wild)(44)
Lester Pearson: Blixt, Ehlers, Kayumov
Norris: Liljegren, Kayumov, Tracol(Coyotes)
Vezina: Hart, Parsons(Maple Leafs), Korkiakoski(Red Wings)
Jennings: Hart, Gagne
Roger Crozier: Hart, Rumpel(Avalanche), Korkiakoski(Red Wings)
Selke: Blixt, Väyrynen, McDavid(Oilers)
Calder: Sokolov(Wild), Brassard(Wild), Furch(Bruins)
Lady Byng: Ehlers(6 PIM), McPherson(8 PIM), Väyrynen(4 PIM)
King Clancy: Ehlers, Liljegren, Blixt
Adams: Boucher, Colombin(Coyotes), McCaw(Maple Leafs)
Plus-Minus: Kayumov, Ehlers, Liljegren
Hart: Liljegren, Ehlers, Blixt
Conn Smythe: Blixt, Ehlers, McPherson

Pretty much the usual suspects, due to the shooting issues this season we only had Ehlers in the Richard discussion though. Liljegren is up to his 5th consecutive Hart and his 9th Norris in 10 years, since Doughty snapped the streak after 3; he's only at 6 consecutive though. I can't recall but I think that ties Orr for the most Norris Trophies. Blixt is up to his 8th Selke, 4th consecutive and he also put up his 4th consecutive 100+ point season, which is more than both Ehlers and McPherson who always have a down year every 3 years. The fact that Blixt does it while on less offensive personal tactics than either, and also being set to check the opponent's top scorer is just insane. Good thing we won that draft lottery to get him all those years ago.

It feels really strange that all the young guys I drafted in the first two drafts are in their 30s now. Hart and Liljegren are both 31, and Blixt just turned 30. Both Liljegren and Hart's contracts run out in two years time. I don't even want to know how silly their wage demands are going to be. It's quite likely Pedersen and whichever of me recent blueline prospects grows the most will need to replace the two for the last decade or so of this save. If their demands aren't insane I'd love to keep both of them for another 5 or so years at least.

Sigh, why is this unfinished BS even in the game, it clearly doesn't even remotely work as intended:

We're essentially robbing them blind and the game is so clueless it thinks it's the other way around. If there was an option to turn off board/fan feedback on trades I'd use it. Because this is like early Alpha-build levels of unfinished...

Triple-post time; Woo!

Anyways, just ended another season last night; I had the time to play both the full season and the Playoff in one sitting for once. We had some shooting issues again, not as bad as last year but Lennon Blixt finally dropped his 100 point streak due to an abysmal 7.x% shooting; He did manage to get a new franchise record in the final game of the season by scoring 6 points (3+3) though, which was neat. Ehlers missed the 100 point plateau by 1 point in his final season, which kinda sucked. Liljegren managed to eclipse the +100 rating plateau for the 2nd time; With our poor shot conversion and sub-par team + / - it was impressive to have anyone manage that feat. The season ended up being somewhat indifferent by recent standards; This was in no small part due to our PP having issues scoring this year (which in turn was because most goalies in the league over-performed against us this year even more so than last).
This is what the final standings ended up looking like:

When it came to individual performances, there were some standouts however; I think the leaderboards will speak for themselves on this one:

The 61 goals for Brayden Bonar almost tie his Junior record of 62 goals; An absolutely massive performance in this 3rd season with the team, also setting the new franchise record for points from the RW. Since Bonar hasn't played Center in over 3 years now I decided to manually drop his faceoffs attribute down and change his role from Center:Sniper to Winger:Sniper; It made no sense to me that a player who hasn't been taking faceoffs for about 3 years have a 19 in that attribute. Felix Tiitinen also got the same treatment at the end of the season, since he's played 4 seasons without taking faceoffs; It just doesn't make sense to me that they would be two of the best faceoff specialists in the league, when they get no practice doing it.

Our 1st line really took way too long to start clicking this season; A combination of Blixt's shooting being in the trash and Ehlers (despite his point totals) not being as good a playmaker as he used to be. We really looked to our 2nd line to carry the team this year, with Väyrynen finally back in the big points and Bonar having a breakout season they were more than capable of doing so. Tiitinen sadly had some injury issues this season and only played 75 games; He was still able to pick up 69 points despite taking some time to get back to scoring form after the last injury.

The final standout performance from the Leaderboards is that of Asger Pedersen; This was his rookie season and he was able to put up Vezina numbers while starting every 4th game of the season. The fact I was willing to start him that much when we have Hart as our starter tells volumes of how much trust I have in the Dane; He's just so reliable, only having a single game with noticably less than .900 save% throughout the year. His peaks aren't as high as Hart's, but on the flipside his valleys aren't as low; In my mind that kind of consistency makes a better goalie. In the playoffs it's not even close though; Hart has so much playoff experience at this point that he just dominates at will.

The runnings for the Calder this year are super competitive, so I'm not 100% sure Pedersen will get it. But man does he deserve it with that performance in net; I even started Pedersen in the final game of the Stanley Cup finals, not something I've ever done with our backup before. But I do see Pedersen as our starter about 4-5 years down the line when Carter Hart will start losing his legs, and with this rookie performance I don't think we'll skip a beat when Hart finally does leave us.

