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nour · 03-22-2021, 06:35 PM

Hey SHL Community! Head Office is back with our second seasonal State of the Union thread! It’s been a great season so far in my 2nd season as Commissioner, and while we’ve had a slightly quieter year in terms of events, Head Office has had a lot going on in terms of discussion about the future of the site and making improvements to existing systems. If you didn’t catch last season’s post, this thread is basically our way of bridging the gap with the SHL community at large, talk about where our heads are at with current topics and issues on the site, and ensuring that our process is clear and transparent with all of you. We’ll be looking at changes we’ve already made, changes we want to make, as well as taking an early crack on topics that need discussion. It’s also a way for us to hear from you guys before we make changes, and garner opinions. We got a lot of great feedback last season that turned out to be very helpful (the changes we made to milestones were directly tied to suggestions from last season’s SOTU), so we’re looking forward to hearing from you all again!

Without further ado, let’s get to the address!

Merch Store (Alt Logos/Championship Tees)

The Merch Store has already been a great success for the site thus far! We’ve seen lots of teams make a push for logo changes so that they can get their merch hosted on the store, and a lot of you guys are now repping your favourite SHL brands (some of you might be wearing yours as you read this)! In terms of profits, we’ve set the margins low to make them as affordable as possible, especially with RedBubble shipping, but even with the smaller monetary gains for the site, it’s been wonderful to see how exciting people have gotten about picking up SHL merch! Looking forward, we want this store to be constantly evolving and improving, and we wanna do that by keeping it fresh and stocked with new content. We’ve heard the interest in alternate logos and we’re making that our next push! Starting this offseason, if your team has a copyright-free alternate logo, you’ll be able to purchase them on the SHL RedBubble store! To speed up this process, we’re asking all GMs to please get in contact with us with some information on whether your alternate logo is legally sellable, as well as sending us a .PNG of the logo in as big of a size as you can get a hold of, or a scalable .svg or .ai version! In addition to this, we saw a few people asking for this last season, and after some discussion we’re looking to add Challenge Cup Championship Tees to the store this offseason as well! We don’t have all the details hammered out just yet, but stay tuned for a potential t-shirt design contest in the near future!

Update Scale Updates

Following up from last season’s SOTU, we have gotten a lot of progress in on the Update Scale changes we previously talked about, with the SHL’s GMs, Fileworkers and Audit team hard at work running tests with the new update scale. As previously mentioned, our goal with this is to allow players to make the jump into the SHL earlier by making them more effective at lower TPE totals, which should ideally solve the issues of rebuilds running too long, and a majority of players spending the full 4 seasons down in juniors. A lot of testing has happened already, and based on my discussion with the rest of Head Office, it sounds really promising from the SHL side of things. Obviously the quality of linemates will always make a difference, but across the board in our tests we saw a lot of improvements for players in the 700-900TPE ranges, which has been very encouraging. Our next focus is to work with Juniors HO on getting the same quantity of tests done for the SMJHL and seeing where to go from there. While this all looks good at the SHL level, we don’t want these changes in the scale to inflate Juniors numbers or break the balance there. This will obviously require a lot more discussion but there is significant progress being made and we’re really excited about how it’s coming along thus far!

Trading Card Announcement

This is less of a surprise unveiling as I’m sure you’ve seen the previous hiring post for this as well as blast’s announcement thread, but we’re very excited for the SHL to bring in the long discussed Trading Card system! At least for myself personally, I’ve seen this idea discussed multiple times since the early S40s, and maybe earlier than that, so it’s really awesome to see this idea become more and more tangible each day. We’re always looking at new ways to make this site a fun place to be, and a big part of that comes from moving past just upkeeping the site and making sure everything functions, and moving into exploring new ideas and introducing new things for people to be excited about. Luke and I have been in contact with the Trading Card Team and the early stuff we’ve seen is really exciting, its an ambitious project but the people working on it are motivated and producing some great stuff so far graphically, and after seeing how polished the ISFL system looks, we’re really stoked to see the SHL’s take! Stay tuned for more updates from the Trading Card Team!

