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Management Through the years
#1

The SHL Changed over the 63 seasons it has existed. Thousands of people came in and out of the site, leaving a variety of impacts. From creating a forgettable SMJHL player, to creating some of the best players to grace the ice, everyone came from an equal footing here. All started at 155 TPE, and grinded to where they are today. Some of them turned into GM’s, managing them, navigating their team from the highs of winning a cup, or the lowest of lows. 34 GM’s can hold the status of winning a Challenge up, 12 GM’s are in the hall of fame, and yet many don’t know what it took to build a team. What it was like to run a team in the early days of the SHL, before discord, before chatzy, and it all ran through the site.

The purpose of the series of articles is to highlight what it was like to GM from S1 all the way up to the present day. The challenges GM’s faced, how the position evolved from a 1 man team, to the war room you have today. So lets start back from the beginning, and go from there

First I would like to thank all the former GM’s that answered all my questions, I appreciate all of you
@Leafs4ever , @Toast , @JumpierPegasus , @Velevra , @Gifter of Bikes , @Steelhead77 , @.bojo

In terms of context for each GM and when they GMed
Leafs4Ever: S1-S30 Winnipeg Jets
Toast:L S13 - S17 Minnesota Chiefs, now SFP
JumpierPegasus: S8-9 Minnesota Chiefs,  S25-S30 Portland Admirals
Velevra: S13-S14 Las Angeles Panthers, S46-S59 Chicago Syndicate
Gifter Of Bikes: S14-S30 Seattle Riot
Steelhead77: S24-S58 Calgary Dragons
Bojo: S24-S39 West Kendall Platoon

From the interviews I had over 9000 words from interviewing each of them, so trying to fit it into a story was quite easy.


PART 1: S1 - S30(ish) Forum/Chatzy Era

I want to split up the era’s between major chatting services, from the forums/Chatzy era to the discord era. Obviously the flow of information is different for each team. But splitting it up around 30 ish season chunks makes it easier to digest. In terms of real world dates, it is ranging from 5/3/10 -  9/21/16 so a 6 year gap between this. Obviously since this history is old, and a few players still remain from this era, a whole idea of what the SHL is will come from the scope of half a dozen GM’s. This might not capture the full SHL experience at this time, but a good amount, especially with how GM’s communicated and acted at this time.


LOCKER ROOMS

So the first thought I had was what were the locker rooms like? Back in 2010, there wasn’t any app you could download and talk to teammates. There wasnt Chatzy, it was all run through forums. From Leafs4Ever, an example of what locker rooms were

“Locker rooms were completely on forums. We didn't have, or know, any other third party sites at the time and all we knew was to use the forum. I know most teams used to make an individual discussion thread for each season, but in Winnipeg we use one main discussion thread. Straight up, we didn't have the most active locker room, but we were always a close knit group and, at least to me, we really had a sense of camaraderie in there.”


Talking with the only other GM from the first 10 seasons that are still active at this time, JumpierPegasus (S9 Minnesota), he said

“Relied on a lot of forum based discussions in my very early days. When I was GM of Minnesota in S9, that was all forum based. No other chat rooms really were even utilized by any teams at that point. We had season based discussion threads that were made anew every season, and then would usually reach about 200+ pages by the end and then you'd start a new one. The goal for any team was to beat the previous years page count, it was a lot of fun.”

Which is true, the equivalent of “active discord”, was how many pages your seasonal discussion was, as we can see from Calgary’s Season discussion here

[Image: unknown.png]



When you fast forward 3 years, you have something similar, albeit there were other options like Chatzy then as well

As Toast (GM of Minnesota from S14-S17) puts
“When I took over in Minnesota from Boon, he had a solid group of members in there already happy to see a younger GM take over. Guys like deedz and Turksa come to mind. Minnesota was definitely a team that stuck to its forum LR but the other big thing was Chatzy at the time. It was just a 10-max chat room that teams used. There were private rooms for LR chats (nothing we could do here in terms of pins, separate channels, etc.) and other groups around the SHL. What I did in trying to build a locker room was finding guys who were active posters already in the general boards in hopes they would bump up the activity in Minnesota. “

With the use of Chatzy, comes a better community within the locker rooms. Instead of just talking about the SHL, and having interspaced talks on the forums. Where you wait minutes or hours for responses. People set up Chatzy’s to play games together, really creating a more team community aspect to it. One example of this comes from Velvera, who was a GM in LAP before Wasty took over, which he says

“Teams also utilized Chatzy for more rapid communication and when organizing team activities in the evenings such as Mafia Game Nights. Compared to the present, there was much less constant communication going on within teams. The social aspect of the league has really grown in that sense.”


