While we came up short of our ultimate goal as a team, this was a pretty good season for me individually, both in the regular season and in the playoffs. I finished well above a point per game despite playing on a 3rd line with a rookie and another young player, I'm not in the running for mvp or anything but at this point of my career it's more about longevity and just avoiding outright bad seasons, so I'm pretty happy with my performance. I'm also glad that I was able to help Rotycus Scott lead all rookies in points, both he and Rikard Hammarberg are very talented young players with a bright future ahead of them and together we formed one of the best third lines in the league. This was also the first time in 7 seasons when I finished above point per game in the playoffs. Next season I would like to do more of the same, only I wish I'd improve my shooting % a little.


The Gabe Johnson defenseman role, let's call it the "4th forward". This is a defenseman whose only goal is to generate offense, this player never backchecks and has no interest in helping out defensively at all. The key attributes for this role are all the offensive attributes except screening, plus speed and acceleration. Improving your defensive attributes will actually lower your rating for this role because that's not what you're supposed to do if you're building a 4th forward kind of defenseman. Well, basically, just copy Gabe's build. His build will be rated 20 as a 4th forward, and the closer your build is to his the higher your 4th forward rating will be.


Gabe is now captain
Ham stopped winning games
Coincidence? Not

Ham hate gabe so much
Hallsy put him on the trade block
Bad move by tig lol


It's pretty clear that Buffalo was the best team not to make the SHL finals. It was highly likely that the final would be between 2 of hamilton, chicago and buffalo which ended up happening. I guess Texas had an outside chance to make it, Edmonton was probably the only non-GL team with a real shot to make it to the finals but then they had that cap space thing, Winnipeg had a great run but realistically it was always gonna be 2 teams from the great lakes division in the final and the team out of the aforementioned 3 not to make it is, indeed, the best SHL team that didn't make the finals this season.


I expect this season to be fairly similar to the last one because the pecking order changes very slowly in the IIHF. Canada should be very good once again and hopefully we can win back to back (or did we not win last season? I don't remember tbh), but anyway, almost half of our roster is 2k players and especially our top 4 is very strong, pretty sure that we have four 1800+ tpe defensemen. Though one of them is Gabe, to be fair. Great Britain and USA should be among the favorites to win as well, Japan and Sweden could also surprise. Czechia has a good but aging roster, probably still good enough to win though. I predict Michael Scarn to be the points leader in round robin because he just had an mvp type of season for Hamilton, he's on a good team but it's not as stacked as Canada, for example, and he's clearly their best player and #1 offensive option.


Calgary Dragons are the Detroit Red Wings of the SHL, only like 5-6 seasons behind. This comparison makes sense to me because Calgary has a very long playoff streak and so did Detroit, both teams won some cups during their streaks and just generally have been very good. Now Calgary is trying to keep their window open despite a mostly aging roster, some of their legendary players have already retired or are close to retiring. Ultimately all streaks come to an end eventually, Detroit's did when they started a rebuild and it's interesting to see how long Calgary can delay theirs, they do have a very experienced GM who acquired a couple of good players the past couple of seasons. I'm not at 150 words yet so I'm gonna have to come up with another one, ok, NOLA are the Vegas Golden Knights because they are an expansion team that made the finals in their inaugural season and has been a contender for quite a while after that.


awils