12-28-2018, 08:01 AMAce Wrote: The SMJHL has lost its way regarding its purpose... keeping the first gens invested and active. No one wants to be a 4th line plug in the J and there’s zero reason for a prospect to “prefer” staying down if being called up is an option. I look at it as if my player were a young kid in the OHL. If the GM of the team in the NHL that owned my rights called me and asked if I’d be interested in the NHL, hell yeah! I’ll be a healthy scratch or a fourth line player there over a top line everything in juniors.

Maybe there needs to be some change in the SMJHL contracts and individual purchases that significantly incentivizes making the jump to the SHL ASAP but doesn’t put the SMJHL players at a disadvantage in the long run...

Good points.

I remember the SMJHL used to be completely about getting your first year rookies ready for the SHL. I hated the old send-down system with a passion but the one thing it did was prevent was the SMJHL teams becoming a country club for send-downs to stay down and pad their stats which are ultimately meaningless in the long run (and hurt their careers more than help in a lot of cases), I'm not blaming the send-downs here because inflation (in terms of TPE and members) has caused this problem as much as anything but it would still be nice to see it changed. This was also an era where rookies could easily score over PPG if they stayed active and some players scored 60 + points in a 40 game season, IIRC Dions player scored close to 80 in a 40 game season. This also led to more separation between the good and bad teams and you'd get some godawful teams but now that everyone makes the play-offs that doesn't matter as much.

First season is also IMO the most important for keeping new members active. I know I likely would've gone inactive on my first player had I not been scoring in my first year or had been scoring less than .50 PPG (as dumb as this sounds it's true). What kept me active in my first season was seeing my player scoring and having a chance at being the best player in the sim in my first year. We've told players that stats don't matter when it comes to your draft position and although its true we're probably losing a lot of potential actives because they log in and see their player struggle to hit 20 points at years end while they grind it out playing 10-15 minutes a game.

At the very least I'd like to see some line requirements put in place. If you have 3 send-downs and 3 rookies on D you should have to pair the 3 rookies with the 3 send-downs instead of just stacking the top 4. You can let anything go in the play-offs but for regular season at least there should be more done to help first gens score.

Like Argar went 7th overall because he told GM's he wasn't staying down for over 2 seasons, this is just crazy. GM's shouldn't be expecting guys to spend 4 seasons in juniors to even consider drafting them. Winning is supposed to be back-seat to first gen development.