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***luke*** · 03-16-2024, 06:30 AM

WIth all of that, the Top 75 is all done. Something that consumed my life for the past 2 months has come to a close. Almost 75k words written about the top 75, I would like to shout out to @Muerto for helping me write, especially when it comes to the top 20. I was running out of steam, as well as his perspective on things. He was in the league in the S20’s when he wrote about those players. So massive thank you to him. And then of course all the other votes as well. RED, JayWhy, Tomen, WannabeFinn, Ace, Joe, and Leafs4Ever. Took an impossible task of ranking the top 100 players of all time, then getting it all down to a cohesive top 75. This article will just be me rambling a bit about the top 75.

First of all, thank you everyone for reading, even if you only read one article or skimmed some. At the end of the day, this is all for the SHL. Making something special for the 75th season of the SHL. And honoring the past and current members in a way that we haven't really done. We had Argar with the top 100 players of the season of course. But nothing to this magnitude. I think this would be the biggest SHL Media Piece(or combined Pieces) ever. I dont know of any other media series that has 75k + words before.

I know for like 2 or 3 weeks I was doing about 2 articles a day in January. While they were still voting, to make sure that it wasn't a pain in the ass to do.

Some of my favorite people to write about
Jason Visser - He was my #1 on my ballot. So I was just able to kinda follow why I thought he was #1 in the media article. It came really easy for me to write about him. Its also fun because he did so much, and achieved a lot

Jakub Aittokallio - Another one of my favorites. Also JayWhy’s best player and I heard a lot about him from JayWhy himself. Personally my #2 goalie of all time. He really pioneered what it takes for the modern day SHL goalie to win the Ron Mexico, given that he was the first goalie to ever win it. An easy storyline of being the first goalie to 400 wins.

Strom Chamberlain - I loved the narrative of getting his whole lengthy career to finally win a cup in his final season. Even if it was against New England. Had fun writing it

Ivan Lacksamus - A player I am currently gmings. Immensely proud of helping Thief get onto this list. I didnt think when I drafted him that he would be holding the most points record in a single season. He really is the main reason why New England won our cups so far. It was awesome to write about him.

If anyone does want some resources we used to look at their own player or how we voted.

SHL 75 WRITING DOC

All 73,653 words, 138 pages of SHL writing. If you don't feel like going through the Top 75 directory on the site, that doc will be there as well.

Then if yo uare looking for a spreadsheet that has everything

GOOGLE SHEET LINK

Im going to go hibernate from written media for a while now

***Muerto*** · 03-16-2024, 07:36 AM

It was a real blast rolling down memory lane while researching these articles, looking at old indexes and seeing how the league has evolved. Thanks Luke for putting it all together!

If there's any inherent bias in these rankings, I would say there was a lot of love given to players in the S20s and S30s, perhaps it was the Golden Era when so many users were creating such amazing players and we still perhaps naively believed that STHS wasn't exploitable. It was also the time of TPE inflation where becoming a 2K TPE player became possible when prior to that, 1K TPE meant you were one of the top 10 earners. So you saw the big earners really elevate themselves into becoming superstars.

The FHM6 era especially, was clearly a GM game so the players from that time didn't seem to be given much credit - if you were on a good team you did well, if you weren't you didn't. Didn't even seem to matter how you built your player, which was disappointing because the promise of all these different attributes to really customize your player ended up becoming just the meta where everybody was the same. The FHM8 era is fun with the elevated scoring but man it is really hard to stand out in a 20 team league so some excellent players didn't get their due.

But overall I think you see that the top 25-30 I think is pretty solid, give everybody a +/- 2 spots either way. After that you do get some variance where obviously you have some differences in opinion on how good players were comparatively.

Anyway I hope you all enjoyed the articles!

**RomanesEuntDomus** · 03-16-2024, 12:31 PM

Thank you so much for putting this all together Luke, it's crazy to see the amount of work you have put into this, but the results are absolutely worth it! Especially the write-ups are so impressive given that they mostly just come from to people and went more in-depth than I would have expected for that amount of content that you needed to produce Smile

. It's very interesting to hear the different peoples thoughts on the rankings themselves, both from the guys involved in setting them up and from the general public who has been reading and commenting on those pieces. It's great to see the feedback being so positive and having the rankings generally well received, aside from the normal "I think player x/y should be higher/lower", which is both normal and healthy in these kinds of discussions.

