EHM The Blue Line

Well, this one blog will be quite different than most around, as I will relate the progresses of my creation of the 2050 database, a very special kind of "historical" database. I will also extensively cover the experimentations I make using the pre-game editor to get the best out of the game's capabilities. Knowledge gathered here might possibly help others - this is why I decided to undertake this blog.

The 2050 database is very special historical database in the sense that it does not recreate long-gone glorydays but rather extrapolates from the current reality of ice hockey as a global sport and attempts to outline what it might be like 40 years from now, prior to the start of the 2050-51 season. I'm limited in my evolutive extrapolations by the game's hard code, but I guess I can make something out of it.

- YZG

Historical context

Much things have changed since 2010-11 in the hockey world. After an epically failed european expansion, in the late 2010's, the NHL decided to retreat to where it belongs, North America, with 30 teams in proven markets. That expansion brought the league size to 40 teams, with two five teams European divisions added at once with teams in Helskinki, Stockholm, Berlin, Prague, Bratislava, Vienna, Copenhagen, Oslo, Budapest and Zürich. The European public, totally disinterested in such artificial creation, with vastly diluted talent, seldom attended games and in a mere three years, the 10 euro teams were gone. Interestingly enough, the most successful team was the Budapest Magyars, at the game and, surprisingly, on the ice, possibly because the hungarian league did not have the same kind of history and culture around it that the other national leagues had. Led by emerging local stars Zsolt Rácz and István Kovács, the hungarian side surprisingly ruled the european side of the league, even coming inches close to the Stanley Cup finals in 2017, the last year of the european experiment.

In North America, Quebec City retrieved its beloved Nordiques when Quebecor Group bought the Phoenix Coyotes in 2014-15, following the construction of a new, state-of-the-art Colisée. Hartford returned to the league as well, joining Winnipeg and Quebec in the trend of resurrecting old names when they, ironically, bought back the sinking Carolina Hurricanes in 2017 - the same year, the league called it quits with the experiments in Florida and moved the Panthers to Seattle, where they became, I bet you could guess it, the Totems. The following year, Portland (Oregon) received its own franchise when they grabbed the moribund Columbus Blue Jackets, naming them the Winterhawks. Both Seattle and Portland were real successes.

The lone experiment the NHL has made is expanding in Mexico, where the game has developped interestingly since the creation in 2010-11 of a semi-professional league - and so far, the results have been quite positive. When José Antonio Flores became the first Mexican born and trained player to join the league in 2030-31, there was a hockey buzz generated all across Mexico. Flores' excellent on-ice performances helping, the interest toward the now fully professional local league increased, and in it's wake, the NHL decided to expand there. The Mexico City Aztecs were born in 2036-37 and, while they have not necessarily been the most succesful club on the ice, with a single playoffs participation in 2039-40, they have been considered a success at the gates and are regarded as a mainstay in the league.

But the most radical transformations occured in Europe. The Kontinental Hockey League exemple of adopting the North American model of multinational, closed leagues instead of the traditional promotion and relegation system changed the face of European hockey, in good and bad ways. The good way is that it made the game more visible and popular by giving the audience an increased quality product on the ice and by keeping star europeans at home, and if the euro leagues already attracted many NHL-caliber North Americans at the turn of the 2010's, it was increasingly true later on. Steven Stamkos notably rejected offers from Tampa Bay, Montréal and perennial Cup-contenders and winners Washington Capitals to sign for 4 years with Djurgårdens IF. Even Sidney Crosby concluded his career in Europe, with two successful seasons with powerhouse Kärpät Oulu in Finland. Djurgården - Oulu clashes in the Nordic Hockey League (NoHL) were epic in those years, and many North American observers did not hesitate to compare the heated rivalry to that involving Montréal and Québec City in the 1980's. The old model however, still an unavoidable in soccer, was very much missed by the fans, and promotion and relegation was brought back in several euro leagues, including Sweden and Finland, by 2025 - the NoHL was simply converted into a promotion/relegation league, with the same Swedish, Finnish, Danish and Norwegian teams participating. Other leagues however, such as the Southern European Hockey League, made up of the countries of former Yugoslavia plus Albania and Greece remained a closed league, however. Only the Germanic Hockey League (GHL), born out of the fusion of the DEL, EBEL and Swiss Leagues, survived, although the local championships remained in parallel.

As far as the KHL goes, the experiment was only partly conclusive. A real competition to the NHL in regards to the signing of Russian and Eastern European stars, the KHL failed to be a real competition to the league all by itself as it wanted, and also failed to be a pan-european league, the western european nations quickly feeling disconnected from the project's goals and turned off by endless trips deep in Siberia to meet the brave Amur Khabarovsk, which, as the most succesful team at the gates along with Dinamo Riga and eventually Barys Astana, was not a team any sane commisioneer would dismiss. New Gazprom and KHL president Fyodor Khvartalnov stated in 2019 that "it was time for Russian hockey to start being Russian hockey again and not an NHL copycat", and the old promotion/relegation system was brought back there too, with new teams spawning all across Russia and the former Soviet Republics. By 2030, all of the former Soviet Republics had developed hockey programs, even unlikely Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. the Kyrgyzs and Uzbeks were those who developped the fastest and the best. With Kyrgyzstan's great showing at the 2011 Asian Winter Games, the sport developped by heaps and bonds there. Transnational rivalry with Uzbekistan prompted the latter to join the game as well, and both nations pushing each other, aided by Russian and Kazakhstan, developped into decent hockey nations. Mongolia, passionate of the sport ever since the Soviets brought it to them in the 1970's, found a way to develop despite poor technical and material means and, with two teams in the strong Central Asian Ice Hockey League, became a respectable hockey nation.

