1. Verification word: Splatter

6. Rough, but that was not in any way an unexpected outcome. Seattle were always going to be a bottom feeder this year, it's part of the process, and this season was an improvement on last year across the board. Which, when your team is mostly stocked with first- and second-year players, it precisely what you want to see. It's difficult to judge where the corner is and when the Argonauts are likely to be able to turn it, but I have tremendous faith that it's coming - we've got a good group of players, everybody is active and plugging away to make their avatars are strong as possible, what more can you ask for? (113 words, 2 TPE)

7. I'm coming to this late but Maine have been an example of excellence in a junior league franchise for so long that you could never go truly wrong betting on them. They were a clear class above the rest of the J during the regular season - pick a statistic and they stood head and shoulders above even the other highly-placed teams - but swinging a deal for a player as good as Anna Skovgaard was a real baller move from the Timber GM team. It's not often Four Star Cups are won off the back of teams willing to make a big swing and trade like that and I'm quite glad it happened, because maybe this will usher in a fresh wave of risk taking from management teams. (127 words, 2 TPE)

8. As we've seen now, the Panthers are champions and it gives support to my long-standing theory that relying on a team of professional athletes to be tired and need rest days after playing seven-game series is ridiculous. We play a huge amount of hockey during the regular season, often on back-to-back stands and lengthy road trips, and suggesting that the playoffs are going to somehow be different has always struck me as weirdly blinkered. Set the superstitions aside - playoff hockey is not intrinsically different to regular season hockey and if you saw a team on a hot streak you wouldn't stop and go "oh but they'll be tired". (108 words, 2 TPE)

11. It's funny that it's brought up here because I've long thought that the mental stats should be up for TPE changing in the same way as the physical stats are. I can firmly appreciate why injuries are turned off, but I'd love to see discipline and suspensions be incorporated and the mental stats would play right into that: I can roleplay Simo however I want but his in-character ironman determination plays out exactly the same in-game as that of another player written to be lazy and lackdaisical, which feels wrong to me. Hell, maybe we should introduce injuries - a league full of perfectly healthy human robots is strange. (108 words, 2 TPE)