So from this, a majority of teams still just used team forums, which are now gone. But from team forums, there were seasonal discussion threads, where players talked about the season with the team. Team forums were used for everything that discord is used today. Communication for the season, captaincy polls, votes for team awards, and more. Teams used to recruit with how long their season threads were, as to project activity throughout the season.


Extra Bits:

Now what did the SMJHL use? Well we have a good account from JumpierPegasus as well, as he was the St. Louis GM from S18-S23, he said

“When I was a GM in St. Louis in the J between S18-23, I remember continuing to use the forum, because not all teams were using Chatzy and I didn't want to introduce young new members to a service that may not be used when they got called up, since they may get used to one system and then not like a forum only approach on a new team. Silly me, as teams very quickly adopted Chatzy and then super quickly moved to Discord and everything had changed by S30. Back in the St. Louis days guys like Rice and Kit and Cuffy would get our threads up to like 400 pages. It was insane.”




FREE AGENCY

Other than trading, the main use of forum PM’s were for Free Agency Pitches, and Scouting for the upcoming draft. Just like how they are in discords now, the same applied to the forum. As we see from longtime Seattle(Now Tampa Bay) GM Gifter Of Bikes

“Free agent pitches would be a combination of telling the player where they fit on the team, giving them some insight into what our internal locker room activity was like, and basically just trying to give them a bit of a preview of what things would be like if they joined us.”

The same applies to now, just in different ways. In FHM you can guarantee better stats than STHS, where it was more of, “we can set you on the top line and PP time and hope that you get the points”. As well as the locker room, since it was all on the forums for the most part, people are looking for people to talk to, just not that instant connection like we have with discord. Yet, locker room inactivity also doesn’t help with free agent pitches, as Leafs4Ever says “We were known in Winnipeg for always being competitive and getting the most out of the players on the team. They knew our locker room wasn't 24/7 every day and that hurt us more than anything in Winnipeg.”

But a lot of the same reasons why people go to FA and sign with a team was prevalent back then as well. From JumpierPegasus,

“FA was so hard back in the day. The league was not as big, you only had a few teams, and people were cliquey which meant that FA was really about "which team and GM do I like the most". Especially as back in the day if you were not on a team you were not in their locker room, which meant that you had to go to the team with your friends if you wanted to spend time with them on the forum. So people really had their minds made up going into FA. Sometimes guys went for the biggest $$ because it was bragging rights that they signed a massive contract, but for the most part you were getting guys through trade or building via your cliques by grabbing popular guys which beget more popular guys. Obviously this is more in the S5-9 range, I remember LA Panthers went from expansion team in S5 to champion in S6 -- well one because STHS was a crapshoot -- and just because Deener was GM and people loved Deener so a bunch of guys went there in FA in S6”

Which explains a lot, the thought of GM’s, was to get popular guys to help them get more guys in free agency, or persuade them with a lot of money. Especially back then there was big money free agent signings, especially since the minimums were 500k back in the day, so there was signings for 10 mil +, and other signings for incentives.

Examples
https://simulationhockey.com/showthread.php?tid=24689
https://simulationhockey.com/showthread.php?tid=24636
https://simulationhockey.com/showthread.php?tid=1507


Talking with the most winning GM in the league, Esa, you have a slightly more elitist view of FA(justifiably of course).


When it comes to Free Agents to him he said

“My FA pitches usually focused on giving the player a great chance to win a championship, while joining a fantastic locker room and playing for a premier organization with stable leadership and a history of success. Of course I'd let them know how much their player would help the team, how I saw us using them in the lines, what my plan was for the coming seasons, etc. That way they knew they were joining a team that will be an enjoyable experience and has a plan to win a championship during their contract. The dollar amount of their contract was never really an issue, with how good the Dragons always were players usually wanted to win first and didn't care how much we could pay them. I benefited from the atmosphere we created in Calgary. It was usually a place people wanted to come becuase they knew it'd be fun, they'd be playing for a great GM and have a great chance to win a cup. I landed a few big name FA's in my time, but it was always team effort, our key guys helped sell them on the experience as well.”

On the flip side of being a good GM, you have Toast (I wrote this before he got the SFP job, so keep that in mind). In his times in Minnesota in the S10’s he said this

“As GM during a rough time for Minnesota to say the least, my main pitch was that your player could make an immediate impact and get all the ice time you want. A lot of guys who went to free agency in this time wanted more money or specific promises but with my inability to get a team to the playoffs, the only thing I could really promise was chasing some regular season records. I recall getting a couple of free agents, but more often than not they would go to the more competitive teams.”


