1. Spinach (+3TPE)

6. (+4 TPE)
a. Los Angeles has been riding their top players for almost a full minute more of ice time than Hamilton has theirs. If you were a coach, do you buy into this strategy? Do you let your top guys leave it all out there every night or aim for the most balanced attack possible?
- I'm definitely a fan of playing your best players as much as they can handle. Icetime needs to be earned, and if you're producing you should be entitled to more icetime. Ideally the team would have three lines producing equally but that's obviously not going to happen, so instead you need to be giving the icetime to the players who deserve it. (62 words)

b. Guy O'Shea and Evangelos Giannopoulos have been absolute block machines for Hamilton in the playoffs with 109 between them. If you’re looking for offense in this series, how do you get around these two defensemen?
- Ideally you would set your whole lineup to be goons and injure them. Wait what's that? You can only have one goon? There are no injuries?  Fine, in that case you would probably want to beat them with skill and good skaters. If your players are fast enough then they don't need to worry about these two hitting them. (59 words)

c. Los Angeles’ defense, on the other hand, has not been afraid to join the play and put up points. How do you prepare for a five player offensive attack? How do you counter?
- Well there's a couple of ways you could go about it, one of those is the way Hamilton seems to be going: having some great, physical, defensive defensemen to shut them down. Otherwise you could hit them with some skilled offensive defensemen yourself and just hope to outscore them. I'm usually more of a fan of the defensive approach but the offensive way is definitely more fun to watch. (69 words)

d. The starting goalies for these teams, Olof Karsikko and A Jobin have been nearly unbeatable up to this point with a 0.937 and a 0.927 SV% respectively. If you’re a player on the other team, how would you get inside their heads so that you can put the puck in the net?
- Well, if I was Hamilton I'd be exploiting the fact that Karsikko is comparatively a very young player and not nearly as experienced. Means that, on paper, he's less skilled as well. However, the Panthers can rest easy knowing that their goaltender has been putting up the better stats so far, which is something that might get to Jobin's head as well. (62 words)


12. Milestones (+3 TPE)

14. (+3TPE)
In your opinion, which team is has performed a successful rebuild and built a legacy around starting from the bottom? What constitutes a successful rebuild? Cups? Playoff appearances? Is this team still poised to do great things in the future?
- I would say there has been a few teams that have done exactly this in the past few seasons, but in my opinion none have had a more successful rebuild than the Baltimore Platoon. Just a quick look at previous standings show them finishing 17th out of 18 teams in S56, with a dismal 10 wins in 50 games. After another rough season in S57, they started their upward trend the season after where they finished 11th. By S59 they became a top 3 team in the league and have yet to relinquish that status after concluding S63 in first place. The only roadblock to them being a perennial finalist seems to be the Hamilton Steelhawks, who've knocked them out in the semis three years running. Baltimore is a younger team so they'll have plenty of chances in the coming seasons to convert this regular season success into a Challenge Cup. (151 words)

18. (+3 TPE)
Well it happened. A general strike by the goalie union led to a mass retirement of goalies and now ALL of them have either quit the site (based) or recreated as a skater. HO has implemented a bot goalie system, but decided goalies were too underpowered and gave the goalies 20 in every stat, even the mental ones we can't upgrade. How does the season play out now that goalies are gods (godbots?) among men. Does anything really change?
- After the general strike by the league's goaltenders proved to be unsuccessful, they all decided to retire, hoping that the league would recognize the importance of their role and backpedal to meet their demands. Instead, it seems that no one really cared. The league replace the goaltenders with bots with maxed out stats, which made people realize that goalie TPE really did mean nothing as their stats all seemed to remain unchanged. Some goalies had record breaking seasons, only to follow them up with dismal ones. Others were consistently bad, while some were good every season. This made the league realize there's a flaw in the sim engine with how it handles goalies, and people decided they were better off having these bots so that more people could fill the positions that actually mattered. The SHL proceeded to enter the most successful and active era of its history. (I'm just kidding I love you goalies but you have to admit goalie TPE has a minimal effect) (166 words)

= +3+4+3+3+3 = 16 TPE