I did end up needing to make a cap trade I had hoped to avoid at the beginning of the season, Erwan Sebag has left us; Felix Tiitinen apparently has quite the low loyalty, so he ended up wanting 6M per year in his bridge contract. As a result we simply could not fit Sebag under the cap; He ended up being dealt to the Sens for a 2nd rounder and a 3rd rounder. I was hoping for more, but there was just no market value in a guy that's scored 60+ points from the 3rd line 2 years in a row...

In other more positive contract news we had some big names resign contracts: Tatu Väyrynen, 7M(+1.5M)/7 years; Timothy Liljegren, 9M(+0M)/5 years; Carter Hart, 9M(+0.25M)/5 years. All of those were a lot less painful than I'd expected, which was really nice after the headache with Tiitinen's extension. In this off-season we're gaining 11.5M worth of cap space since Ehlers just played his final season for the franchise. Bonar is getting his new contract so that should eat up about 1/3 of that. But this really gives us some head room to fit all our new core members under; Speaking of new core members, this is what Bonar, Tyutin, Tiitinen, Beaulieu and Gerling all look like at the end of this season:

These are the guy I'm going to look to for closing out our last 10 wins to become the most successful franchise in NHL history. And by now it's quite clear that Ivan Tyutin is indeed Ovi's regen, he put up those numbers from the 3rd line; He was at above PPG pace until his Center went out for 7 months with a UCL tear and we were forced to bring in a somewhat subpar replacement from our AHL team. That really put a damper on his production this season; Next season Tyutin will take over Ehlers spot on the 1st line as well as probably taking over Watson's spot on PP1.

That brings us to the playoffs, the only big surprise was that Florida managed to steal a wildcard spot in the last two games of the season. They proceeded to ride that high all the way to the finals, meaning that we got to face Gagne and Dubois in the finals. Sadly for them it wasn't even close, but the series ended in about as much of a fairy tale ending as it could:

I really couldn't have planned it better if I tried. Ehlers also managed to hit the 1500 point plateau with us in this final season, but he's really started declining fast at this point; We need the cap space he took up to continue building on our new core, and with Tyutin on his way to becoming a superstar and Bonar putting up a 60 goal season I think we're going to have the necessary resources to get across the finish line. Part of me wants to try and keep Ehlers and get him to the 2000 point Plateau before he retires, but the opportunity cost is just too high with his wage demands and waning speed; Because speed is Ehlers game, and always has been.

This is what the Playoff leaderboards ended up looking like, Blixt really has been outstanding the last two playoffs:

Depending on how next season pans out he should be looking at hitting the 1000 point mark, and in another 2-3 seasons Timothy Liljegren will join him there as a 1000 point Defenceman; Liljegren would be the 9th Defenceman in history to reach that milestone, and the first one born after 1970 to accomplish the feat.

Another thing I've forgotten to mention; Since the board decided not to retire Blake Wheeler's jersey, despite the career he's had for us; I decided to manually retire it in the database, so 26 is up in the rafters. Ehler's 27 will be unofficially retired until he retires, then that too goes into the rafters.

Well, this just happened:


And then this happened...again, last time we won the 2nd place with Carolina's pick we got Lennon Blixt; No pressure!

and yes this is one of the 4 picks we got in the trade that my board and fans raged at me for...

I went over the top guys in the draft just to see if I actually wanted any of them; This is a super odd draft year, all the guys I want the most are going in the mid/late 1st round. So I really had absolutely no use for a 2nd Overall pick, enter San Jose Sharks:

Trade AI working as intended! I just traded for the 10th Overall pick this year, lottery picks (almost guaranteed) in the upcoming 4(!) drafts, as well as 3 early 2nd rounders. This is probably the worst trade I've ever seen the AI take, and my assistant GM was against it. This means that the 3 random players I traded away last year have now turned into 6 1st round picks, 4 2nd round picks and 1 3rd round pick. Seems like a fair trade to me...Oh and I should note Crosby, Price and Kessel will all have their regens in one of those drafts. Not that I need Top 6 forwards or a goalie, but it's food for thought. If all else fails I'll probably get Erik Karlsson's regen to replace Liljegren towards the tail end of that little era of Shark picks.

I'm guessing when the AI was made to value high 1st round picks super highly so you can't trade for theirs, it also made it so they value yours absurdly high; Because clearly no player would trade away a high 1st round pick for infinite high 1st round picks. That would just be silly!

darn, that's an impressive run as the Jets. Also, MacKinnon on the Bruins?!

braeden wrote:darn, that's an impressive run as the Jets. Also, MacKinnon on the Bruins?!

Him, Duchene and Landeskog were one of the more lethal lines in the league until the 20-21 season, then they only had the cap space to resign Landeskog and Duchene, making MacKinnon the odd man out. He was picked up by the Canucks where him, Virtanen and Jaden Schwartz linked up to be one of the most long living and lethal lines in this save. With Demko in net and that line putting up 200-300 points every year they were finishing 2nd behind us most seasons, but MacKinnon is 35 now so the Canucks didn't resign him and he ended up in Boston on a 1 year deal; He'll probably journeyman around for another 4-5 years until he turns 40 and actually retires.

