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***Sburbine*** · 08-25-2024, 04:12 PM

There has been a general feeling around the league for a few years now that goalie TPE doesn't matter and the being a defender is boring. The first point is honestly just true, there has been a tone of analysis in the past that goalies doing well is mostly a reflection of the teams TPE total and not of their TPE. An active goalie brings a lot to a team locker room but not much to FHM. The second point is what I want to analyze today, is Defense no fun anymore? There seems to have been a shift when we swapped from FHM6 to FHM8 that defenders play a lot less of a role on winning games and getting points which even led to changing the way we score fantasy in order to weigh defenders higher because forwards were dominating the leaderboard. This has also led to many teams fighting for very few defender free agents and people struggling to fill their six defenseman slots with active people, In the FHM8 era you see a lot more people swapping from forward to defense than from defense to forward to fill a team's needs. This also lead to HO attempting to increase the amount of scoring that defenders do by increasing the scoring accuracy cap for all defender from 12 to 13 staring in S68 (to no affect but I'll speak on that later). My first player, Jay O'Neil, was a defender his whole career starting in S61, spent five seasons playing in FHM6 before playing the rest of his career in FM8 so I can tell you that there was certainly a shift between the two sim engines and the desire to play defense went down throughout the seasons. The league officially swapped from FHM6 to FHM8 in season 66 so I wanted to look at the 5 seasons before and 5 seasons after to look at why defense feels so boring. Is defender scoring down? Are defenders hitting less? Is it just in everyone's head? The first thing I looked at was points to see if defenders are in fact scoring less between the two sims:

You can see from this graph that defender scoring has remained unchanged between the two sims but offensive scoring has shot up drastically. So it's not that defenders points are lower it's just that they feel that they're missing out on the scoring bump that offenders are seeing. Next I looked at hitting, from the general feeling around the league, it seemed like forward were hitting at lot more and I wanted to confirm that:

Not only is forward hitting up but defender hitting is down. Defenders are beating less people up while forwards are not only getting to score more, they're also hitting more. Really no fun for defenders at this point. Lastly, I wanted to look at shot blocking, something that should be defender's bread and butter:

Now we can see that not only has defender blocking gone up slightly in FHM8 but the forward block has gone way down. It seems that FHM8 requires defender to defend a lot more and score a lot less than in FHM6. So in conclusion, unless you're really into blocking shots, defense is less fun in FHM8 vs FHM6. They score at lower rated to total points than forwards and hit much less. I'm not really sure what the league can do about this because it looks like the increase in scoring accuracy in S68 did nothing but we'll see what the next sim engine does for points when we eventually swap.

chetib · 09-07-2024, 02:26 PM

Approved @Sburbine @CptSquall

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