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sash · 04-04-2022, 04:48 PM

04-04-2022, 04:31 PMboom Wrote:
04-04-2022, 03:20 PMGooney Wrote: i don’t know the league well enough to discuss parity issue but i don’t think you do either frankly. everything you listed could be applied to either league. good gms do good, which both hamilton and newfoundland clearly have.
imagine telling someone who’s a J GM and SHL HO they don’t know what they’re doing

because every real NHL gm knows what theyre doing right?

**RomanesEuntDomus** · 04-04-2022, 04:48 PM

This issue has nothing to do with Hamilton so how about we just leave them out of it for once?

spooked · 04-04-2022, 04:50 PM

04-04-2022, 04:32 PMACapitalChicago Wrote:
04-04-2022, 04:27 PMspooked Wrote: I'm not going to refute anything you said, I did say from what my experience was which is mainly limited to a few seasons ago, so fair enough. I am happy to hear more communication is happening, I think the main point I was trying to get to with the "merging comment" was that rather than the focus being on the SMJHL or SHL for the two groups, the focus really needs to be at the site-level at this point. The specialization will still be needed for day-to-day activities, but when it comes to initiatives or rule changes, or any other systems, I think the teams should work much much closer together than I had ever seen in my iteration of HO. It never felt like the two HOs were pushing in the same direction when I was in it, so I hope that can be the case cause without the J being fun the SHL will suffer, but if the SHL cannot be fun then the J won't keep up growth either cause not everyone is down for it either.

Entirely fair. Thank you for this conversation and for your perspective, I'm very glad to talk these things out. I think there's some interesting ideas present, but the execution and realization of them can be a very difficult process

Well we clearly both care about the site at least! Cry

Samsung virtual assistant · 04-04-2022, 04:52 PM

04-04-2022, 04:42 PMsash Wrote: why yall so mad about randomness when hockey itself is a very luck based sport all things considered

IDK how your take from this thread is that people are mad about randomness.

***Hallsy*** · 04-04-2022, 04:52 PM

04-04-2022, 04:48 PMRomanesEuntDomus Wrote: This issue has nothing to do with Hamilton so how about we just leave them out of it for once?

Agreed

***sköldpaddor*** · 04-04-2022, 04:58 PM

04-04-2022, 03:36 PMWaters Wrote:
04-04-2022, 03:14 PMsköldpaddor Wrote: sorry let me rephrase.

j parity conversation is a different conversation than SHL parity conversation

hope this helps
That’s not what the post I was replying to said, so it does help. Also, I don’t agree. The things that make a team good in SHL and SMJHL are largely similar, and they are the things you listed when you were praising NL. Good trades, good drafting and good locker room. The difference is, while hamilton wins a lot of games (not even true right now, they suck), NL wins almost every game in a league where the smaller theoretical success windows should allow teams to be more even. I believe you guys are working on it, but posts that compare NL favourably to HAM makes it sound like you guys think their dominance isn’t as bad so it’s not as pressing an issue. I think it’s actually much worse.

Okay I am home from the dentist now and can actually answer this.

First of all, I was not attempting to mindlessly praise Newfoundland here. I GM a juniors team of my own, I promise you I am just as demoralized and exhausted (if not more) by the imbalance in the J as the next person.

But my entire point here was not to say "NL good, HAM bad," but rather to push people away from comparing those two situations as if they are equivalent, because a J team and an SHL team cannot be equivalent in my mind. The things that keep NL good require a completely different balance of GMing skills from the things that keep Hamilton good (or any SHL team, I just think it's obvious that HAM is the team always at the epicenter of parity discussions, just as NL is in the J).

Hamilton and Newfoundland both have GMs/coaching staff who are very, very good at FHM. I don't think anyone would argue that. But being good at the sim does not get you as far in the J as it does in the SHL. Being good at the sim is absolutely not enough when the lifespan of any player you acquire, regardless of how good they are or how you acquire them, is a maximum of five seasons. That limited lifespan completely changes the way you have to build your team, and the things you have to focus on. It limits the extent to which you can rely on certain things that SHL GMs can rely on. A juniors team can't have a whole team commit to a ten-season big picture or build theory, the landscape is always changing. A juniors GM has to be absolutely on top of things that SHL gms generally don't have to worry about. When was the last time an SHL GM (outside of those paid to be mentors) had to spend hours helping somebody completely new to the site figure out how to do an update thread? What percentage of an active SHL roster has to be gently reminded to do their PTs every single week? (I don't have data on that, but I'd wager it's a lot lower than it is in the J).

Free agency in the J and free agency in the SHL are completely different animals, and that was actually the main point of the second paragraph of my original post (I know that got kind of lost in all of the "why is Hamilton involved here" scuffle and I think I could probably have been a little clearer about that, so that's on me). There is absolutely no equivalent in the SHL for getting a blank slate player that you can guide into the build strategy of your team without having to consider significant budget ramifications, or using/spending significant assets for them. I admit that I don't know what Hamilton is like on the inside, but from the outside, it looks like a group of tightly-knit friends who are committed to one team strategy for literal real life years at a time, who will almost definitely want to come back to that same team with their next create, and I am in no way saying that's a bad thing, but it's a completely different picture than anything you can build in the J.