The Draft and Award Ceremony are over now, we ended up picking up a new 3rd line LW/RW that looks quite insane; Our scouts have him at higher potential than Asger Pedersen in the Top Prospects list, which means he may be in the 170-180 PA range as a 10th Overall pickup that was supposed to go around 27th according to ISS. We also picked up a bunch of other promising forwards to make sure our 3rd line is stocked for years to come. Almost all of them slotted in above the blueline prospect that's scouted to be as good as Hampus Lindholm (so about 150 PA). This draft was the deepest I've ever seen, bar none. Down in the AHL our third stringer goalie from a few years ago has exceeded expectations and is about a 1B NHL goalie at this point, and he's only 19. So the future looks bright.

This is the Winger we picked up with the 10th Overall pick:

Sure he played in a lower tier league, but being 2 points off 2PPG is still pretty impressive to me.

The award show actually had some surprises this year, the biggest was the fact that Asger Pedersen got the runner-up spot for the Vezina in his rookie season, but wasn't even a finalist for the Calder; I guess goalies are super underrated in that selection process. We still managed to grab the Calder though, as our new 2nd pairing two-way defenceman had a stellar +67 rating in his first season.

These were all the award outcomes:
Art Ross: Bonar(118), Väyrynen(111), Drozg(Flames)(103)
Maurice Richard: Bonar(61), Drozg(Flames)(50), Bengtsson(Flyers)(49)
Lester Pearson: Liljegren, Bonar, Hart
Norris: Liljegren, Watson, Kayumov
Vezina: Hart, Pedersen, Tomek(Flyers)
Jennings: Hart, Pedersen
Roger Crozier: Eriksson Ek(Oilers), Pedersen, Hart
Selke: Väyrynen, Blixt, Wise(Islanders)
Calder: Beaulieu, Ohlsson(Bruins),Nixon(Rangers)
Lady Byng: Bonar(0 PIM), Värynen(6 PIM), Ehlers(4 PIM)
King Clancy: Ehlers, Liljegren, Bonar
Adams: Boucher, Arniel(Panthers), Colombin(Coyotes)
Plus-Minus: Liljegren(103), Kayumov(86), Bonar(80)
Hart: Liljegren, Bonar, Drozg(Flames)
Conn Smythe: Blixt, Ehlers, McPherson

Väyrynen managed to steal back a Selke again, as Blixt had a poor year by his standards; Bonar had a real breakout season in pretty much every single way, and Liljegren picked up his 6th consecutive Hart and his 7th consecutive Norris. Hart picked up his 12th consecutive Vezina; If it wasn't for his last name being Hart I'd be tempted to rename it after him when he retires, but having two Hart Trophies would be all kinds of confusing.

I was going to post a screenshot of all the awards Ehlers has picked up with us over the years, but upon realizing his awards page is 8 pages long, I decided against it and just tallied up all the accolades and nominations he's gotten:
King Clancy: 12 wins, 1 runner-up and 1 third places
Lady Byng: 9 wins, 4 runner-ups and 3 third places
Hart: 5 wins, 5 runner-ups and 1 third place
Lester Pearson: 3 wins, 4 runner-ups and 2 third places
Plus-Minus: 3 wins, 6 runner-ups
Conn Smythe: 2 wins, 8 runner-ups and 4 third places
Art Ross: 2 wins, 3 runner-ups and 1 third place
Maurice Richard: 2 wins, 2 runner-ups and 4 third places
Calder: 1 win

All-Star Fastest Skater: 2
All-Star MVP: 1
Fans' Player of the Year: 11 (12 if he wins it for the 12th time in a row this year)

For a total of 39 won Trophies, 33 runner-ups and 16 third places in his 16 season career with us; That's more than a little bit impressive, and he's also had the highest AvR of any player on our team every single season after his rookie season; With his 8.79 AvR in 25-26 being the highest he ever managed, as he scored 122 points to set the franchise record that year. His departure in this year's off-season will signal the final player who was with us from the start going away. If by some miracle his wage demands in Free Agency are not insane I might get him back in and play him as 3rd line LW until he retires, but I'm not holding my breath. When I tried to offer a new contract just to see where he's at he wanted a 6 year 11.5M a year deal at age 34; Totally reasonable contract demands...

I am playing jets also.

I use the the challange house rules
-No trades for 1st picks
-max 3 trades per seson
-max 2 assets for 1 or 2 assets per trade
-no trades for rfa or unsigned prospects
-max salary for UFA 1mill

I found it very fun. Won stanely cup 4 times in row and Ehlers,Laine,Trouba,Little ,Morrissey are all a super core to build around They are so young and I can play 15 sesons around em I have reinforced team with Rantanen and Ekblad and currently have 4 of my draft players in my start squad (low 30 picks or 60 picks).
Also Connor and Dano are very good 3rd line wingers, quick and consistent performance.