Further east, the game kept growing in the rest of Asia, growing in India and Pakistan and expanding into Vietnam. The Asia League grew to include 18 teams, most from Japan and South Korea and even one from North Korea, a consequence of the putsch that finally overthrew Kim Jong-un, son of Kim Jong-il, in 2026. However, the greatest rise of fortunes came in unlikely China. The Chinese team(s) had, for decades, been the laughing stock of the Asia League. They would just descend into the last places of the standings very early in the season and just never budge from there. Eventually, the Chinese Ice Hockey Association (CIHA) decided to pull back the China Dragons and the Harbin Stars from the Asia League in 2036. Some observers thought the nation called it quits with the sport. But rumors began spreading about the Chineses' infamous athlete factories having started producing hockey players as well, despite the results being less than conclusive at the international level. In 2045, it was announced with much fanfare that the CIHA had founded the Chinese National Hockey League (CNHL), a 14 teams league that had planted teams in the bigger cities. Most hockey pundits only half-listened the press conference until it was announced that, financed by the Communist Party and various local highly succesful businesses, each team would have a player budget largely in excess of $60 million in a cap-less league. The hockey world had just stopped and nobody knew exactly how to react. Did the NHL just find a real competitor? Would players want to go play and live in China?

The planets were perfectly aligned for the CNHL's birth. The first season, the league ran with (skilled!) local players and a few good, but not overly talented imports, including several NHLers such as Bradley MacIsaac, Dylan Schmidt, Marc Dahlström, Stanislav Döme, Gert Nijenhaus and Crimson Wesley - mostly talented career third liners. The older ones remembered the KHL's birth and noticed how it was the same kind of players who crossed over. The NHL was reassured. But the second season, the game of hockey litterally crashed worldwide, because of the NHL's continued greedy policies. The league had continued poaching the greatest international stars for so long with the infamous NHL Release Clause that the non-North American IIHF nations got irremediably fed up with it and decided en-masse in 2046 to boycott the NHL and forced their respective players home. Compensations were asked for by the players. The national federations and and their players could not come to terms, and a strike ensued. Meanwhile in North America, the NHL teams found their rosters with large gaps due to the departed Europeans and Asians. The teams undertook to draw in the North American pool of talent, but it just wasn't deep enough to fill 30 teams with cream-of-the-crop players like it used to be, and the North American NHL players threatened to go play in Europe if they didn't do something in order to restore the game's calibre in the NHL, demands backed by the fans all across the continent. The European leagues players, scared at the thought that some 800 skilled players would flood their leagues and steal their jobs, demanded that not more than a couple of NHL players be signed per team to protect their interest. However, the European GMs, seeing a great opportunity to sign many more Worldclass superstars, refused to agree to these demands, and the strikes expanded to all the European and Asian players, from Porto to Vladivostok. All players? Nope. The CNHL players, well controlled by the powers that were in China, didn't (really) object such a possible massive arrival. The CNHL reacted accordingly. The league was expanded to 30 teams and all across China, a hockey buzz spreaded. Superstars started to pour in from abroad, lured by the perspective to keep playing some hockey for salaries higher than at home.

The various strikes lasted some 4 years and resolved in August 2050, when all the involved parties realized how much the whole world but the Chinese were losing. All leagues worldwide but those in China and various junior and amateur leagues worldwide had been suspended for four whole seasons. All contracts had expired and rights lost over time. The various leagues had to rebuild themselves from scratch and compete with a new, large player for their players. This is at this moment that the game starts. Right on time for the 2050-51 season, with all teams in the world empty and the greatest players in the game in China, with huge contracts. Hopefully this database turns out to be as great as I want it to be.

- YZG

If you guys got any thoughts on the idea behind the project, I'd like to hear them.

Current database state
- Most, if not all, new leagues were added to the db. Reputations of the various leagues worldwide have been adjusted upwards to reflect the increases in skills in the various nations over time. This will also translate into more skilled players in the database, and less predictable World Championships with a greater parity existing between more nations.

- Several hundred new players were added, mostly for new nations. Most are very average and good enough for their home leagues only, but there's still the odd star hidden in improven nations like Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan. So far, I must only have 1,5% of the db covered... that will be tedious.

- I also started updating the poor name lists that come along with the game. I've always thought it was one of the game's weaknesses, but I found a neat way to address it. You can actually update a large part of the players' db and names db by editing the names directly in the firstnames and lastnames sections of the editor. This way, I could quickly and efficiently correct and uniformize the transliterations from Russian and Ukrainian names by simply changing the names in those areas of the db. By replacing "Sergei" by "Serhiy" for Ukrainians for instance in the forenames section and confirming the change, all Ukrainian player named "Sergei" will instantly have its name modified to "Serhiy" in the db! Likewise, for Russians, you can get players named Alexei, Aleksei, Aleksey, Alexej, and Alexey, whereas, while all correct, the most adequate transliteration should be "Aleksey". By editing them all to Aleksey, everyone named that in the db will have his name transliterated the same way.



- YZG