Verification word: Burp!



A. While having a line, or better yet two, get hot at the right time is almost a given necessity in order to do well in the SHL playoffs, I would still bet more on the team with a better average level of talent that can be spread out more evenly across the lines. Your team can then be that much harder for the opposing coaches to plan against, not having a clear favorite line to ‘shut down’, for instance.
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B. It’s kind of interesting really to see these guys rack up the blocks as much as they do, since usually the big blocking machines rather come from the bottom end teams and not offensive powerhouses that dominate possession for the most part like Hamilton certainly has done for the last decade or more. But as to how to get the puck past them… I guess you just have to keep plugging away so much more shots that eventually at least some of them find a way through. And you also need your forecheck to be active as hell so as to be able to regain possession after all these blocks and not allow a quick counterattack by their elite forwards.
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C. Full on five player attack carries with itself an inherent risk of allowing more odd-man rushes on the counterattack, so that’s what I would probably try to build my countering tactics upon. I would preach responsible defending above all else, but also tell my speediest forwards to always be ready to turn on the jets in case we force a turnover and have a good chance for an opening pass right through the neutral zone.
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D. We in Texas have plenty of history already against both these goalies. Even though Karsikko is still rather young and Jobin plays in the other conference, we have faced off against both of them in the playoffs in most of the postseasons of the last 5 years and they have always been a formidable challenge. Karsikko is a young finn and we have a few veteran finns on our team that know just the things to say to get under a finnish goalie’s skin and they have also passed some of those things along to the rest of our crew so that they can catch Karsikko off guard when he won’t even expect to hear those things said. Jobin is a hardened veteran himself by now and has been a tougher one to crack. Sometimes we have managed to upset his balance a bit by mentioning random fantasy league issues during tense moments in the game so as to get his mind off the play at hand and onto his other duties to the league.
(175 words)





+3 TPE - Lemo Pihl S63 milestones (6)



Yes, there was finally a new team in the finals in the Los Angeles Panthers, but not to take away anything from their great playoff performance this season, on the whole it still seems more like a fluke abberation than a great sign of growing parity. I might begin to be persuaded otherwise if they (or another new team) reach the finals again next season (and Baltimore shouldn’t even count here, since they should have made the finals ages ago already and it’s a mystery how they haven’t yet), but there is I think still a more than fair chance that we will keep seeing some combination of the old top-five of Hamilton, Buffalo, Chicago, Texas and/or Baltimore in the finals. I again include Baltimore here, since although it might even be a breath resembling fresh air, it would rather be a long overdue achievement considering their dominant regular season performances in the last half-a-decade already. And with the way the league is going through what feels like a massive wave of general managers and players (rage/apathy-)quitting the league this off-season, I feel like the talent pool for those up-and-coming teams is again likely taking a bigger hit than the currently successful ones. So unfortunately I don’t see too much to be hopeful about right now in the league.
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I don’t need to look far to be able to point to a perfect example of a successful rebuild all the way from the bottom. It is my of course my own team, the Texas Renegades. Somewhere around the end of the S40’s the management team of (I think, this was before my time in the league) Dankoa and Jearim decided that the team needed to commit to a thorough rebuild process if they were to climb out of the muck of the league and return to prominence like in their glory days of old. Instead of trying to haphazardly assemble the team via trades and free agent signings, they decided to sell off all their remaining assets for draft picks and prospects and map out the road for seasons ahead. They went into the rebuild knowing that there would be many seasons of cellar-dwelling ahead, but were determined to endure this in order to achieve in the future the kind of cohesive and balanced team that would be needed to dominate the league in the future. They worked hard to sell their vision of such a team to their new draft picks and were successful in gaining their trust in the long run. Even so much so, that some time into the rebuild process, at the early stages of the S50’s, when the team management became troubled by real life issues, some of those same prospects were already able to take over leading the rebuild with nary a hiccup. The plan continued to be followed and slowly but surely Texas began to show signs of the force that they had vowed to become once again. They still kept building mostly through the draft, with only one noteworthy addition by trade, their future starting goaltender Cillian Kavanagh. The plan had worked very well and had also allowed for sufficient flexibility to sustain some unexpected circumstances like the two waves of league expansion and changes to the update scale and later also regression. It took almost a decade of seasons, but by the latter-half of the S50’s this Texas Renegades team was finally hitting full stride with a large number of their players either at their peaks or nearing them, with plenty of youth pushing up from behind on the depth charts as well. They already made the S58 Challenge Cup finals and lost that series, but were right back there again in the following season and that time took home the championship to cap off the rebuild and announce their arrival back into the cream of the league. Since then they have kept up their level of play, repeatedly appearing in more finals and also winning another championship in S62. And they don’t plan on letting up anytime soon.
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