Ya boy, Slip McScruff, is going to take the homestand in Tampa to warm up a bit.  It really gets frozen into your bones playing half your games in Winnipeg over the course of a season and Calgary isn't much of a relief from that.  However, I really have no idea what to do in Tampa besides not wear mittens.  I'd start with a bit of food tourism to guide me around to new places, then see what I can dig up around the food spots.

I found a Dine & Wine tour around some place called Riverwalk, which seems like exactly the kind of tourist hell hole I want to find myself in.  It mentions this historic Henry B. Plant Museum which I thought was a museum about plants, but it appears to be about some rich dead guy.  There is an upcoming exhibit called "Henry Plant: He's More Important Than You Thought", so I think this one is a can't miss experience.

To round it all out, I have to check out a ghost tour in every city I visit, so that will be on the list to check out.  From what I can tell online, there will be the ghost of bandits and buccaneers which makes sense given the football team.


(Written prior to the series ending >.>)

I find it really hard to root for a division rival, but I am cheering for a few individuals on the Calgary team.  As the Federation Head of the blessed United States of America, I want my true American heroes, Otis B. Driftwood and Nicky Pedersen Jr., to take home that cup.  If they are going to come to my team totally exhausted, I want them to be riding the high of a cup win straight onto international ice.  Tampa Bay has a decidedly un-American roster, including both Federation Heads for Russia.  Although I chose to visit the Tampa homestand, I would like them to kindly lose and be off their game come IIHF time.


More wildcard spots would have been great for me since we missed playoffs this season, but I don't think I would like to cheapen the regular season like that.  Given the nature of STHS, just making it in the door means some crazy shit can happen and the bottom seed can go the whole way.  On the same note, I wouldn't want a whole season to come down to single game unless we went through the dramatic build up to game seven first.

It may be interesting to try a double elimination style to make up for STHS being such a fickle thing.  So the 1st and 2nd place in every division would start in the upper bracket, each 1st taking the 2nd from the opposite division in their conference.  When someone loses in the upper bracket, they fall to the lower bracket.  For the first round in the lower bracket, the four upper bracket losers play four wild card teams.  When someone loses in the lower bracket, they are out of the playoffs.  Then, the lower bracket plays an extra round to get down to two, since there will only be two upper bracket losers to fall through.  This pattern repeats until we have the winner.

What is appealing here is that placing high in your division basically earns you an extra life, so the regular season becomes very important.  If you've done well in the regular season, one fluky series will not knock you out, it just makes it a whole lot harder to win.

There's an extra variant where we could have all teams make the playoffs and the first round of the lower bracket is actually a single game elimination, but I think that runs counter to the idea of making the regular season very important.


In one alternate reality, the Los Angeles Panthers do not go on a run to end the season and the Jets make it into the wild card spot.  Then they lose to the Calgary Dragons and everything else is the same.

In another reality, Eggy goes power mad and makes the playoffs into a double elimination bracket like my previous answer, which means the Jets and the Wolfpack are both in the wild card.  The first round in the west goes the same, Calgary beats San Francisco and New Orleans beats Edmonton.  However, that means San Francisco gets to play Winnipeg and Edmonton gets to play Los Angeles to stay in the playoffs.  The matchups are shuffled in the east, Tampa Bay beats Buffalo and Hamilton beats Manhattan.  Buffalo gets New England and Manhattan gets Toronto in the lower bracket.

The lower bracket plays two rounds to thin the herd.  San Francisco against Winnipeg is a toss up based on the regular season, splitting the season series and matching GF / GA.  Coin flip picks Winnipeg.  Edmonton takes Los Angeles based on regular season.  For the same reason, New England beats Buffalo.  Toronto beats Manhattan like they did in the real playoffs.  So we have Winnipeg vs Edmonton and New England vs Toronto.

Winnipeg and Edmonton also split the season series, each getting two regulation wins and a shoot out win, but Winnipeg has two more goals, so we take it.  New England and Toronto are another split series, but New England takes it in goals by five.

At this point, the upper bracket is identical, so New Orleans and Hamilton are falling to the lower bracket.  New Orleans and Winnipeg is a classic match up and another split series.  Winnipeg has it by one goal this time instead of two.  Hamilton has the edge over New England with two regular wins instead of one regulation and one shoot out.

Lower bracket plays again to thin the herd, Winnipeg vs Hamilton.  First time we cross conferences, but again Winnipeg has a split series.  Winnipeg gets it by a coin toss, guaranteeing third place at least.

Calgary in seven, Tampa Bay has to play Winnipeg for a chance at the rematch.  On the regular season, Tampa Bay smokes Winnipeg, so it's a rematch for the cup. 

Going by the regular season, Tampa Bay takes it over Calgary in the rematch.


There were some really painful offside calls during the playoffs.  Goals were called back left and right for plays that took 15 minutes to review.  In one case, almost a full minute of game time was called back because a player was one centimeter offside while kicking the puck up to his stick and that wasn't "possession".  The league has really leaned into the letter of the law, rather than the intent and it hurts the game.  Once a coach has issued a challenge, refs are focused on getting it right down to the letter of the law because of the penalty for getting the challenge wrong.  Coaches already feel slighted because of the suspect goal, but they might get a penalty on top of it instead of having the goal scrubbed.

I think maybe the review should be more normalized and less strict.  After every goal, the refs should take 30 seconds to verify zone entry and the goal itself (interference, high stick).  If they think the goal is suspect, they can initiate their own extended review.  The coach's have a strong bias to have goals scrubbed from a technicality so even if a minor infraction doesn't have a real impact on the play, they will challenge it.  However, the refs have no bias so they can use their sense for when a goal needs some attention.


The area with the most room left for improvement is my checking and strength tandem, with more emphasis on strength.  In recent training, it has taken the back seat to my offensive utility toolbox because of my unique situation.  Although I am in the top three defensemen on the team in terms of overall skill, I found myself playing down in the bottom pairing because my skill set was redundant with the two ahead of me.  Down on the third pairing, my defensive skills already had me blocking shots at the highest rate and delivering all the hits from my pair.  So I rounded out my passing and scoring to try and provide some offensive upside.

However, in this coming season or two, I may find myself finally passing Grease in skill as he regresses.  That means I need to work extra hard to max out my defensive strengths that I was able to cruise on while down in the lineup.  I think I have put myself on a good trajectory to make a clean transition into his old role as we have very similar skill sets and I was able to use this past season to shore up my offensive liabilities.