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Keenan · 01-27-2021, 01:08 AM

I always have real affinities for my draft classes. Like being drafted, you’re tied to this group of people, but unlike being drafted, you’re tied with this random group for all of your careers. It’s nowhere near as special of a bond, but it’s a built in set of rivals and a great way to compare oneself. My first player was drafted into the SHL in S11, and I did tons of articles about them over Keenan’s career (and I do plan on doing one in a few seasons for our 50th anniversary) and lately, I’ve been getting the same feeling from this class, only much, much better.

But it’s one thing to look at everyone’s stats and whatnot (don’t worry, we’ll be doing plenty of that too), it’s another to try to standardize everything into one simple number. I don’t know how successful this will be honestly, and even my goal is a bit unclear, aside from cold hard cash, but the way I see it I’m going to call upon my 10 seasons as co-GM (over 30 seasons ago, granted) and try to make a ranking of the best players in the draft, trying to take into account most of the assets I’d be looking for in a player. Ideally this should be a nice one stop shop for prospect info for GMs, and maybe it’ll help everyone get max points on their mocks too!

So what is this system? It’s just a little something I threw together a few weeks ago to consolidate everything that I would be looking for as a GM into one easy to follow number, from 0 to 100 (though I’d wager we’ll never see a 0 or a 100, it would require the perfect storm). As its creator I hereby dub this stat KUSP (Keenan’s Universal Scouting Points). Who’s on the KUSP on greatness? Let’s break down how things are scored.

First, a player gets 50 points simply for existing, because I am a sweetheart. Next let’s look at all the things that can add to the score:
1) +1 for each 10% of max TPE earned (max of 10 points). This is kinda hard for me to put into a quick blurb, but stick with me. I’m assuming a “max-earning” and thus, 10 point player, will be at 350 TPE by draft time. Is that going to happen often? No, not at all, but I think since it’s the first cap players will encounter, and it is theoretically possible, it’s a good place to set our prospective 10 point player. From there, we’re just going to go down by ~10% for each score, but we won’t be counting the initial 155 TPE. I thought out a few ways to do a TPE ranking, but any way that included the 155 that you start with, left it so the absolute minimum a player could get is 4, which I’m already giving away 50 points for existing, so I don’t want to give away any more! A 10 point player will have 350+ TPE by draft night (or whenever the article goes up), a 9 point player will have between 331 and 349, an 8 point between 311 and 330 and so on until a 0 point player, who will have between 155 and 174 TPE. No rounding on this one.
2) +1 for every $10M in their bank (round up, max of 10 points). This is one way of looking at potential as a GM. The more money a prospect has, the less risk of them failing to update. Inactivity is still a thing of course, but a GM can rest easier knowing that if a player stays active, they have the means to keep improving.
3) +1 for every Article/Graphic/Video/Podcast since creation (max of 10 points). This ties in with the previous. Players who only have contracts as a source of revenue a) probably won’t be buying equipment to boost their TPE as high as possible, b) are generally less safe than those who have other income sources for many of the same reasons as listed in section 2, and c) may chase higher pay days to supplement their training, either forcing GMs to use more cap on them or possibly even having them sign elsewhere. Now naturally articles and graphics aren’t the only ways to earn money in the league, jobs and the casino are other steady ways, but with job turnover being pretty high I don’t think it would be advisable to look at who does or doesn’t have a job while drafting them since that could change in a matter of weeks. Also some jobs are prone to being fined, so kind of a double edged sword there.
4) +1 for each milestone reached (max of 5). On the other side of TPE is a player’s build. A player may be awesome at earning TPE, but if their build is garbage, it doesn’t matter how much TPE they have. I had considered doing something with GR and percentiles to earn these points, but I think this is an easier way. It considers both offensively and defensively minded players. It does give an edge to players who had more TOI, but if we did GR, there really wasn’t too big of a variance in scores between the rookies. The only additional thing we’ll do here is multiply a goalie’s number by 1.5 since they have about half as many milestones that they are eligible for compared to skates.
5) +5 if the member has had a previous character reach (or almost reach) 1k TPE. So I’ll go into this a bit more in depth in the negatives section, but seeing someone reach 1k TPE previously means, to me at least, that a) they’ve shown devotion to the site prior, and b) they have a good idea of how things work around here. Not that it’s complicated mind you, but experience is a commodity too. I set the limit at around 1k just to be sure to include older players. I know nowadays, 1k TPE is bottom pairing or bottom 6 more or less, but it was an extraordinary earner back in the S1x and early S2x days, and I don’t want to count those guys out. While going over previous players, I also gave a few points for previous players that didn’t hit 1k, but weren’t just 300 TPE washouts either.

