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Z0REM · 01-06-2025, 03:42 PM

Having recently added a third juniors team to be near and dear to my heart, I wanted to go back and take a look at the Nevada Battleborn and their dominant cup win of season 66 and what happened with the team from there. At first glance, we see a team that has consistently been in the top half of the rankings but has never been able to capture post season success again. Most noticeably was their crushing defeat in season 77 to the second lowest team in the rankings that many would never had seen coming. What happened in season 66 that went right and what went wrong in season 77 that went horribly wrong for this team?

Season 66
Nevada won the cup and the league with a team that was not at all capped for success. By the end of the season, they only had 2 capped players with several more who were just short of 425. In comparison to the next two top teams of that season, Colorado and Vancouver, the paper stats would show that Nevada was not a shoe-in to win anything let alone the massive amounts of accolades they wracked up. Yet the proof is in the results and Nevada played their way to the first, and only, 12-0 path to cup victory ever seen in the league. This victory included a 4 game shut out against the second place team and finally against Quebec who had the most stacked roster of the season. The first thing you notice about this team is that the defenders were a solid core and took up many of the most experienced players on the team.
Seamus O'Slapahan - 425
Chad Nickelback - 419
Michael Byfuglin - 408
Dan King - 294
Chamai Malchi - 209
Tanner Aittokallio - 185

These members contributed for 12 goals, including 3 game winning goals, and 50 shot blocks. Which is pretty much the same number the QCC squad was putting up at the same playoffs and much better than the Colorodo squad was doing. Average PDO was also much higher for the Nevada team than the other two teams which contributed heavily to this miracle run.

Season 77
Nevada has come in at second in the league with 87 points with the Maine Timber taking the top spot. Their team is stacked with 9 capped players of which 5 were defenders and yet Maine was the more dominant team with fewer players at the cap. On paper, Nevada should have been the better team to take the ice this season but had their efforts squashed. Then you hit the postseason and the team just crumpled. At the time of playoffs these were their defenders:
Cade de Vries - 425
Chopper Donquixote - 425
Caspian Leevi - 425
Jordan Bamford - 425
Christov Kovalev - 210
Josh Fewer - 425

In 5 games the defense had to block 42 shots which is almost the same as the 66 squad did in 12 games. In that same time the defense also put up 5 goals and the only defender not at 425 put up 2 of them.

At the end of the day, this discrepancy may come down to the tactics run by the GMs but if you look at raw numbers from this small sample set, it's almost like it doesn't matter on the strength of the defenders. One could come to the conclusion that the best way to win cups would be to only focus on strong offense and put defense as a secondary. A bonus that is nice to have but won't win you cups. This could be the start of a larger conversation in the J's but that will take much more number crunching than I am willing to do for this deep dive.

[Image: seamsu_500.png?ex=66b438d3&is=66b2e753&h...96a382d50&]

Credit to Vulfzilla for the awesome render pic

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