So there are two sides of getting a free agent, both from a great franchise, and a weaker franchise in Minnesota, where they were going through a rebuild. Just like today, competitive teams got the majority of the free agents, and money was a lot more of a factor back then as well. Especially since the whole scale in which money is accrued was different back than compared to today.



SIMMING

Test Simming has come such a far way from S1 in both of actual test simming who does it. In modern SHL times, there is usually 1 or 2 people if not more who test sim for each team, running hours worth of sims to get the edge of the competition. Starting from S1, there wasn’t any test simming. Coming from Leafs4Ever again he says

“In the early days, test simming was basically non-existent. GMs would input their lines, see how they played for a few games, adjust if needed, rinse and repeat. Except for me. If I set my lines, I barely touched them. If I had to, I would make a couple of changes in the season, but for the most part I let my lines breath and have time to play with each other. I had a reputation for being quite effective in creating a lineup. I was known for always finding the right combination in order to find success, no matter the roster. All I would do is look at TPE number and then match up player builds that would mesh with each other. It was a system that worked for me, very well.”


We can see that here
[Image: Capture.PNG]

For those who weren’t here for STHS engine that was the majority of the SHL sim engine,

His first line is Ron Mexico- Claudio Krejci - Sergey Kovalenko, who he gave 40% (roughly) of the Event Strength ice time, and the 0-1-4 is the tactics used for that line. 0 Physical, 1 Defense, 4 Offense.

For a lot of general managers, it was through trial and error to get the knowledge of what worked and what didnt in the SHL. Coming from another old user, JumpierPegasus he said that

“Not at all. At least as far as I knew it was almost barely done. I ran 1 or 2 test sims a season maybe. STHS was so slow, it was not a quick system, you were taking a while to get a season done. Plus the files were not as easy to get your hands on. Maybe other people did it more, but I won Four Stars, Cups, McKeil's, Chouinard's, and Littleton's never test simming. I had one meta. Leafs on the Jets had a defense strategy that was 2-2-1 (physical, defense, offense strats) and I copied it to great success on all my D pairings for my entire GM and coaching career.”


Another longtime user Velvera had this to say

“We usual did our lines based on pattern analysis from results and looking around at what was working for the top teams. For example, if one of our lines is usually going negative, we switch it up. We also noticed that the top teams/lines in the league usually had 2 scoring focused players on that line. So, lets try to emulate that. Funny in hindsight that we should have cut that 1 passer out entirely.”

Which mimics kinda what GMs and linemakers do now, copy from other GMs in the league that has stuff working for them. But from that, it is a lot of trial and error in part of the GM, which is why the longer you worked with STHS, the better you could be, along with having a bit of that STHS luck.

Every GM I talked to that was around from the S1- S30 did not test sim extensively if at all. They just set their lines and ran with it for the season, tweaking it here and there if need be.



WAR ROOMS / SCOUTING / OTHER

For War Rooms and Scouting, there isnt a ton to be said that most GM’s dont already do. But it is still important to show how it was back in their day.

Especially for war rooms, as now you usually have 1-3 different people other than your co-gm to help you with scouting, test simming, or just general advice giving, it was a lot different then.

For war room, it varied from team to team.

For example, for 30 seasons Leafs4Ever never had a co-gm,
“For myself, I handled all the GM work myself. I liked the control and doing things in my own way. Later on in my tenure, though, I did start to delegate some of the scouting to a few of my players. Outside of that, I did the signings, trades, drafting, lines, budget, you name it. I was notorious for not having a co-GM so that should tell you everything you need to know.”


For someone like Velvera, he had help throughout his tenure,
“Not too different in this regard. For the Panthers we had Kylrad, Taron, and myself making all of the core GMing and coaching decisions. We would also engage other members of the team on scouting decisions, especially those with close connections to the NWJHL/SMJHL teams. We even sometimes talked to people on other teams for information such as JNH, O4L, and Teztify who would all end up becoming core members in running Chicago. In Chicago we ended up having a lot more internal team members involved in decision machining. We were also in a fortunate position to have a lot of Junior GMs to help with scouting and a lot of people with sim knowledge”


The only difference between then and now is that a lot of Co-GM/GM communication came through email or site pm’s, instead of discord messages. So the time to trade, or get FA targets would be longer than today.

In terms of scouting, it is very much like today, we can see from Esa
“I always valued the person first and the player second. If you were a good person and an active positive member while having a good level tpe player I was interested in you. If you had a good player but a bad attitude or liked to cause drama in the league or trolled people, etc, I was not interested in ever bringing you to my team. I knew that if I brought in the right people and they loved being a Dragon they'd benefit the group and work even harder to reach their full potential. That was always my philosophy, try and find out who's a good fit in scouting, who has a good attitude and would fit our group, then of course try and get the most out of the player once he or she gets here.”


