Hola SHL friends, the 4th seasonal State of the Union post is here! As always these posts have been really great to put together every season, and have not only given us an opportunity to communicate with you all what we’re up to in Head Office, but also gives us a chance to recap and figure out our priorities and goals as we look towards the future. These seasonal posts are super important to me and the rest of Head Office, and we’re so thankful you’ve all been so receptive to it and willing to contribute with your own thoughts and ideas. If this is your first time seeing one of these posts, this thread is basically our way of bridging the gap with the SHL community at large, talking about where our heads are at with current topics and issues on the site, and ensuring that our process is clear and transparent with all of you. We’ll be looking at changes we’ve already made, changes we want to make, as well as taking an early crack on topics that need discussion. It’s also a way for us to hear from you guys before we make changes, and garner opinions. As always your feedback is super helpful and a few of the things we've added/changed on the site were directly tied to suggestions made in these SOTU posts, so please keep them coming!


Parity
This feels like it's been a topic in every single one of these threads since we started doing them, but it’s an important topic to continue to discuss! Last offseason saw contract changes, expansion, playoff changes, AND the update scale come into effect to hopefully create a parity situation in the league that we are all happy with, and so far we’ve seen what I believe has been a tremendous success. While we’ve only seen the league’s average Points Percentage jump up from ~0.532 to ~0.553, we’ve seen lots of bubble and middling teams take big steps forward in competing, and we’ve seen plenty of players in the lower TPE tiers become viable contributors at much lower TPE. A lot of these changes will still take time to ripple through the league, but we’re looking forward to monitoring this continually as the seasons go by.

Canadice
As I’m sure a lot of you have seen, SHL user @Canadice has given us an absolutely phenomenal new SHL resource in their Analytics App, and we’ve been no strangers to rewarding great dev work in the past! We got in touch with Canadice to have them incorporate a regression tracker into the Analytics App, which is actually live right now, click HERE to check it out! More systems like this that we can automate means less room for human error, and also means that the workload for tracking regression and posting it every season has become much, much simpler. Everyone please give Canadice a massive thank you, I’m sure they’re going to be a massive contributor towards improving this site and its systems as the seasons go forth! Going forward, Canadice will receive a $4,000,000 seasonal paycheck from HO for the maintenance of this app.

Draft Lotto
This section isn’t going to be news to a lot of you seeing as we’ve had the SHL Draft Lotto this season already, but we’ll recap here the new format going forward, and why we opted to go with it! We bounced back and forth between a 4 team lotto (all the teams who missed playoffs) or an 8 team lotto (4 teams who missed playoffs + 4 first round exits with the worst records), before ultimately settling on the 4 team option. Our thought process was that with the massive shift towards SHL parity we’ve made, there seems to be a really clear divide between the teams in the playoff picture and those who aren’t, for the most part. Given this, we felt that giving the teams on the outside of the playoff picture a chance to get a pick no lower than 4th overall felt most fair, and it was obviously the simpler choice too. In addition to this, due to the lotto only containing 4 teams now, we’ve opted to open picks 1-3 as lotto picks as opposed to only 1st overall, making all 4 picks in the draft lotto open to any of the 4 teams who missed. Our reasoning for this was to prevent a team from perennially pulling the 1st overall pick too many times in a row (no sim-league Oilers allowed), and also just makes the draft lotto a much more fun and dynamic experience, even for the team with the lowest odds.

Commissioner Podcast
We drew a lot of positive feedback regarding the Charity Drive’s Commishcast, and following the conclusion of that we saw a substantial number of new creates this past SMJHL draft coming from our sister leagues like the PBE and ISFL. After discussing a bit with all the wonderful commissioners who took the time to chat with me while I was admittedly very belligerent, we’ve decided to make the Commissioner’s Vidcast a regular thing! We’re aiming to make this a monthly live cast, streamed on all the league’s various platforms on YouTube, where we can shoot the shit with one another, but also bounce ideas for more connectivity off one another, as well as field some questions from you all! We wrapped up episode 2 on Sunday, and we're aiming to have our next one aired sometime around the beginning of September so stay tuned for that!