Now as to what can subtract from a score.

1) -1 for each downrep (up to -10). I think this is probably the best way to know if someone won’t be a good locker room presence, at least without knowing a team’s LR setup. But it also comes with its own set of problems. Was someone downrepped as a joke? Was it a targeted flurry of downreps from just one person? When making this list I hope to contextualize everything and not just take the numbers at face value.
2) -5 for each missed Deep Dive (up to -10). Self explanatory, I had originally had this as PTs or Deep Dives, but I think Deep Dives are easier to find and still tell a similar story to what deep dives+PTs would teach us.
3) -1 for each previous player. This is the other side of the 1k TPE bonus. Basically I’ve noticed in my time here that many times 2nd players tend to sputter compared to first players. I get it, starting all over after literal years with one player is a downer. So I feel like if you’ve got a lot of players under your belt you’re either a) someone who has built success in the past and have a slightly higher risk of burning out or b) a chronic recreator, who might retire in 4 seasons to try something else leaving me without the player I picked, or without being able to get some value in a trade for you if it’s sudden. Obviously there are definitely exceptions to this rule, Wongy seems to pump out great player after great player, as does McZ and RED (amongst others, don’t hate me if I missed you), and I think the switch to FHM and live sims will keep retention up when compared to the SimonT years. Just to prove my point I’d like to share a little tidbit of data (especially since I probably won’t finish the article that this research was for, at least not for a while). I took a sample of 59 of the 133 players in the Hall of Fame. Of those 59 players, only 6 followed up their Hall of Famer with another Hall of Famer (to be clear, I mean the player immediately following their HoFer, so I’m not counting anyone that went HoF to bust to HoF). Similarly, the players in the HoF have a collective .79 Points Per Game, whereas those 59 players post-HoF players I took a sample of only have a .46 PPG. I think this illustrates where I’m coming from when I say that there is an inherent risk in taking recreates (obviously there’s an inherent risk to taking first gens too, but I digress).

And finally, one more stat.

1) Activity (+10 if online within the last 2 days, +5 if online within the last week [but not the last two days, does not stack], -20 if not online within a month). I think activity is the most important thing to look for, because without activity everything else is moot. Since this is (hopefully) dropping right before the draft, it should give a good reading of who is online every day, who pops in regularly, and who is more or less inactive. The biggest hiccup is those who hide their activity on their profiles, but that just means a little more digging for me, and what may end up being underselling them.
Finally, something I’ve noticed something with this class, is we have a wide variety of different “circumstances” let’s say. This wasn’t really an issue as much in my time as a GM, so I don’t want to include it in any calculations I do, but I think it bears mentioning. Outside of the top handful of guys we have a couple of different groups of players that all exemplify a different kind of risk. We have guys like myself and Nike: guys who have built great players in the past but are coming back from inactivity. Will we go inactive again? Then there seems to be a pretty heavy ISFL presence among this draft class. Will they burn out being in multiple leagues? Or is it a benefit that GMs have another way to reach them if they go inactive? Positives and negatives to each, no doubt, and I’m not gonna pretend to know which GMs prefer.

Any comments? Criticisms? I hope to work to fine tune this system for the future, so any feedback would be great. One thing I noticed is it does tend to prefer recreates, which seems mainly due to the cash. We’ve had a couple of rooks go balls to the wall with earning this season (Sivart, Maple, and Hundertwasser, and they couldn’t even reach $50M) so I may want to either tweak how much bank account matters, or double the points from TPE or something. But that’s something I can worry about next time. For our Next Article, we’ll rank all the players from this draft class by KUSP!

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DeletedAtUserRequest · 01-27-2021, 05:58 AM

These Keenan reads tonight have been a trifecta of fun.
+1

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