Good afternoon SMJHL!

With the recent expansion announcement, congrats to @overdoo and @Geekusoid on their winning bids. To those who did not get it, do not give up. Do not take it as a shot to what you can do, look for opportunities, keep moving forward. With that, I decided to do a little research on what the number should be? Should there have only been 2 teams to make it a 14 team league, 7 per conference, or would have 4 expansions made more sense? Well, let's take a look at the numbers!

First, I looked at the amount of players that each team had to see whether we could even fill 14 or 16 teams.
Anaheim Outlaws 21
Anchorage Armada 23
Carolina Kraken 21
Colorado Raptors 23
Detroit Falcons 22
Kelowna Knights 23
Maine Timber 21
Nevada Battleborn 21
Newfoundland Berserkers 21
Quebec City Citadelles 23
St. Louis Scarecrows 21
Vancouver Whalers 23

There are a total of 263 players in the league with an additional many pages of free agents that could easily fill those slots. I mean, the SMJHL is about playing time, so who cares if the last line is filled with inactives or whatever. You want to be able to play and showcase those players and enjoy it.

Now, the next thing I looked at was actives. How many players does each team have that physically updated in the last two weeks?

Anaheim Outlaws 15
Anchorage Armada 11
Carolina Kraken 16
Colorado Raptors 15
Detroit Falcons 9
Kelowna Knights 12
Maine Timber 16
Nevada Battleborn 15
Newfoundland Berserkers 16
Quebec City Citadelles 15
St. Louis Scarecrows 16
Vancouver Whalers 18

With this, there were 174 players that updated in the last two weeks. That is a super nice percentage of players that updated in the past two weeks. Exactly how many players had updated? Well, 66% of the players updated. That is a fantastic number. How was the breakdown per term?

Anaheim Outlaws 71%
Anchorage Armada 48%
Carolina Kraken 76%
Colorado Raptors 65%
Detroit Falcons 41%
Kelowna Knights 52%
Maine Timber 76%
Nevada Battleborn 71%
Newfoundland Berserkers 76%
Quebec City Citadelles 65%
St. Louis Scarecrows 76%
Vancouver Whalers 78%

So, my next thing I looked at was maybe Head Office was worried about people being called up because of the new update scale being a little better for players. So, I took a totally random number (600) and decided to count how many players have over 600 TPE in the SMJHL. To my surprise, there were 51 players that have over 600 TPE and likely could be called up soon. Again, let's look at the breakdown per team.

Anaheim Outlaws 6
Anchorage Armada 7
Carolina Kraken 3
Colorado Raptors 6
Detroit Falcons 4
Kelowna Knights 3
Maine Timber 0
Nevada Battleborn 1
Newfoundland Berserkers 7
Quebec City Citadelles 3
St. Louis Scarecrows 7
Vancouver Whalers 4

So, there is a good amount of players that could have 1 season left or be called up. So, where would those players fit in the SHL? Well, it has to do with regressing players, of course. They need to be able to fill a spot! So, how many of each class are regressing?

Season 51: 19 players
Season 50: 27 players
Season 49: 12 players
Season 48: 13 players
Season 47: 17 players
Season 46: 25 players
Season 45: 9 players
Season 44: 3 players
Season 43: 9 players
Season 42: 2 players
Season 41: 2 players

So, when you look at it, the players who are going to be near a place that really would not bode well for them being successful, the Season 41-45, we are only looking at 25 players. That turnover is not that great, while we look at some successful classes coming up. Now, that could be good, but, also, those players will hopefully recreate meaning we need more spots. So, was 2 teams the best number knowing that we will probably need to expand pretty soon given these numbers?

Currently, there would be 12.42 players per team in a 14 team league. There would be 10.875 actives in a 16 team league. I feel like 2 solid lines with room for those UDFA would actually be PERFECT, so teams can add those newer players without running out of room. I really think 10 should be the number and with large classes probably incoming, was two actually the number?

I decided to do a lot more research on the SMJHL and do a little bit of digging on the numbers. I hope you enjoyed reading. Let me know if you have any questions.

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