My tactic is to trade like this every seson:
1) a Trade for a player to my starting rooster, replacing an older player over 32/33 (stafford,wheeler,byfuglien)
2) a Trade away squad surplus assets for a 2nd rounder ( petan,tanev,mathias,copp)
3) a Trade who involves youth for youth mostly ahl players for ahl players to balance needs and depth

I do my trades between draft and 1july before sesons or on last week before trade stop in februari if i need to sort something wrong during season.

Another season over, 15th cup in a row now. Only 9 left to overtake Montreal, I'm sort of starting to look forward to finishing up this save now. Although we are in the middle of a generation change it's starting to get a little bit stale at this point. We only just managed to sneak above .900% Pct this season again, Hart had an absolutely awful season. When you see the screenshot of the leaderboards saying he's got a .930 on the season you might think I'm crazy for saying that, but since I'm still trying to beat the odds and get a 100% win rate season I end up judging my goalies on their valleys rather than their peaks. Hart's valleys this season include a .667 game, and of the 9 losses we had this season he was in net for 8 of them; Compare that to previous seasons where he's had 0 regulation time losses in a whole year, and suddenly this season doesn't look at good anymore. We don't need him to get a dozen shutouts and tonnes of .950+ games; We just need him to not put up sub .850 games, and we'll take care of the rest offensively. That's another part of the issues this year, first of all Tyutin had a 2% shot convertions for the first 2½ months of the season; That certainly didn't help offensive production.

To make matters worse I was experimenting a bit with shot targeting this year which lead to some very avoidable losses. Essentially there are 4 things that can make us lose a game at this point, and generally 2-3 of them have to happen at once for it to be enough to actually lose (or 1 has to happen really, really hard). I can control 1 of those, the other 3 are completely out of my hands (hence why the 100% season is so hard to get). The 3 I can't affect at all are: My goalie deciding to forget to make saves, their goalie overachieving by 3% or more, and our entire team of skaters deciding that today is the day to all get 5-7 rating at once. The one I can affect is accidentally not targeting the opposing goalie's weakness. We had 3 losses this year because I was trying out some new theories on shot targeting against two of the best goalies in the league (the experiment obviously failed). But the other 6 were because at least 2 of the other 3 happened at once; There is literally nothing I can do about that, it's just 100% luck 0% skill to get those last few % win rate for the 100% season; Which is in no small part why I'm trying for it a lot less actively at this point, it's not going to feel like an achievement when/if I do get it. I will just have gotten lucky enough to dodge a bunch of things that had nothing to do with my decision making.

But with all that said, this season had some pretty cool stuff happen; The first thing was Timothy Liljegren putting up a 97 point season, had he not gone on a 3 game drought in the middle of March madness he would have hit 100 points as a defenceman; I've never had a defenceman hit that plateau in any of my saves (partly due to this being the first one where I coach myself). Mark Kayumov managed to hit +105 rating, for his first 100+ season in that field. Our 10th overall pick who makes up 1/8th of the trade with my 2nd overall pick last year just absolutely demolished the rookie scoring record for our franchise; Tad DeBoer put up 90 points (45+45) and had he not gone on a scoring drought in late March/early April he would have had a 50 goal season in his rookie year. To make DeBoer's achievement more impressive I must add that until late January he was playing on the 3rd line and PP2 units only. So he was keeping PPG pace from the 3rd line, and upon being moved up to the 2nd line due to injuries (which I will get back to later) he went above and beyond any expectations I had of him going into this season.

The injuries brings us to the less glorious news from the season; I tried to trade Felix Tiitinen at the trade deadline due to him simply not living up to his potential due to the near constant injury problems he's been having. But guess what? After we nailed down a trade with the Red Wings in early February he got injured while the trade was about to take place, dropping his trade value to 0 stars. He didn't recover until after the window closed, you know a player is injury prone when he's too injury prone to stay healthy long enough to be traded; At least Felix was kind enough to go at above PPG pace in the playoffs to ramp up his trade value for the off-season. Overall he's just in a very awkward spot. His attributes and wage dictate he must play on the 2nd line; But he's not that good as a defensive forward (despite that being his role) which means we'd prefer to play him as the playmaker or scorer on that line. But because Bronar is a better scorer, and Väyrynen is a better playmaker; That forces Tiitinen into the defensive role on that line by default. When we put DeBoer up in that spot as the playmaker and dropped Väyrynen back to the defensive role we saw a rise in production from that line, while also improving their quite poor defensive record. That make Tiitinen the 3rd line scorer, and I don't really fancy having a 6M a year player as the 3rd line scorer. I'm sure Ottawa fans can relate on this one... This all means that Tiitinen is going out before the draft this year. Another cloud on the horizon that's approaching at a somewhat concerning rate is the issue of Lennon Blixt starting to losing his legs this season, despite only being 31 years old. That's the issue with regen/newgens, most of them have horrible natural fitness compared to the pre-made players. So you get 3ish fewer seasons out of them than you'd expect from the corresponding skill level premade players. But we do have a very good center playing college hockey currently (because I don't want to start eating into his entry just yet). He's looking like a 1st line C at age 19 and he's growing at a very acceptable pace for someone playing college hockey. The only issue is that he's an offensive forward, we currently have a grand total of 0 defensive minded wingers in our top 6; This makes fitting him in awkward at best, but Tyutin does have the attributes to take on a slightly more two-way role; But it just feels wrong having Ovi's regen be the two-way guy:S

I guess if all else fails I just draft Crosby's regen next year's draft. Unless he's generated as a 14 year old, then it's 2 more years left. Price is in this year's draft though. He had 3 consistency and no anticipation before I fixed him. Gotta love the game being so horrible at generating goalies it even found a way to ruin Price. Why regens don't carry the consistency attribute is beyond me.

