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Keygan · 04-10-2020, 07:21 PM

Keygan's guide to being a Sim League Manager

Hello everyone and welcome to my personal guide or I guess an advice article on being a simulation league manager. I am going to be writing a bit about what I believe has helped me find success as a sim league manager across the leagues I have been a part in.

The guide is going to be listed in multiple parts with headers for each section, here is a bit of an overview for the topics I will be primarily discussing:

1. Recognize your strengths and weaknesses
2. Analysis of the market
3. There is no such thing as untouchable
4. Establish a plan, and follow it but do not be afraid to capitalize
5. Friendship is your best friend

As we go through these five steps we will be discussing each in length about why there are important to establishing yourself as a manager in any given league.

1. Recognize your strengths and weaknesses

The first thing you do when you become a general manager of a simulation league team is typically to begin the search for a Co-General manager to fight alongside you in the trenches of day to day activities such as scouting for the draft, building lines, lineups, rotations or formations, building a sense of family or even just spending time with friends. While it may be enticing to immediately hire one of your best friends in the league, sometimes that just plain and simply is not the best option in regards to the management side of the league.

My purest example of this would be my Co-General manager of my simulation hockey league team, TommySalami. Tommy and I were familiar with each other after spending four of five seasons together in Edmonton when I was the Co-General manager myself before Karl stepped down. I knew my strengths in that time were line building and player evaluation, but I struggled to keep an organized tab of players in order to best show who could potentially be great picks in the later rounds of a draft and that was something that I recognized Tommy absolutely excelled at.

By trade, Tommy works in accounting spreadsheets nearly 80 hours a week some weeks and this allowed him to have an exceptional level of knowledge in regards to building and formatting a Microsoft excel spreadsheet of every player in any upcoming draft and different things about each player that would update itself automatically anytime a change would be made to those players, things such as their current TPE count or the number of point tasks they have done during the course of the season.

This set of skills beautifully accompanied the skillset I had personally, and that is what I believe made Tommy a great choice to be my partner in the league.

Remember, it is not always about who your best friend is, but who your best fit is.

The other side of this could be that you are vying for a Co-General manager spot in a league, you need to be able to perfectly articulate why the skillset you bring to the table as a Co-General Manager is something the current manager should want to bring on board.

Are you great with excel or an organized person? Explain how that could help in player evaluation

Are you impeccably active on discord? Explain how that can benefit a locker room culture and player development.

It is essentially a job interview and you need to sell yourself to this person or this set of head office members why you are the best candidate for the job.

I quickly ran over to my friend Mike Izzy of the simulated hockey league and asked why he felt recognizing your strengths as weaknesses as a manager was crucial to success and he said the following:

If people didn’t take the sim league experience seriously than self evaluation wouldn’t be as necessary.. but the reality is many who drop in from day to day find this place important to them in some aspect and there lies the responsibility of the manager to effect their experience in a positive way. It’s a give and take effort as the more you get them to log in and enjoy the site the more production you get from them on and off the sim. This process relies on you continuing to grow at your job to highlight and refine your techniques which affect them.

From the outside, the job requirements seemed focused on the results of the sim and sim related issues like line and time allocation for your players and wins and losses.. that is one piece of it of course, but I’ve always felt that equally as important is creating an atmosphere that has the user feel like there contribution to the team and its community is important. One thing I always say to the new hockey draftees is each person on Calgary has an obligation to keep the team healthy... whether it is updating, helping out or just chipping in each day to the conversation... and as a manager that starts at the top.

As a GM you do not want a team of semi-actives or guys indifferent about the team.. you want people invested in the franchise so attaining and keeping those players around requires a manager to work at being the best they can be under the conditions they create.

Mike Izzy -
Calgary Dragons Co-GM

2. Analysis of the Market

This section of the guide more so applies to those taking over the General Manager spot as opposed to someone who successful receives a Co-General manager spot.

The most common mistake I see from new general managers in any league is they take the post and more often than not enter a rebuild by selling. This is a massive mistake in my opinion, no matter the current state of your roster purely due to the fact that you have no idea how to properly gauge the value of players. To do this you need to analyze the market by doing research. Is there a position that teams value more highly than others? In hockey it might be centers, in baseball it might be starting pitching. In order to gauge that you need to look at previous trades, and then even further analyze why those players or picks in that trade were worth what they were.

Was the player evaluated highly or poorly due to the user connected to that player?

Are the offered picks valued highly or poorly due to an upcoming reddit draft?

Is the team attempting to buy the player in the middle of a playoff push and this player could put them into championship territory?

These are all potential factors in what makes up the value of an asset whether it be player, pick or positional scarcity.

I have been around long enough for teams to destroy their future because as a new manager they value a certain player too highly and spend picks they should have never used as they saw a player and wanted to acquire them before analyzing the market of what a player of that stature is truly worth.