People like to bring up the boogeyman of "J lifers" but as ACap already explained, the data just does not support the claim that that is the big problem here. The rules currently allow players to play a fifth season in the J, and maybe there's a conversation to be had about whether we want that to continue, but we just do not see this overwhelming influx of repeat users recreating to join the same J team over and over and over again. Sure, we see established users express a preference for going to a certain J team when they recreate, but they are by and large users who go on to have full SHL careers after that. When people stall out in the J and play five seasons, it's usually because they've either a. decided they aren't really interested in sticking around but like their J team enough to make it to the cap and finish their time out here, or b. gone fully inactive. I can count on one hand the number of users I've ever had tell me in the entire 3+ years I've been here that they actually intend to only ever play in the J and recreate repeatedly to do so - it happens, but I don't think it happens nearly as often as people think.

I do think, however, that making changes to the free agency system would coincidentally eliminate that problem completely, because it would force teams to rely primarily on the draft to acquire those players. That's not the primary reason I'd like to see changes in juniors free agency, but I do think it would address it along the way, because it doesn't matter nearly as much that a recreate wants to play for a specific team as long as that team spends equivalent assets to make that happen that any other team would have to spend on a player.

Gooney · 04-04-2022, 04:58 PM

04-04-2022, 04:31 PMboom Wrote:
04-04-2022, 03:20 PMGooney Wrote: i don’t know the league well enough to discuss parity issue but i don’t think you do either frankly. everything you listed could be applied to either league. good gms do good, which both hamilton and newfoundland clearly have.
imagine telling someone who’s a J GM and SHL HO they don’t know what they’re doing

every junior gm and shl ho have had perfect knowledge of everything related to sim hockey. chill out

Serpe x 13 · 04-04-2022, 05:10 PM

CK UR THE BST

***Chevy*** · 04-04-2022, 05:13 PM

Memento Mori · 04-04-2022, 06:54 PM

04-04-2022, 04:11 PMSburbine Wrote:
04-04-2022, 03:56 PMHallsy Wrote: we really didn't dominate last season. Most tests I ran showed BAP smoking us. there is still an RNG element to FHM.
Not a great look coming off of winning the cup with the 11th highest TPE in the league (in the SHL no less where it's much harder to win) and saying "sorry about the rng bro"

Weirdest take in the whole thread.

***SpartanGibbles*** · 04-04-2022, 06:59 PM

04-03-2022, 06:43 PMACapitalChicago Wrote:

We're already looking at it

Oh my those icons take me back..... is the J GM discord still named the same thing?

ACapitalChicago · 04-04-2022, 07:09 PM

04-04-2022, 06:59 PMSpartanGibbles Wrote:
04-03-2022, 06:43 PMACapitalChicago Wrote:

We're already looking at it
Oh my those icons take me back..... is the J GM discord still named the same thing?

It is not, it's gone through a few iterations. Currently it's back to the usual SMJHL GMs

Still got shits & gibbles tho

S66 Damian Littleton

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***SpartanGibbles*** · 04-04-2022, 07:51 PM

04-04-2022, 07:09 PMACapitalChicago Wrote:
04-04-2022, 06:59 PMSpartanGibbles Wrote: Oh my those icons take me back..... is the J GM discord still named the same thing?

It is not, it's gone through a few iterations. Currently it's back to the usual SMJHL GMs

Still got shits & gibbles tho

Then all is right with the world

nour · 04-04-2022, 08:38 PM

Putting Hamilton aside because it's clear the people discussing here didn't intend on Hamilton being the part of the conversation, I do think the real issue in parity with Juniors right now is the amount of teams. Genuinely I don't think the SMJHL is built to support 14 teams right now. No discredit to Newfoundland, they're also doing a good job building a culture that keeps people engaged, they're drafting well, they're great at FHM, you can't really say anything to detract from Newfoundland in terms of their competence. They're genuinely good, but the issue is that teams can't catch up right now with the state of draft classes right now. We don't have big Reddit classes every 3 seasons anymore, an alarming number of teams are fielding way too many IFAs right now, so when Newfoundland pulls ahead of the pack, they don't pull ahead by an inch, they pull ahead by a mile. Again, all props to Newfoundland for building a great room and keeping people engaged, but they have a much easier time keeping people engaged when their room is bumping with guys, versus other teams having to split scraps because there's literally not enough players to go around, and with their rooms being dead because of that, they have a harder time keeping players engaged because of it. It's cyclical. Room is dead, so you draft players to bring the room to life, they go inactive because the room is dead, ad nauseam.

It's not a popular take, but if we care about closer parity in Juniors, you need to cull 2 teams from the league at minimum. SHL playerbase is stable enough to expand when it makes sense for them, Juniors playerbase is way too unpredictable to field 14 teams when sub-60 player draft classes are the norm now.

Edit to say more: Newfoundland is the focus of the ire right now, but as long as there's an issue with not enough players to go around, every season going forward is going to be one team pulling ahead of the pack who can't keep up because of a league bloated with teams, whether its Newfoundland or not.

**First GM in SMJHL history to win 3 Four Star Cups back-to-back-to-back**

grok · 04-04-2022, 08:46 PM

04-04-2022, 08:38 PMnour Wrote: Edit to say more: Newfoundland is the focus of the ire right now, but as long as there's an issue with not enough players to go around, every season going forward is going to be one team pulling ahead of the pack who can't keep up because of a league bloated with teams, whether its Newfoundland or not.

I've been saying for years that expanding smjhl is a losing battle at this size. if j is bursting at the seams, expand the shl to force more call-ups. if necessary, adjust the update scale to make those call-ups competitive on bottom lines/pairings. expanding j just makes it more of an obligation to spend a calendar year there.

my personal hot take is the current "four season" requirement for nearly every player is devaluing the shl, but that's a separate conversation.

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