With all that out of the way this is what the standings ended up looking like:

Having Tyutin playing in the Ovi spot has really helped our PP this season; Tyutin put up a staggering 38% of his total points on the PP.

And this is what the Leaderboards ended up like:

Blixt also managed to hit his 1000th points this season, and Liljegren is due for his next season.

This is what Tad DeBoer looked like at the end of the regular season:

I can't believe he was supposed to go 27th Overall in that draft.

In the playoffs we ended up with the usual sweep, nothing really worth noting other than us scoring a bit less than usual on our way through the Western Conference, we had some pretty bad goalies put up some pretty nonsensical numbers against us. But we completely blew up Montreal in the Cup Final to get things back to somewhat acceptable levels, but we didn't actaully have the top scorer in the playoffs this year; But when Montreal had 5 more games played than us as a 1 line wonder team I guess that makes sense.

When I say nothing worth noting I think I might be mentally blocking out the fact that Ted McPherson went out for 4 months with a torn UCL in the last game of our first series against Los Angeles. But he's going to be back in time for next season so I'm not too worried about it; With the depth we have his absence in the playoffs was barely felt. All I had to do was move Bonar up from the 2nd line and bring up our draft steal from 2 years ago to play the Defensive role on the 2nd line and let Väyrynen take back the playmaking role and setup DeBoer as the scorer; The end result was that DeBoer scored 10 goals in 12 games (he was without a goal in the first series). This is the draft steal in question, picked 54th overall:

his distinct lack of regular season points is a combination of playing on our 3rd line (which had a rough year after DeBoer moved up) and being a quite defensive forward. However during his time on the 2nd line in the playoffs he was quite impressive. He's one of those players that just takes over games sometimes, he scored back to back goals in two separate games in the playoffs; Any player who can seal games like that in the playoffs at his age is a valuable asset. There is definately a world in which we run a modified version of our playoff top 6 setup in the future, it would remove the issue with our upcoming top 2 Center being purely offensive. The lines would end up something like this:
1st line
Tyutin(Scorer/Playmaker hybrid), Väyrynen(Def), Bronar(Scorer)
2nd line
DeBoer(Scorer), Howe(Playmaker), Välisalmi(Def)

This obviously involves trading away Ted "100 points" McPherson, which just feels wrong on all levels. But we will probably end up in a situation where that has to happen for cap reasons anyways. It remains to be seen how our upcoming draft picks from the SJ trade pans out though. We could very well end up with a top notch two-way center and play Canon Howe as an overskilled 3rd line Center until he wants a big contract and then move him along. We are in that situation where we simply have too much talent on the forward side (again). In my next save I have a few challenges that I'm looking at doing. One is drafting with hidden attributes and the Challenge rules for draft picks trading; The other is purposefully only drafting skaters with the "needs to improve his consistency" scout snippet. Just to see how bad having a team with only inconsistent performers would actually be, I'd probably try it with the Challenge rules too. The AI is just too abusable with trades. This current save is technically a save where i handicapped myself too, in that I put the limitation of only being allowed to acquire players through the draft (no trading for players/Free Agency pickups). But it turned out to be a lot less limiting than I thought it would be. Since I really like prospect development I'm probably going to keep doing it in all my saves in the NHL from now on regardless; It's just more fun to build through the draft.

How do you have pictures for those players? Aren't they EHM generated players?

Also, that 19 year old Finn should have been put in juniors/AHL to dominate imo.

braeden wrote:How do you have pictures for those players? Aren't they EHM generated players?

Also, that 19 year old Finn should have been put in juniors/AHL to dominate imo.

You can add pictures to any players just by putting a new picture into the player pics folder and renaming it "firstname_lastname_birthday_birthmonth_birthyear.fileextension".

I'm more curious where you get all of your fictional player pics, Shindigs. I've been trying to find pics for my guys but I can never seem to find any good ones. I have a big collection of Football manager pics that I've gone through but haven't found too many ones that look like hockey players.

colinrsmall wrote:

braeden wrote:How do you have pictures for those players? Aren't they EHM generated players?

Also, that 19 year old Finn should have been put in juniors/AHL to dominate imo.

You can add pictures to any players just by putting a new picture into the player pics folder and renaming it "firstname_lastname_birthday_birthmonth_birthyear.fileextension".

I'm more curious where you get all of your fictional player pics, Shindigs. I've been trying to find pics for my guys but I can never seem to find any good ones. I have a big collection of Football manager pics that I've gone through but haven't found too many ones that look like hockey players.