Regression
Lastly, we just wanna touch on Regression changes since that’s been a hot topic in GM Chat, as well as around the site to a lesser degree. At this time, SHL HO hasn’t made a decision on whether or not we’ll be making changes to regression. We have a lot of testing to do regarding these changes first, as well as seeing how the update scale changes affect a player’s ability to go the distance, and seeing if there are solutions that can be found elsewhere, like the soon to be mentioned streamlined 8-week season (see: Formalizing Dates). There isn’t too much else to say here, we just wanna let you all know where our heads are at, but also reassure you that it is indeed a topic of conversation amongst our Head Office group.


Formalizing Dates
So a big topic of conversation that has been on our mind in Head Office is streamlining and clarifying important dates, as well as having our seasons operate on a predictable timeframe so that we can map things like the trade deadline, SHL Draft, and season starts much further in advance. We’ll discuss that here, starting from the clarification of important dates. Right now, there’s a lot of verbal confusion in the rulebook. We have a lot of processes, deadlines and events that circle around the idea of when we transition from one season to the next, but does the season end at the offseason post, or is it 12PM Eastern the day after the draft? And regarding the start of a new season, is that the day after the draft, or is it the first sim of the preseason? First sim of the regular season? While this muddy definition of when we transition between seasons hasn’t resulted in any major problems yet, we’d like to get ahead of this and make some changes to truly clarify when we’ve entered a new season.

So with all that said, going forward, the previous season ends at 12pm Eastern, the day after the SHL Draft, and the new season will begin at that point as well. With this now clarified, here’s how this change will affect various processes from now on:

- Any player on an expiring contract will officially become an Unrestricted Free Agent at the start of the new season as listed above.
- Any player with 1 season remaining on their current contract can sign a contract extension with their team at the start of the new season as listed above.
- Personal Coaching for the previous season can no longer be purchased, Personal Coaching for the current season can now be purchased (using this season as an example, I can buy S60 Personal Coaching until 11:59am Eastern the day after the draft, and from 12:00pm Eastern, I can buy S61 Personal Coaching.)
- Any rulebook rules that have a written clause reading “offseason to offseason”, will have those points set at the start of each new season as listed above (example: If I were a GM, and I cut a player 20 games into the S60 season, I would not be allowed to bring them back at any point during the S60 season, as well as at any point between the start and end of S61. I would be allowed to re-acquire that player following the start of S62, which would begin the day following the S62 SHL Entry Draft at 12pm Eastern, as listed above.
- Expiring Head Office seats will officially open up, with the application thread for those seats set to be posted at some point before the start of the next Regular Season.

We will still allow users to retire their player at the offseason post if they wish to retain their player for one more year, as tying this process to the new season start would cause an influx of recreate creation just before the SMJHL Draft. The Offseason Thread will now be titled the “SXX Retirement Thread”.

In addition to all this, Head Office is working closely with @Kalakar and the future Sim Team to streamline the SHL Season to consistently last 8 weeks every season. The goal with this change is to be able to plot out major events essentially months in advance, as well as shorten the real time life of players, and make entry into the SHL as an SMJHL Send Down much quicker. We’ll have more news about the season streamlining as it becomes more hammered out.

Draftee RFA Rights Timeline
Last offseason, we implemented a new system to the SHL Draft to prevent teams from picking players, leaving them unsigned to save money on their budgets, while still retaining their rights, essentially allowing them to stock the prospect cupboards as full as they wanted with no repercussions. This system can be found in the SHL Rulebook under SECTION 2, SUBSECTION L - Draft Rights. As it was our first time implementing this, there were naturally a few bumps in the road that made the process a lot less seamless than we were happy with, and we’re making changes to hopefully make this new system an easier one. Part of what will make all of this easier to understand will be touched on in our next section, but we’re working to hammer out what exactly the problematic parts of the system were, what we need to change to make things run seamlessly, and making sure the effects of this new rule fit in alongside rules already present in the rulebook. Stay tuned for a post in the near future detailing our changes to this new system!