Another useful tip I would give in regards to trade and market analysis would be to form a management team rather than just you and your other manager.

As a simulated hockey league manager, my current management team consists of seven of my players alongside Tommy and I. The management team in Outer Banks has five players outside of the managers themselves as well. This is absolute common place in simulation leagues just as it is in a live sports front office. The ability to bounce ideas off the heads of other people is a great way to avoid making rash decisions that could impact the health of your team as a whole.

I asked a successful manager and trade guru Luke why he thought analyzing the market before making trades as a new manager was important and he had this to say:

So you do not find yourself low-balling on your offers, or find yourself accepting bad ones. You see with some new general managers they often are not sure of themselves on whether a deal is good. The best way to prepare is to look at similar trades in the past, and make your judgments from there.

You also need to understand where your team is in regards of competitiveness, and what you can afford to lose when making trades

3. There is no such thing as untouchable

One of the biggest mistakes a team can make is to truly believe that a player is untouchable. Trust me, I fully understand the importance of loyalty to your players and I completely agree that some players are irreplaceable but that does not mean that a player should ever by any means be untouchable.

A primary example of this is a trade offer a friend of mine once received for a prospect he had recently drafted. This player was a consensus elite level prospect and without a doubt one of if not the best prospect in the draft. Within days of having drafted this player my friend received an outrageous offer of FOUR first round picks for that recently drafted prospect.

You might be thinking, Keygan that is an outrageous offer what did he do with those four first round picks? Well, he did not accept the trade offer. He had deemed this player untouchable and refused to move this player. While there were other motivations such as the player not having very fond feelings for that city. While I commend him on allowing a players opinion of a city sway him from making the deal, there are truly times that you have to bite the bullet as a manager for the betterment of your franchise. As a player if you truly want to avoid the city, ask for a modified no trade clause. I as a manager have to look out for my players, and unfortunately, the need of the many outweighs the wants of the few.

Another prime example is a manager who found themselves trading for an elite first line center in exchange for three first rounds picks. While in a vacuum the deal could be defendable, the current state of that team's roster made it an extremely questionable decision to send their future for a player that did not really make their roster any better at the current moment. The team in question is still attempting to recover from the damage that trade made after the center departed in free agency just three short seasons later.

4. Establish a plan and follow it, but do not be afraid to capitalize

The first part of becoming a manager is analyzing the current roster before you, what state the roster is in, and what you need to do as a manager to bring your team to a point where a championship becomes more likely.

I truly believe one of the most important questions a head office member can ask while interviewing for a manager position is for said manager to layout the next three seasons for them. Is your roster in a state where being competitive now is a realistic option? Is your roster being held together by strings and a rebuild is inevitable?

If you go into management without a plan, I am sorry to tell you this but failure is inevitable. You cannot fly by the seat of your pants every seasons, acquiring or trading off talent without a goal in mind, it will not work. Every time you make a transaction whether it be free agency, trade or draft you need to ask yourself "What about this transaction moves me closer to my ultimate goal of a championship" I have found myself at times entertaining trades or free agency movements that begin chain reaction transactions and my management team has to remind me "What about this move benefits us short or long term."

If you are about to enter a rebuild, maybe you have analyzed the market and have realized there is a reddit class coming soon, you could potentially move a wily veteran or a player that is just slightly outside your realistic timeline of competitiveness for picks in that upcoming draft that benefit you and build a core of young, hard-working players that makes your team a more ideal location for free agents in that age bracket.

WITH THAT BEING SAID, sometimes you need to realize when the beginning of your window of competition is opening and that first round pick is better utilized as trade bait for a player nearing the end of their career but with a still competitive build may be more beneficial to your team in their current window of opportunity than that first round pick will. While career value may be higher on that first round pick, the veteran is much more valueable in the opportunity window of winning.

5. Friendship is your bestfriend

The last point I would like to discuss today is that I truly believe friendship is one of your biggest assets as a manager in any league. We often find ourselves poking fun at managers who we deem to have a "Cult Like" following of players, but the foundation of that following is both friendship and loyalty to the manager themselves. This is prominent in many leagues as friends typically want to stay together. The reason for this? People enjoy leagues more when they are with people they enjoy spending time with.

When you can use these friendships as tools in free agency, or to acquire a player that might not be fully active for one team, but you feel as though the friendship you have might allow that player to be more successful in a different environment, eerily similar to trades we see in live sports at times where the broadcasters mention the success of the player could be because of just that, a change of scenery.

It also allows you to build a cohesive locker room environment. Friendship and enjoyment breeds activity, activity breeds competitive rosters.

Closing Comments

While I am not the best manager of all time, I do not regard myself as a poor one either, I think most managers can attest this list would be helpful for any first time manager, or person seeking a management role.

If you have any questions I would be happy to answer them at any point whether by personal message or a comment here.

Thanks for having a read and I hope it was helpful Smile