+1 where?

colinrsmall wrote:

braeden wrote:How do you have pictures for those players? Aren't they EHM generated players?

Also, that 19 year old Finn should have been put in juniors/AHL to dominate imo.

You can add pictures to any players just by putting a new picture into the player pics folder and renaming it "firstname_lastname_birthday_birthmonth_birthyear.fileextension".

I'm more curious where you get all of your fictional player pics, Shindigs. I've been trying to find pics for my guys but I can never seem to find any good ones. I have a big collection of Football manager pics that I've gone through but haven't found too many ones that look like hockey players.

I just google the first name or last name of the player + sport, so "Välisalmi Sport" for example; Then I set the search options to "face" and size to 400x300 or bigger. That way I can crop the images without the risk of them becoming smaller than 157x200, which is the size of facepack images. A lot of them will have the edge of whatever soccer/rugby/floorball jersey they originally wore show no matter how I crop. That's why I've started to photoshop Alexander Burmistrov's Jets jersey onto all of them to hide that.

As far as the fin goes, he was stuck in finnish juniors. Players of his caliber can't grow enough there. So I shipped him over, before putting a player in the AHL I always have them in the main team over summer so I can figure out which training schedule they need to be on. Välisalmi gained 11 Attribute points over summer, with that rate of growth I wasn't sending him down. I essentially use my 3rd line as my AHL all-stars line. That way it's always stacked with talent, this year it kinda lacked scoring threat after I moved up DeBoer, but by the end of this season Välisalmi was up to 1st line quality. I don't know the exact number, but by eye he's at least 150 CA at the moment, and still growing; So I'm keeping him around. Also I'm having this weird issue where about half my AHL/junior players' contracts don't slide. So I'm a bit wary about losing contract years on quality players in the AHL. Besides players need a lot less CA to be effective in the NHL than most here seem to think. My 1st line RW whose worst season since his rookie year is 94 points only barely scratches 150 CA/PA, and he's pretty much the most consistent scorer in the NHL with 10 slapshot and 12 wristshot. So you don't need a lot to work with, as long as the hiddens are there.

Just made my way past the Draft and Award ceremony again, we picked up a pretty exciting Swedish RW and two solid canadian Dmen in the first round, then another dman who was supposed to go in the 1st round at pick 40; Because the AI was busy playing whack-a-mole with all the draft busts as usual. Still sort of at a point where we just have more good players than I can fit. I could pretty much staff two playoff teams if i split up my players at this point. Manitoba Moose won the Calder cup again, since our 3rd stringer is down there putting up .944 in the playoffs like a god. He's pretty must an NHL starter at this point, he just need to get 2-3 more in reflexes, but he won't.

The awards this year were as follows (some new winners since Ehlers is stuck in Buffalo now):
Art Ross: Bonar(108), McPherson(106), Väyrynen(106)
Maurice Richard: Bonar(56), McPherson(52), DeBoer(45)
Lester Pearson: Väyrynen, Hart, Bonar
Norris: Liljegren, Kayumov, Watson
Vezina: Hart, Pedersen, Tomek(Flyers)
Jennings: Hart, Pedersen
Roger Crozier: Hart, Pedersen, Eriksson Ek(Oilers)
Selke: Väyrynen, Blixt, McDavid(Canucks)
Calder: DeBoer, Laliberte(Canadiens), Vanek(Blues)
Lady Byng: Väyrynen, Bonar, McPherson
King Clancy: Liljegren, Tyutin, Eichel(Coyotes)
Adams: Boucher, Colombin(Coyotes), Houle(Flyers)
Plus-Minus: Kayumov(105), Liljegren(97), Bonar(86)
Hart: Liljegren, Bonar, Väyrynen
Conn Smythe: Blixt, Bonar, Tyutin

That's Liljegren's 8th consecutive Norris and 7th consecutive Hart, he's just dominating like no blueliner I've ever had before. He consistently gets well over an 8.0 AvR every single season. I still can't get past how stupid it is that my backup goalie is the 2nd best goalie in the league, and he had a 20-0-1 record this season. Hart put up 12 shutouts as previously mentioned, but also lost us 6 games on his own. McDavid is indeed playing with the Canucks currently, and Eichel is a Coyote; The Coyotes are in fact the 2nd best team in the West every since the Schwartz, MacKinnon, Virtanen line Vancouver rocked for about a decade was split up and Demko was traded. The Caps are still the worst team in the league, their top 4 prospects are all goalies; So their drafting is just top-notch. I almost expected them to pick up Carey Price's regen with their 4th Overall pick this year. But Chicago finally picked him around 6th Overall, despite both Dallas (2nd Overall) and Nashville (3rd Overall) being in desperate need of a starter. They both picked random off board dmen who were busts instead, good job AI!

We had a bit of a sweep in this year's All-Star teams:

Gabe Smyth, the Rookie team Center of the year was the player we picked up with the first 2nd round pick from the SJ trade, this is what he looked like at the end of his rookie season:

The player SJ went off the board to pick with our 2nd Overall pick was a 130 PA russian sniper btw. I rerolled his PA to over 160 for them. So the trade is slightly less horrendous than it otherwise would have been. But I've used barely a 4th of the picks I got and already have a 90 point rookie and a solid two-way 3rd line Center from the deal. So everything beyond this point is just bonus value.