From Jeffie
“If anyone is interesting in helping out, message Jeffie or Blastmeaway, there is more than enough work that you can earn money from”

Calendar Announcement

Luke and I have been discussing this for a couple of weeks now but a big topic of conversation that has come up for us a lot has been streamlining. We want to make the existing systems we have as efficient as possible and avoid wasting time on things that can be done in a way that's more timely or more clear. A big part of that now going forward will be us leaning on the site calendar we already have! We’ll still be giving updates on important dates as they need to be called, but we’re going to be putting a lot more effort into plotting out important dates using the calendar, including but not limited to: Trade Deadlines, Draft Days, FA Openings, Season starts etc. This is as much for us as it is for you guys, because a visual timeline allows us to really get a better sense of when important days will fall and ultimately allows us to prepare with a good idea of timing. It’s biggest draw in my opinion will come when everything starts clicking with offseason teams (namely IIHF, Awards, Fantasy, All-Star Committee and HOF), and this will ideally result in us being able to get a sense of finding out how to make the offseason as short as possible, so we can get right back into the swing of things with less lulls between seasons! This has seen a lot of great work thus far, and we’re excited to see it continue to grow. We want to make the calendar more visible on the site and we’re brainstorming more ways to do that, so please let us know if you have any ideas! We planned on making the calendar more prominent on the site’s front page through the dev team, though they have their hands a bit tied with another project…

Index/Dev Work Update

The new Index has taken some massive leaps forward this past season and is going to be launched in its first iteration for the site this offseason! I’m not at liberty to discuss the finer details, I’ll save that for the dev team’s official announcement post, but from what I’ve seen it’s made some really amazing progress and is a real treat to look at. The guys in the dev team deserve a massive shoutout for the work they’ve done thus far. This is no bare bones, spreadsheet index, it’s got some really exciting work put into it and I cannot wait for you all to start using it yourselves as part of your daily SHL experience. Stay tuned for some announcements on the Index from the dev team in the VERY near future, sorry for this being a bit vague but I promise there’s a big update coming about this!

Playoff/Division Realignment Discussion

Our last 2 topics move more into the speculation and open discussion territory rather than the “this is happening” territory, but we still wanna be transparent about this stuff because they are topics the entire site has in mind. We’ve seen and heard all your questions about parity, the divisional system and the playoffs, and I’ll start by saying we’re frustrated by this current situation as well. The Great Lakes Division has become a real hot button issue due to the quality of the teams there, basically always guaranteeing that a good team is going to miss the playoffs. The truth of the matter is, the only good solution to this problem is rooted in FHM 7 adding more playoff options to their custom leagues. We’ve dealt with this issue since last expansion, and we’d genuinely love to have just two, 9-team conferences, with the top 6 in each making the playoffs, but currently FHM 6 doesn’t offer that, and we’re waiting on FHM 7 to offer it in an update so we can make the jump. We’ve seen the discussion on constantly re-aligning the divisions based on standings, but the problems we’re facing with that solution outweigh the solution itself. For starters, we’re opposed to introducing a divisional alignment that opens the door to human error. If something were to go wrong with how we align things, we might end up with a similar situation to the GL division, but now the blame falls at our feet, rather than at the feet of an unbiased geographical division layout. More importantly than where the blame falls, standings-based divisional re-alignment, when working as intended, invalidates the regular season. If we make 4 divisions with the thought process of “2 good teams and 2 bad teams per division”, we may as well quick sim to the playoffs every season. I know it’s not as black and white as that, and I also know that if you’re on a good team and you miss the playoffs, it can feel like the regular season is invalidated anyways, but these proposed solutions don’t fix the problem as neatly as they appear to on the surface. Again, this section is more discussion based so don’t take this write-up as a “we will not be changing anything” message, we’re truly just stumped on how to best adjust things until FHM 7 brings more playoff options. Please discuss this issue in this thread, we’d genuinely love to hear any of your thoughts or new ideas you might have on this topic!

