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Doing a rambling article here that is (somewhat) topical to the SHL for dollars while I wait for Zoone's cheque to clear.

-First of all, congrats to Wally for getting the GM job. I know theres some messy lore back in the day with Portland and his previous history in the league, but hey, it can't be worse than my GM tenure *shudders*. I wish him all the best in trying to turn things around in Toronto.

-I re-signed with Toronto because the Top 7 teams from last year seemed set with their forward core, and also to attempt to justify the value a bit more from ml's trade. Philly gave me a tempting offer and I liked their blueline, but we'll see where things end up next year. Maybe the league will sign legislation outlawing Hamilton and Buffalo? (jk don't do that I actually like some people there.)

-In all seriousness, and this is no disrespect to Toronto, I like people there and I'm happy to have a roster spot somewhere, but I feel like I got badly screwed in this FA period by being honest with my TPE earning. I get the feeling if I ended up below 1300, I would've gotten an offer for falling into 4 million payout range and that might've gotten me a slot on a contender. But really, for all the shit the big teams get, it does have to be said that they do a pretty good job building their rosters. Some teams probably are set for this year AND next as Cup contenders, and still even have younger players on the backburner from the looks of those SHL budget docs. Good for them! They did a good job of building teams and deserve their just rewards for doing so. Even Hamilton, if they have somehow "rigged" FHM to their benefit, they'd be contenders every year in a "fair" sim, and did a good job drafting after the whiffs in Season 46.

-There is a part of me though that feels like we'd have been better off re-scaling and sticking with Simon T with the forced playmaker on Line 1 and 2 rule. Being part of a tanking team just destroys morale, and although I engineered a disastrous Winnipeg Jets S50 roster that got badly screwed by STHS in some awful ways (Walter Hobbs had an .867 save percentage on the penalty kill for us towards the back half of the season when we had a soulrending losing streak through a bunch of games that should've been winnable, leading to a then tanking LA team making the playoffs over us. FUCK that), at least it gives some teams on the bubble some hope. Sure, we complained about those Toronto meme runs where Mikhail Lokitonov carried the team like Atlas balancing the world on his shoulders, but compared to nowadays it has an air of fuzzy nostalgia to it. Participation has got to be an important thing in this league, and 2/3rds of the league feeling completely invalid on a year-by-year basis has got to suck (I don't even know how it works in the SMJHL, and I'm not sure I want to know.)

-Also as a veteran player, despite complaining about being just slightly over a TPE tier, I will hypocritically now turn around and complain that I lost too damn much TPE for regression. It should've been 18% or something, and I'm salty over the rebalancing. I feel like the long-term effects, combined with COVID activity levelling out, may lead to a situation where tanking teams have to go after 300TPE SMJHL IFAs because there genuinely aren't better options. That and maybe some early callups that end up decimating the J rosters. If we have to contract the J that kinda sucks, because then I'd guess we'd somehow lose Regina in the crossfire and then I can never play for my IRL hometown team. but hey, Head Office knows what they're doing, surely.

.........quit laughing in the back there asshole, theres no punchline. Honest!

-Ultimately, since I'm probably snakebit in this league, my goal is to be the last guy standing from the iconic Season 46 draft class. I imagine more of my colleagues will be retiring en masse as regression tears talent apart. Nick will probably end up being the Shane Doan of the SHL, and theres nothing too wrong with that. I won titles in the ISFL and SBA, all three of my guys had competence, and I was a good LR presence for the most part and made a lot of friends. I put together a reasonable sim sports legacy (disaster of a GM tenure aside)

-I probably will not be re-creating for a while. If Regina sticks around, I will probably re-create there just to say I played sim sports for my IRL hometown team. If the Regina Elk existed IRL, I would've definitely tried to attend the first game. I've attended about a dozen Pats games over the years, sadly the team was falling apart in the later stretches. I even saw the last game for Jordan Eberle, but it was a fucking funeral procession. We got blown out like 9-3 because our teams goaltending was appalling, then everyone gave Eberle a standing O, knowing deep down that things were probably not going to improve in Edmonton. And shocker, they didn't. I was considering hitting up the baseball league, but I'm falling out of love with baseball........ Do we have an FM league? That would be probably gloriously terrible.

Well thats one week of training done, so that wraps things up for this article. Hope you all had a happy holiday break, stay healthy and keep updating!