ThroughMyVeins

SMJHL Milestones

To me, personally, I'd say the Season 46 draft has been the most influential one by miles, as we can still vividly feel its impact on the SHL today. Just looking at the first round is impressive enough, but then you start realizing that even players drafted as the fifth round - Yoshimitsu McCloud and Jules Watt - contributed in the league for a long amount of time before their retirement a few seasons ago (omitting Karlstrasse Scholz here, as this was a GM pick.) I could ramble on about the names, but just the fact that fifteen players have been drafted 16 seasons ago, and are still active, fighting regression, and being key contributors for each of their respective teams is impressive - moreso when you realize that some more recent draft classes, namely 51 and 52, have less players still in the league than the S46 draft class! And that's not even counting the players that have already retired after an incredible career. You also have to remember that this was the draft class that led to the creation of the Chicago Syndicate and New Orleans Specters - which led the path for more expansions later on, as the retention on this draft was quite spectacular.

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Yay! The underdogs of the league, the Hamilton Steelhawks, have once again prevailed in the playoffs and paid acquired themselves another Challenge Cup. Of course, their roster is monstrous. Of course, they had 4 different players score 20+ points in 19 playoff games. Of course, they even managed to sweep the Western Conference's own monster, the Texas Renegades! So with all that said, I'll award the MVP of the series to each and every person that's on the 16 "other" teams of the SHL, those that haven't seen a Cup final, or even a series win, for so long. Thank you for your passion, dedication, and for not going completely crazy as history seems to be repeating itself over and over again. (But for the sake of the task, it's Mitchell van der Heijden for his games 1 and 3 performances, as well as my Swiss bias.)

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Just look above as to how tired I am of the situation - but no, it's not all doom and gloom, in my opinion. The teams we've seen at the top for so long are well built, for sure, but other contenders are also popping up in each conference, and growing rapidly. As GMs learn to take advantage of the sim engine, with all its flaws, the TPE advantage the "top" teams have will slowly dwindle (although that would mean that we need to tweak the regression percentages, which is a thorny topic.) Yes, there's still the element of the "goalie roll", but I still feel like that can be overcame. The biggest challenge we're facing, as a league, is if my optimism is misplaced, and these teams continue dominating all the way through the 60s - may it be by apathy from everyone else, or by just being the only places where you can win a championship in many players' minds, both of these outcomes being unfavorable. I hope we can see some teams ripe for bursting truly emerge in the coming 3 seasons. I want to see some giants slain.

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I was the first one to be skeptical of your hire, wondering what kind of PTs we'd be having. And while some of those choices are really out of the ordinary (that pill PT sure was controversial, eh?), it's been still fairly easy to get my words in for the week, so I'd say you fulfill your task well. Just wish we'd be speaking more about our player's life within the organization, and the community surrounding their franchise's location, as well as exploring the somewhat... extenuating pace of the scheduling in the SHL, at times (I'm talking about three straight back-to-backs... most of them away!) But I understand that those are all topics the veterans have been through, so you may feel like it's repetitive. Oh, and get the whip out on your graders, I need my updates to be organized or I go ballistic.

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