Conditional Picks
This one I won’t spend too long on, but this season we’ve seen a greater number of issues than normal regarding confusing trades that saw picks being moved that should have been tied to other trades due to conditions. In almost all situations we were able to resolve the trades in a way that both teams negotiating were satisfied with, but it became clear to us that the issue here was more of a systemic one regarding how we handle trading picks that are already beholden to conditions. We don’t have a complete answer just yet on how we want to change things, but we just wanted to communicate to you all that SHL Head Office is exploring additions to the rulebook that more clearly define how to legally move a pick tied to a condition, as well as changes to the pick tracker to help us denote all of this.


Rulebook Processes Announcement (Courtesy of Tommy)
Since I joined HO, one of my personal top priorities has been to make sure that the SHL Rulebook is as clear and understandable as possible. We’ve made strides towards that goal through our complete rewrite of the SHL Rulebook, adding “honour system” rules to the SHL Rulebook in writing so we have something tangible to reference, as well as a multitude of little tweaks every season to make sure the Rulebook is as great as it can possibly be. With this announcement, we’re taking our next big step towards making the rulebook more accessible and easy to source. Courtesy of rookie HO member @TommySalami, this offseason we’ll be introducing an SHL Rulebook Guide Doc to the Rulebooks section of the site, which will contain all the processes and steps for the lengthier rules in the SHL Rulebook, mostly pertaining to GM processes. Our hope with this addition is that the SHL Rulebook Guide will be easier for our GMs (and to a lesser extent the rest of the league) to reference, acting sort of as a “How-To” section to quick reference steps to take for various GM tasks and responsibilities, which should hopefully make the transition easier for GMs who step into the role for the first time as well.

Lines Rule Change
This one has been one we’ve discussed all season long after having a few instances pop up this season of teams with minutes allotted to their (what should be non-existent) 4th line. There’s no rule explicitly disallowing this so we were pretty averse to actually punishing for it, but we did agree it was something we weren’t totally okay with letting slide, so we figured the best decision in cases like this is to introduce a new rule! This rule, which can be found under SHL Rulebook Section 1, Subsection G, Article 6 will read:


Our reasoning for making the punishment for this new rule a 3-strike system, as opposed to a 2-strike system like our other rules, is we’ve found that this infraction is easier to make accidentally than others. While GMs are still responsible for ensuring that all submitted lines are legal, we feel firing a General Manager should only happen when a GM has displayed clear negligence, and not if they happen to get shafted by the program or the line submission process.

Extension Changes
Another grey area we’re looking to clear up moving forward is what tier players can be signed at. The rules as they currently stand have served us well and kept things mostly in check, but we have sometimes hit bumps in the road regarding what TPE players are signed at when signing an extension, which becomes further muddied by regression. We want to get ahead of this issue, so going forward all players signed must be signed at a tier that matches whatever TPE level is currently displayed on their TPE page, regardless of upcoming changes stored in their update page. There will be an exception to this rule between the end of the playoffs and the beginning of free agency. You may re-sign your players at the tier they would regress to AFTER making all pre-regression claims. Our hope with this is that we can avoid some of the murky areas regarding signing players to extensions/new contracts, which will in turn make processing and verifying signings easier on our Budget Team.



That wraps up S60's State of the Union! What did you think? Do you like these changes? Do you have suggestions or questions to share? How are we doing as a Head Office group? As always your feedback is incredibly important to us, and we hope you'll continue to provide it as you all have done in the past. Thanks for being such a wonderful community, we look forward to hearing your thoughts!

On behalf of the SHL Head Office
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