In this alternate reality, we seed in four more teams for the wildcard lower bracket and all imaginary showdowns play out OPPOSITE from their regular season series. 

For the East, we have Chicago and West Kendall seeding in.  Buffalo and Manhattan fall to the lower bracket instead of being straight out eliminated.  Buffalo's seed earns them West Kendall, while Manhattan gets Chicago.  West Kendall takes their match up in 7 because Buffalo had the better differential in their split season series.  Manhattan takes their match up in 7 for the same reason.

For the West, we have San Francisco and Winnipeg seeding in.  Calgary and New Orleans fall to the lower bracket.  Calgary earns Winnipeg, while New Orleans gets San Francisco.  Calgary takes it in 7 because they split the regular season series but one of their wins was in OT while Winnipeg got all theirs in regulation.  New Orleans sweeps their series after being dominated by San Francisco in the regular season.

That leaves Manhattan and West Kendall in the East with Calgary and New Orleans in the West.  They play each other to shrink the lower bracket to match the upper bracket.  Again West Kendall takes their match up in 7 because of the goal differential tie breaker.  On the other side, New Orleans gets another sweet revenge series in 5 after being spanked by Calgary in the regular season.

Back to the upper bracket, New England and Los Angeles fall.  In an outstanding showing, West Kendall sweeps New England to move on to the lower bracket semis.  They are joined by New Orleans who beat out Los Angeles in a hard fought 6 game series.  In an exciting 7 game series, New Orleans advances to the lower bracket finals.

They are met by Edmonton who fall to Hamilton in the upper bracket semis (formerly the real finals).  New Orleans knocks Edmonton out in 5 and moves up to the finals against Hamilton.  In the regular season, Hamilton won one game in regulation and New Orleans won one game in a shootout.  So in these finals, New Orleans is victorious after double OT game 7.  Congrats to the Specters.


I would predict New England continues to be dominant in the East while Hamilton less so.  New England had 4 skaters over 50 points and 1 is just entering regression.  Hamilton has 3 skaters over 50 points and one of them is already in the 18% tier of regression.  Although with the redistributions, I'd have to give it to Hamilton to come up with a good strategy to stay up there.

In the West, it was a lot closer.  New England had 32 points on the 4th place team while Los Angeles -30 covers everyone except Minnesota and Texas in the West.  With regression hitting Edmonton, San Francisco, and New Orleans harder than us, I am going to stan Winnipeg for making a big climb in the standings.  I think we would be on track to be a top two team with Los Angeles, although we would need to shore up our goal differential a bit for that to happen.


I want a Slip McScruff award before I fade into the sunset, so it has to be something that I'm good at.  Luckily, defensive defensemen is a really ambiguous category where I can carve out a specific niche.  I'm thinking the Slip McScruff award is for being a brave boy that dishes hits and blocks shots.  However, I'd want something to round it out so it's not just a goon award.  For that, I think it has to be maintaining low PIMs while playing brave and aggressive.  For example, this season I was third in Hits (261 behind 312 and 286) but my PIMs were around 1/4th as much (38 vs 178 and 145).  If the defensive award considers Hits / PIMs, then I'd be compared against Perry Morgan at 171 Hits over 18 PIMs which is slightly better but then he only has 90 SBs to my 177. 

The other defensive stat where I did well was Takeaways but it wasn't phenominal.  8th top defensemen with 37 while true American Geoff Moore had 49.  I'd be ok for that to be considered as part of the overall Slip McScruff defensive brave boy award, but it's definitely secondary to the clean hits.


I'm biased to think the USA is going to take home my third gold as federation head.  We are able to spread our skill pretty evenly down the line up.  Seven of our forwards are in the top 50 point scorers of the regular season, five are in the next 50, then Joe is a couple points shy of that.  We've got three of the top four shot blockers.  We've got two of the top three GR skaters.  Both our goalies are in the four way tie for second in GR, and Cain has five shut outs.

I don't know Canada's players well enough to check those stats for them, but I have a feeling they will also be pretty dominant based purely on TPE.  Using number of players >350 TPE as a proxy for average TPE, Canada may be in the easier group.  In group A, we have USA, Ireland, and Czechia as three of the four most populous countries.  Although, Ireland is a bit of a wildcard with a fresh federation head this close to the tournament start.


Slip McScruff would be a WWE celebrity guest appearance at Wrestlemania.  He'll get to play that bit of just being in the audience when the heel goads him into getting into the ring.  He's big and tough so he can take and give a few bumps to make it all look authentic.  However, as he starts to get into regression territory, he'll be playing a constant will they won't they game with the WWE.  Rumors will circulate about the end of his career and being spotted around the training center.  El Scruffo will start to make some TV appearances to stir that rumor up again.  Then one day, Slip will fade into the sunset and El Scruffo's career will take off again.


Edmonton tried to make a food themed around mocking the Hamilton Steelhawks but each iteration backfired spectacularly.  The first iteration was the Steelhawk turkey leg which was marketed with large posters of the Steelhawk being roasted over a fire.  To differentiate between the Steelhawk turkey leg and the regular turkey leg that is sold at all home games, they dressed up the drumstick with elaborate tin foil holsters.  In the back, the cooks were getting all cut up trying to mass produce the foil art, and out in the stands, fans were ingesting a bit too much of the foil.  The FDA caught wind of this fiasco and quickly shut it down after one game.

They tried to quickly pivot to the HAMilton special which were hamsteaks with frowning faces cut into them.  They reused all the same posters, but put a pig nose over the Steelhawk along with a curly tail.  The immediate blowback was when fans started to put the hamsteaks over their own face to taunt the players.  Although Edmonton got the win here, the pictures are totally unusable with a bunch of pig faced weirdos streaking up the glass with their juices.  The less immediate blowback was the scene in the bathrooms when people mixed too much ham with too much beer.  I think you can see where that one went.