The blueliner who made the rookie team is a swede I picked up 35th Overall 2 drafts ago; His Potential Ability probably isn't great, but he's got very good mentals and has performed admirably in his rookie season. He's playing on the 3rd pairing with "Overload" on, and still put up 27 points while playing as the more defensive of the pair; He had an average of 12:09 ice time, 0:53 of that being on the PK. This is what he looks like:

He doesn't exactly jump off the screen and wow you with his attributes. But what 3rd pairing defenceman does? The fact he gets as much done as he does with what he's given is very impressive though. His efficiency and good mentals has earned him a spot on the half-boards in my 2nd PP unit for next season. I'll be interested to see how much he can contribute on that line, as we're a bit short on offensively minded left handed skaters at the moment.

Oh, and I almost forgot: Felix Tiitinen finally managed to be healthy long enough for us to trade him. We picked him 28th Overall and managed to trade him in for the 12th Overall pick and the 42nd Overall pick this year; The former turned into a quite exciting Canadian blueliner and the latter turned into an equally exciting huge LW/RW who could honestly replace Tiitinen on the 3rd line right now and we'd probably not notice a difference; Due to how stacked we are right now I'm letting him continue his College career for now. Speaking of college careers our late 1st rounder from last year is doing quite well in the Big10, considering College isn't really the ideal place for a player of his skill level to grow in EHM:


This off-season ended up being a lot more eventful than I had planned; Ivan Tyutin wanted 10.5M a year for his freaking bridge contract, I managed to talk him down to 9M a year but that coupled with Asger Pedersen wanting 4.6M a year for his bridge contract meant that we needed to drop one of our high earners to make the Salary cap this season. As much as I liked the idea of getting my hands on Ovi's regen (Tyutin) he has by far been our worst Top 6 forward as far as performance goes, and he was now tied for being the highest earner at the club. So as much as trading Ovi 2.0 might seem a silly thing to do, it's what I did. At first I tried to trade him to Washington (for obvious reasons) but they wouldn't have any of it. So I went to Nashville instead, we ended up giving up a 1st rounder 5 years down the line + Tyutin for the next 2 1st rounders; Juuse Saros left them as a free agent this season, as did most their core players. And they did finish last with that core last season, and they somehow managed to get even worse in this off-season; So their picks should be pretty high, which is nice considering Crosby and Karlsson's regens coming up shortly.
Moving Tyutin on has lead to a bit of a shuffle in our top 6:
1st line:
DeBoer(Scorer), Blixt(Def), McPherson(Scorer/Playmaker Hybrid)
2nd line:
Smyth(Def), Väyrynen(Playmaker), Bonar(Scorer)

Smyth, the C/LW we pick up with the 2nd round pick from the SJ trade ended up being quite the sleeper; He's currently scouted as having the potential of "like Auston Matthews", and I don't think they're too far off. He's still only 19 and all his core technicals are 16+ as a playmaking defensive forward (except hitting at 11 and Off the Puck at 15). This also helped alleviate the somewhat awkward situation in our 3rd line; We had 3 defensive forwards playing on it before this change happened, but now it's been changed to one playmaking forward and two defensive forwards. That's still far from an ideal setup, but it's better than it was. So far we've only had 2 pre-season games with the setup, but we did win the first one 12-0 against Calgary and the second one 6-2 to Montreal who we met in the Stanley Cup finals last season, so it's looking promising. DeBoer also managed to crack the "Top Left Wingers" list in his sophomore season, despite only having about as much attribute point total as your average 4th liner; So I'm expecting a lot of growth from him this season based on that, or the AI is just drunk again. I'm hoping for the first option.

Now im back playing EHM again, and its my second season with Red Wings.. It was the OG break, and we were no 1 team in NHL.
I changed so my headcoach was handling the games, but with my tactic and roster.






As the pictures show, we played really well, claiming the Presidents and Stanley Cup again! Here is the awards our players won:
Lazar and Mantha really stepped up in the playoff and helped out with depth scoring.. The five games in the final was 10-1, 4-3, 3-4, 5-2 and 7-2.

Lady Byng: Tatar
King Clancy: Tatar
Lester: Zetterberg
Conn Smyth: Nyquist
Masterton: Mike Green
Jack Adams: Blashill

And im happy with our drafpicks, we had two pick in the scond round..
#30 Brady Tkachuk C
(Like Ryan Johansen, offensive playmaking forward, 1st line potential)
#41 Jakub Skarek G
(More talented version of Marc-André Fleury, starting goaltender)
#60 Jacob Pivonka RW
(Like Stefan Noesen, Goal-scoring forward, 2nd line potential)
#120 Jacob Tortora LW
(Like Emerson Etem with smaller fram, two-way forward, 2nd line potential)
#150 Arvid Degerstedt C/LW
(Like David Desharnais, two-way forward, 2nd line potential)
#180 Vladislav Kotkov LW/RW
(No scoutreport, this is a gambling pick by me)
#210 Kalle Eriksson RD/LD
(Like Ryan Ellis with slower stride, two-way defenceman, no. 5-6 potential)

