1. CW Trivia; verification word: vagabond [up to +3]

13. I kind of understand why people were upset about Quebec getting its own team, but the sheer number of users coming from Canada and the number of users from there also makes it easier to understand. I’m surprised Slovakia, Denmark, Norway, or Austria don’t have teams but suspect a lot of those users would go to Czecha/Latvia or Sweden, respectively. I also think it’d be hilarious to include Kazakhstan personally, and they’re ranked number 15 in the IIHF standings in real life – so why not? I think it’d start to gain some meme steam. [94 words, +1, total 4]

14. Los Angeles won the S78 Challenge Cup because they matched up quite well with the Barracuda. Realistically, the Barracuda should have let the Atlanta Inferno win their series (totally unbiased, trust me) – but in reality, it seemed far, far more likely that whoever came out of the West was going to win the Challenge Cup regardless, and this bore itself out in the standings – there was just better team cohesiveness and talent at the top of the West. Top three in the standings were all West teams while the next six were all Eastern teams – and while we could theoretically attribute that to a lighter schedule or a weaker western conference, the obvious difference in goal differential among those three teams made it clear that the West’s top teams were just a smidgeon better as a whole.
I’d probably say that the top couple of players for Tampa Bay were on par with, if not better than those on the Panthers (I mean, Carnage and Wagner-Svenson led the league in goals and assists, respectively). But they don’t spend all of the time on the ice, and Derek Martin for some reason is still the sim darling insofar as Franchise Hockey Manager is concerned. That certainly bore itself out in the leaderboards (I mean, just look at the goal-scoring leaders). [220 words, +4, total 8]