Also from both the old times and new times we have Velvera who said
“We looked for the same aspects in Los Angeles that we did in Chicago. Essentially looking for signs of sustained activity such as TPE gained, money earned, and time on site. I guess now we look for information about discord posts rather than forum posts. You probably have longer discord conversations happening with prospects now than the PM conversations you would have on the forum in the past. “


Going to straight old school GMs you have some like Gifter Of Bikes who said

“In order, I'd be looking for personality first, activity second. I actually did a lot of pretty in-depth pre-draft conversations with prospects, which helped develop our draft rankings. Overall I think it was a really efficient and insightful thing to do, because it would also help with future trade targets.”

And you also had Toast who said
“A lot of the same as it is now. I don't know if I had a spreadsheet to track everything but we tried to PM all the draftees. There were interested prospect threads for the SHL teams as well and a lot of weight was put into if you answered that thread or not since there was so much time spent on the forum at the time. “


Fun Bits/Extra’s
These are just some quotes that I thought were great quotes or experience’s that didnt fit into the article itself. Some questions I asked was the biggest drama that happened on the site, favorite memory, favorite trade that never happened, and best or worse GM they remembered.

I thought the worst gm they remembered would bring up old beefs they had, but it turns most of them declined to answer. But the ones who did said: JumpierPegasus, Cuffy, and Toast said himself(good luck in SFP Smile)) )

For best GM they remembered, we got some good quality ones, like GoB (x2), Leafs4Ever (x3), Tez (x2), Eggy, Maxey, and Jkrever.

One GM said that
“I respected the hell out of Leafs, one of the most consistent, honest, and also ruthless GM's around. He never tried to cheat you in a trade offer, his counters were fair and balanced, but his tactics were insane and he only made moves he had to and had a lot of success doing it. Obv his longevity too”


For JKrever the GM said
“There have been a few great GMs, but I always felt for Jeff Krever. Founder of the league, first GM of the Toronto North Stars. His team was always good, but could never win the Cup. It became a running joke after a while, but it definitely wasn't because of GMing, blame the randomness that was STHS. “


For favorite trades that never happened, there are a couple.

First from bojo we got a cheeky
"Every single one Calgary offered for Slappydoodle"

But the rest are pretty juicy from what their old brains can remember

From Esa we got
"I guess I'll say that when my good friend irl Nicholas Pedersen (mstuk41) joined the league back in the early S20's and was drafted by LA, I always hounded Wasty to trade him to me. He held out for like 4 or 5 seasons despite my best efforts, but eventually I wore him down and we made a deal. I think he was just tired of me asking."
Trade (https://simulationhockey.com/showthread.php?tid=56182)


For velvera we have
"In Los Angeles I remember there was a draft where we trying to bluff Wade (the Texas GM) to trade up with us because we were going to take the player he wanted. He didn’t end up going for it, so we ended up taking the player he wanted rather than who was probably our top target (ByrdeMan). We then traded that player for Donini so it all worked out. But It would have also been awesome to have had Byrde on the team."

From JumpierPegasus we have
"Kind of an answer, kind of not. Back when I was having my SHL firesale, I remember I had dangled like 3 guys out there after moving Brumm/Kowalski and Killington. Karlsson, Scholz, and Vikingstod. Karlsson went first to LAP for a huge ransom, like a first and 2 seconds. There were 3 teams in on that deal. LAP, EDM, and MIN. Both EDM and MIN then said they'd take Scholz but I remember I was a total ass. I think Minnesota (Merica) was ready to make a really really good offer for Scholz, I just had to give him a min to get back to his co's and coach. Then from underneath him I moved Scholz to Edmonton for like 2 firsts and a third. Merica was choked, I felt like an ass, and I'm pretty positive that Merica was about to offer me more for Scholz (2 firsts and a second) and i absolutely screwed him. He then traded me a first and two seconds for Pal Vikingstod, so it worked out in the end for both sides, but the firesale haul could have been that much sweeter"



For best drama that happened we have

From Velvera we have
"I’m probably the wrong person to ask since I never really followed along with the drama too much. During the S10s I know there were a few GM firings i.e. Chris McZehrl and Seth? that really blew up on the forums. There were also the typical members stirring things up, just like in the present day. During my time GMing Chicago, the whole STHS exploitation issue was probably the biggest drama."


