So what I see is what I could probably gather from the league myself anyway - we kinda don't have mid table teams at all. Half the league at any given moment is in "fighting for cup" caliber, half the league is pretty much openly tanking or at least freshly out of the position, and we get absolute minimum of sort of "ok, but like round 2 ok" teams, which isn't fantastically realistic compared to the NHL. The way GMs here operate is that we are far more likely to just explode a middling team on the spot, because there is very little punishment for not performing unlike a real GM could face while trying to rebuild/retool, and that then translates into a state where teams are on either extremes of performance, and very rarely in the middle. That then creates the issue of playoffs being seemingly very uncompetetive in round 1, and a lot of blowouts - it's effectively as if you attempted to mash 10 NHL playoff teams and 10 AHL teams and tried to pretend there is ever going to be any competition between them. I think it's more of a symptom of the way the league is, rather than an outright issue with the sim itself, and I think it's going to be very hard to properly fix unless we actively put in rules that would for example allow HO to replace GMs underperforming for large periods of time continuosly, therefore making GMs far less likely to explode a team even if the rebuild hasn't exactly worked to at least hit some .500+ seasons, and to not get fired for underperforming.