All players are under contract, but we didnt manage to resign Mike Green.. He had a really great season, scoring 23 goals and 69points.. He was on a 6mil contract and wanted a 6yr @ 9mil extension.. I dont think thats a good contract for us, so thats why he´s a free agent.
Russo or Hicketts will play in NHL this year instead if we dont make any trades..
Edit: Added the rest of our picks, and also wanted to say i feel pretty calm about our aging center core (Zetterberg and Nielsen). Sure both are great players, but now when i have picked Brady Tkachuk and last year Ryan Poehling the future looks bright. And dont forget i also have Athanasiou, Holmstrom and a few more prospects. My main concern is our defence core, that looks week with Mike Green gone and a old Kronwall.. DeKeyser and DeAngelo will be my top pairing, and a trade feels like a must.. Considering trading Howard with some prospects to get a top 2-4 defenceman.

Another season over, and what a season it was; New records were set pretty much across the board. We rolled a "your 3rd line and pairing is awful, but all your other lines are better" year for the 2nd time in this save. And boy does it make this team disgusting. We were on pace to finish with less than 100 goals conceded and over 400 goals scored at the 42 game mark, sadly as usual the pace trailed off a bit after the All-Star "break". But with 20 games remaining we were still on pace to hit 400 goals, same at 15 games; Then we started running into goalies consistently over-performing against us in March (this almost always happens). So heading into the 2nd to last game of the season we were sitting at 387 goals scored, clearly we couldn't hit 400 unless a miracle were to happen... Well, Nashville happened; We scored 8 against them, setting up a situation where we needed 5 goals against the Rangers on the final day of the season. Some may recall I gave them a 180 PA goalie to make them a team again, we'd never in his career scored more than 4 goals on the guy so I was all but certain the dream was gone. Queue a 6-2 win on the final day of the season and this is how it ended up looking:

Yes, that's a +276 goal difference. New franchise record, the 401 goals and 125 conceded are both obviously new franchise records as well, as is the 97% Pct and only losing a single game in regulation (thanks to Hart conceding 6 goals on 20 shots, great job bud!)

So what kind of individual efforts fueled this record-breaking season? For the longest time the top 6 scorers in the league were our top 6 forwards, and for essentially the entire season the top 10 on the +/- charts were our Top 6 forwards and Top 4 blueliners, this is how it looked when all was said and done:

127 freaking points from the 2nd line and PP2 by Väyrynen, setting the new franchise scoring record actually made the "doesn't think Tatu Väyrynen should be a member of our team." Board feedback go away. The 91 Assists are a new franchise record, the +114 is a new franchise record, if Gabe Smyth hadn't been injured for 6 games and played about another 10+ through injury he was projecting for over 100 points too; Which would have put our entire top 6 above 100 points on the season. Our backup goalie is statistically speaking the best goalie in the NHL and he's undefeated in regulation time for 2 whole seasons (combined 49 starts). Väyrynen was on pace to hit 140 points for the longest time, then despite never going more than 1 game without a point in a row for the previous 60 games he went on a 5 game streak with no points, followed by no multi-point games until the final days of March where he put up 6 points against Dallas in the 11-1 smashing we administered. On his way to achieving the new top point record he also (as you may have guessed) smashed Ehlers' record for fastest 100 point in the franchise. Ehlers achieved it in 65 games; Väyrynen only needed 60:

He also hit the 1000 point plateau this season, only needed 895 games to get there too. In other news Liljegren finally hit that 1000 point plateau:

There's a pretty good reason he's won the Hart 7 years in a row. Being able to put up an above 8.0 AvR for 11 straight seasons as a defenceman is something I didn't think was possible; I had only had a single defenceman get it a single season before Liljegren was fully developed and began his domination. The 8.04 season should be the one after he turned 23 (read: was finished developing everything but his mentals).

The development of Gabe Smyth has been quite the journey too, from struggling somewhat on the 3rd line last season to scoring a projected 100 points as the defensive forward on the 2nd line while playing out of position this season, he's getting up there in attributes already:

and remember, we picked this guy up 34th Overall in the same draft we got DeBoer, so we picked up two 100 point scorers in the same draft. And we still have two probable Top 6 forwards from that draft in College/juniors; I wasn't kidding when I said it was the deepest draft I've ever seen.

The final thing of note that happened this season was that our Defensive coach got too old and lost almost all his attributes in a very short period of time; But then I came across this Caucasian Japanese retired player gone coach:

Did not expect to ever have to write that sentence, but man is he good! All he's missing is another few points in Working with Youngsters and the Defensive tactical style and he'd be perfect. He's actually a better tactics coach than Guy Boucher at his peak, which makes him the best tactics coach in the game. At first I just assumed he was one of those wacky regen coaches from a random country (I've had an NHL coach from Trinidad & Tobago for instance). Then I saw he had International caps and his birthdate was in 91, so I googled him and that picture is of the real Denis Akimoto. The more you know...

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.