SHL and SMJHL Live Draft

Finally, after the success of last offseason’s live drafts, which was a massive success on the part of the SHL Events Department, we are taking a very serious look at moving to the live draft as the official format of following the draft! I know for me personally, I was blown away with the level of quality that came about from the draft streams last season, and after some discussion we really like the idea of moving to youtube as the primary way to follow the draft instead of the threads. This is going to get a little bit more big picture, but the reality is, forum boards are a really archaic medium. We’re stuck in a position where the format we host this site on is very limiting, but it’s also the only place we can possibly host something like the SHL. The solution to that, at least in my opinion, is moving more and more of the site's major systems to formats that are more modern, engaging and interesting. A big part of that has been YouTube, which at least for me personally, has made following sims INFINITELY more exciting than just checking a box score or reading a play by play. Live drafts ideally are paving the way for us to bring more of that showmanship and excitement to the league’s biggest events! This is something that we really want to see discussion from you all on however, because it impacts the site at large and we wanna make sure that ultimately we’re doing right by you guys. If we do this, there will still be a draft thread that gets updated either during or after the draft, so we’ll still have a paper trail outside of YouTube streams. Do you like this idea? Let us know!

Shl

This concludes the SHL’s State of the Union Address! Hearing from you guys is really important to us, so if you’ve taken the time to read all this, first of all thank you, and second of all get to discussing in the replies! What do you like? What do you dislike? What are your suggestions, and how can we improve? We wanna hear it all, and be the best Head Office group we can be, for you.

On Behalf of the SHL Head Office,
nour

**First GM in SMJHL history to win 3 Four Star Cups back-to-back-to-back**

Zomp · 03-22-2021, 06:42 PM

Alt logos :D

Sean · 03-22-2021, 06:45 PM

Liking what I'm hearing. Good job guys!

EDM All-Time Leader in Goals, Assists and Points

Zombiewolf · 03-22-2021, 06:45 PM

I still fail to see how division realignment isn’t a good temporary solution until fhm 7 is ready but oh well

Thank you Brandon, Fish, GeckoeyGecko, Karey, Kit, takethehorizon, and Ragnar for the sigs!
[Image: Pw202QP.jpeg]

Player Page || Update page

***sve7en*** · 03-22-2021, 06:46 PM

Live draft hype

*slothfacekilla* · 03-22-2021, 06:49 PM

oh my god a new index hooray

***honkerrs*** · 03-22-2021, 06:55 PM

Ph

***sve7en*** · 03-22-2021, 06:56 PM

03-22-2021, 06:55 PMhonkerrs Wrote: Ph

hey wait that's my thing

*puolivalmiste* · 03-22-2021, 07:01 PM

You want divisions realigned but want things to be less predictable? Add teams to pools based on last seasons regular season performance (A: division winners, B: 5th to 8th, C: 9th to 14th, D: 15th to 18th) and pick one from every pool (expect one extra from pool C to 2 divisions in different conferences). Would add another lottery event to offseason for people to watch and work well enough if/when FHM 7/8/9/x might fix the problem. Though this way you would lose your divisional rivalries which barely matter when playoffs mix things up and you play everyone in conference same amount anyway.

***Blastmeaway*** · 03-22-2021, 07:26 PM

Division realignments is literally just making it into like a sudo-iihf that allows for more FA/trade movement

Shout out to ml002, schultzy, slashacm, tedward!
[Image: blastmeaway.gif]

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09-05-2018, 10:04 PMBeaver Wrote: Wow look what the PT affiliation has done to our pristine league.

12-19-2018, 12:31 AMBeaver Wrote: I personally blame the PT affiliation for handing out massive amounts of free TPE to all these players, inflating the TPE they're at when they get called up.

[Image: Capture21.PNG?width=400&height=90]

**.bojo** · 03-22-2021, 07:30 PM

players in harder divisions could just go to weaker divisions if they don't like it.

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Tayjay · 03-22-2021, 07:33 PM

#draintheLakes

caltroit_red_flames · 03-22-2021, 07:36 PM

I feel like we need another thread for the divisional realignment topic. Personally I'm against that idea because as much as it sucks for the team that misses in the Great Lakes having the Great Lakes be so freaking good is an awesome story line and one that was created organically. It's a feature not a bug.

***Rotti*** · 03-22-2021, 07:37 PM

Folks I call him snour because this put me right to sleep!

tweedledunn · 03-22-2021, 07:52 PM

+1 for the live draft stream and just post a thread after

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