From GoB we have
"Most of the drama that I remember comes from before I was a general manager. I guess the biggest drama I can remember while being a GM was a difference in opinion between a few players about how seriously they wanted to take updating their players. We had a few members who were on the site every single day and communicating in the locker room but would only update their players once every month or so. Eventually that came to a head and I had to make a couple of trades to fix the locker room culture."

From Toast (and my favorite drama story)
"There were a lot of fires around the time with day-to-day SHL being a pretty dramatic place. I don't recall anything too specific, but to keep it team related... Boon decided to give an excited young me an opportunity at GMing and handed over the reigns before he went on vacation with no internet access. In the 2/3 weeks he was gone I blew up that Chiefs team so quickly for scrap picks because I was over confident in my ability to draft fantastic members in the late rounds from my luck in the NWJHL drafts. When Boon got back from his vacation he... wasn't too pleased to say the least.. "


From JumpierPegasus (and my favorite league wide drama’s)
"Honestly not 100% sure. I might say myself if that's allowed. S27 brand new Portland Admirals team, expansion team, first big expansion the league had done since like S11 or 12 whatever year that was. Buffalo and Portland were struggling to break in but we had set up some good young players on our team. Then the tampering charge came through and that was probably one of the most interesting tampering threads I've ever seen because of the outflowing of support from people that came in rather than people being angry that we tampered. I'll never understand that, we obviously broke the rules, but there was a lot of sympathy. If I can't say myself, I'm going to go with Deezy being fired for rigging. I was an SMJHL GM at the time in S7 with the Firebirds, but I think he simmed for both leagues. Was just insane that he was setting up and rigging games for his stats. Way better controls around that now with live sims. Respect to Deezy still though guy came back and had some awesome players. He wasn't the only one, just the only one that got caught. I"m positive other simmers from that era were absolutely doing it"

In the modern SHL, there is usually 1-3 people in the war room to help with lines, or scouting, or whatever. Back in your day, did you have people in your “war room” to help. Or how did you get people to help.

From Esa
I've always tried to stay out of the drama and pretty much everyone knows I don't get involved in thunderdomes or stuff like that, but one big thing I remember that affected my team at the time was when gorlab got banned. He was a big part of our team and locker room and honestly was a great teammate and we always got along well, but he had a handful of people in the league who didn't like him for whatever reason and he made some bad decisions that ended up in him being removed from the league. I've always felt bad for him, he's a good guy at heart. He's actually been in a fantasy hockey league of mine for the last 5 years so we keep in touch, but yeah that's some drama that directly affected our team. We rebounded though and kept winning.

From Bojo
“Well, there was this guy a while ago named Nando. Bit of a turd apparently. But we wanted to keep the WKP brand, and we held onto it for as long as we could. Looking back, I probably would have been a bit more lenient on changing it, but everybody was just so butthurt about it that it just fueled us more to keep it. It's like when you try to forfeit because you're down 5 goals in rocket league with 2 minutes to go, and they score on us again. You then try to forfeit, and I'm like well now I don't want to. But I love the brand, and it helped maked our team a tighter group of people. I miss those days. Shoutout to JR and enigmatic (and everyone really) for the jersey, which I still treasure greatly.”

There was also some smaller dramas. Drafted someone first overall who wanted out not too much later. Never really knew exactly why they wanted to leave, but that sucked. Also we were the latvian hotbed for a while. Some members like birks and LB were always up to no good, but nothing crazy. I think the only time I had to be like "quit that shit" to one of them when they were causing trouble that could result in a suspension.





Words for each person
Luke , whatever the word count - everyone else
Leafs, 289
Esa, 546
GOB, 250
Bojo, 150
Toast, 400
JumpierPegasus: 900
Velvera, 460

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#2

wew luke article

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#3

Awesome read… also… do we have a media Hall of Fame, cause this should be there.

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#4

Nice article, very interesting.

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#5

Log on SCP

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#6

Had a blast talking to you about this Luke! Love the walks down memory lane and you got some excellent people to speak to about the SHL. Great read!

Guy Incognito - D - #24
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#7

This is amazing

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#8

W

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#9

ill never get over how fucking dumb "War Room" sounds, but good article Smile

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#10

Good stuff as always, Lucas!

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#11
(This post was last modified: 03-13-2022, 02:51 AM by karlssens.)

Awesome read, thanks Luke (and other fellas)! And to think I could’ve been a chief…

Thanks for the sig ragnar!
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#12

Loved reading about JP! All his experience really flies under the radar

@JumpierPegasus

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#13

Very neat. Looking forward to follow ups!

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#14

What a great piece! Wonderful users to interview and so interesting for a newer user. Great work

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#15

This is a nice read.

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