As many people have pointed out, comparing the different eras is really tough, as is the sheer number of players to take into account. I personally found it much harder to cut the list down to 100 people and to figure out the lower parts of the ranking than I did ranking the people at the top, as there were just so many good players who would've warranted inclusion and it was more painful to leave someone out completely than having them a few spots lower than they might have deserved. In regards to the eras, it's interesting to hear Muertos thoughts about the bias or "Golden Age" that he perceives, and while I did not look into those numbers myself, his assumptions feels valid to me as well. There are a bunch of reasons for that as he already pointed out, it was both a sweet spot in regards to what numbers you could reach as a player (both in terms of TPE and career stats) and is also a timeframe from which there are still quite a lot of members around, whereas a lot of the S1-S20 people are already gone.

It will be very interesting to compare STHS vs FHM down the road because as has been pointed out, there is a certain bias against FHM players in this list. I don't think it was anything malicious and mostly comes from the fact that we don't have a real established statistical base yet to determine what those numbers that people have put up over the last 20 seasons or so are really worth. In that regard I am really looking forward to maybe a new version of that in S100 with a 100 in 100 kind of list, because then we will be looking back at a league history that is roughly split between STHS and FHM and we will have a much better statistical basis to judge those FHM numbers.

My perception is that right now, we are looking at a statistical landscape where players in their prime can easily put up two to three times the points in a season than players could in the STHS days. And even in ones twilight years you can keep a player in the 40 point range for a very long time. So a point range that was considered very good for much of the STHS-era of this league, is now the lower end of what is sustainable for a very long time. If you look at the numbers like that, you could argue that 1500 points in FHM only translate to like 750 points in STHS or something like that. But then this is somewhat counteracted by the new TPE-infrastructure and changes in the competitive landscape of the league and this is where I think things become really tricky and where, hopefully, we will get a much clearer picture over the years. Once we see more pure STHS players play out their careers and provide us with a large enough statistical sample, I hope we can get a better answer to questions like "What are 1500 points in FHM actually worth", "How impressive were the primes of Selich/LEG, Manning/Lacksamus/Winter" and so on.

Of course you can never fully eliminate people personal biases, but I think we got a good mix of people into the voting group here to balance out a lot of that. And having some personal touch like this in the discussion isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it brings in new and different perspectives when too much group-think might otherwise have taken over or people might have flown under the radar. Just to give some personal perspective: I for example am a sucker for longevity, I really like long careers and it will ususally hurt someone in my rankings when they only had a rather short career, unless they were super super dominant. But this is something that is not without risks of course, due to big differences in the league eras. Players from the early years of the league simply didn't have the chance to have careers that are as long and consistent as those that came after them had. And then on the other hand we have recently moved into territory where it has become easier again to have really really long careers and still put up decent numbers 20+ seasons into your player, so you can't just look at those players the same way and be impressed by their longevity.

To balance that out, I think I care a little less about Awards and ASG-appearances than the average voter and part of the reason for that is that I know how unreliably those have been handed out in the past. Especially in the earlier seasons of the league there often wasn't even an actual Awards/ASG-committee in place and people from the Head Office just picked people they like based on their personal preferences and friendships. We have a much better process today, but at the same time the league has grown so much that it has become even harder to earn Awards these days and it is absolutely possible to have very impressive careers while barely ever getting any awards recognition. But I know that other voters basically look at it the other way around, they care less about career numbers and longevity than me and more about Awards and peak performances, and I think both those perspectives are valid and good to have. I think Brick Wall is an example of a players where those different perspectives clashed quite a bit.

A rather tricky aspect of this are your own players of course. I personally found it really refreshing to read JayWhy's contribution in the retrospectives thread where he made the case for his own player, because he honestly and openly voiced something that a lot of us probably secretely thought about their own players, but weren't brave enough to actually vocalize. If I look at my own players, I kinda think the same about two of them at least: David Winter and Philipp Winter.

I think David did some historical things and broke new ground in quite a few aspects of the league, but most of the people here weren't around when they happened, so that's why he ended up a little lower than I would've liked. Plus, while I am not that big on Awards in these rankings as I mentioned before, I do have to acknowledge that his lack of individual hardware prevented him from being near the very top of these rankings and this is a reasonable perspective to have. For Philipp Winter I was a bit disappointed to barely see him in dicussion for this list at all. He wouldn't have been someone at the very top of the rankings of course, but I think he deserved some more serious consideration in the 50-75 category and my impression was that he fell through the cracks a bit and people barely even took a look at him - so in a sense, he might be a typical example of what probably happened to a lot of players in the 50-150 range because there were just so many in contention for those places. It's something that you can't really avoid in a ranking like this. So with that being said, it was really nice to see the little shout-out by Leafs4Ever for him in the Retrospectives thread.

Hope you all enjoyed reading this series and my thoughts on it as much as I did participating in it Smile

!

***WannabeFinn*** · 03-16-2024, 12:34 PM

Thank you Luke for putting so much effort into this project to celebrate our 75th Season Smile

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