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Slowpoke · 08-21-2019, 01:06 PM

If you can remember, or didn’t know, there has been some recent discussion about the role of enforcers in the league and if first gen players should be allowed to create as one. The idea that GMs would pass over an enforcer in the draft is the driving factor. This made me start thinking about how the league is made up. I have said in the past that I believe that the league is getting to a point where the ideal build for each role is becoming common knowledge. If you want to create a goal scoring forward, the how to guide has been written, and the same can be said about a pass first defensemen, or a power forward.

So I decided to take a look at what the most common builds are in the SHL, and what the strengths and weakness choices look like league wide. I ended up taking a look at every player in the SHL to see what I could find and some of it was pretty eye opening and some of it was pretty well known. So to begin with I want to take a look at the forward. I also want to give out a disclaimer that there is probably some errors on my part as I gathered the data over a week or so, and may have miscounted in some area or made a typo. I don’t think the errors are large enough to discredit anything but keep that in mind when looking at the info.

To begin with let’s take a look at what archetypes across the league look like.

Total Forwards: 183
Playmakers: 28
Snipers: 56
Offensive Forward: 31
Two-Way Forward: 52
Power Forward: 16
Enforcers: 0

One error that I know I made now is that I did not separate the strengths/weaknesses by F or D, so unfortunately I cannot say what the common choices are in terms of strictly forwards. What we can see is that the two biggest choices are snipers and two-way forwards. This makes sense. By choosing sniper it allows, what I see, as the easiest choice in terms of weaknesses, checking or defense. In reality, it comes down to one weakness, checking. Two-way forward falls on the other side of the spectrum by allowing the full gamut of stats, but also allows the choice of scoring or passing as a strength. This build also allows the biggest flexibility in terms of builds, and it is no surprise why this is one of the most common builds.
Now to take a look at defense.

Total Defensemen: 104
Two-Way Defender: 45
Defensive Defender: 16
Offensive Defender: 42
Enforcer: 1

If you really think about it what we see here is the same thing we saw with our forwards. Two build making up the bulk of the choices, and for the same reason. The offensive template limits the weakness choice to a fairly small list, and one of those items being checking, and the Two-Way defender allows the same flexibility in build that the forward version offers. So now that we have that done I want to take a better look at the strength/weakness choices before we continue any further. This is where we can see my errors in compiling data. The total number of forwards and defenders is 287, but the total weakness picks I have is 280, so 7 are missing somewhere. On the other side the total number of strength choices should be 861 (287*3) but we have 867 so it looks like I may have inadvertently recorded some strengths as weaknesses. I don’t think this should skew the data enough to make it invalid once you see the results. Let’s start with strength choices.

Checking: 13
Defense: 185
Endurance: 5
Face Offs: 7
Passing: 129
Puck Handling: 153
Scoring: 164
Skating: 168
Strength: 41
Fighting: 2

And now weaknesses.

Checking: 208
Passing: 9
Scoring: 33
Strength: 24
Puck Handling: 4
Skating: 1
Defense: 1

With all of that I could begin to put together what the ideal build is in the current SHL. A skater with defense, skating and scoring as strengths, and checking as the weakness would be the ideal build. I think that most people who have been around would actually agree with that with some deviation to swap out scoring for passing, or defense for skating.

Recently I thought that eliminating strengths and weaknesses entirely might be the answer. The result of that would be a weighted update scale after a stat reaches 90. For example, if I raised defense to 90, the cost of 90-99 would be 12 TPE. Once skating hit 90, the scale would increase to, maybe 14. With each additional stat going up 2 TPE, or even 3 TPE, a stat point. In a purely unrelated issue I do believe that TPE inflation is a thing, and that a weighted update scale would help address that by making it so that maxing multiple stats is more expensive. What I have not figured out is if that would balance out with the removal of a weakness and its inherent increased cost. The problem is, how do you keep track of that and it would be a pain for the updaters who already have it hard enough.

Another approach would be to separate the existing statistics into categories. For the most part I think this is something that is already done. We talk a lot about decision making statistics. Passing, scoring, and skating making up those. We could then add an additional category of modifiers which would be puck handling, defense, and endurance. These statistics are those that help modify the success rate of the decision making stats or are those that don’t directly affect what the player does. The 3rd category could be physical stats which would be used to determine the physicality of the player. These would be strength, checking, and fighting. And lastly we have face offs which I believe should be a stat that is automatically higher for all natural centers, maybe starting at 65?

The next improvement would be to remove the archetypes and place some rules on choosing the strengths and weaknesses. The first option could be choosing 1 stat from each category. This would allow the user to choose any other statistic as a weakness. Along those lines the user is allowed to choose 2 from a single pool, but the flip side is that the 3rd statistic MUST be their weakness. The only time that a player is allowed to choose all three stats from a pool is if they are taking strength, checking, and fighting, at which point they would be filling the role of an enforcer, and thus would not be required to take a weakness. This would make the role of the enforcer slightly more appealing to the majority of users.

The reason this idea came to mind is that one of the driving factors that brought me into the SHL was that I could build a player the way I want. Let’s be brutally honest for a second. This is not the truth. I have an inbox of PMs from GMs who have asked me to make specific changes to my build and I am sure I am not the only one. We have had recent retirements due to building a player that does not align with the desires of the league. There are changes that could be made, but again, let’s be honest, they won’t be made. The league knows what works, it knows what it wants, and it won’t change its way. I once had a GM who I had asked how he wanted me to build and he pretty much told me that his job was not to tell me how to build MY player, but to find a way to make my build work in the lineup. This belief is not common enough today. This is all just food for thought, and mostly done for some extra cash.

***luke*** · 08-21-2019, 01:17 PM

I thought this was actually makeup and I was gong to get myself pretty

TnlAstatine · 08-21-2019, 01:30 PM

08-21-2019, 01:17 PMluketd Wrote: I thought this was actually makeup and I was gong to get myself pretty

you already pretty bbg

Slowpoke · 08-21-2019, 01:42 PM

08-21-2019, 01:17 PMluketd Wrote: I thought this was actually makeup and I was gong to get myself pretty

You dont need makeup for that.

*Leppish* · 08-21-2019, 01:59 PM

08-21-2019, 01:17 PMluketd Wrote: I thought this was actually makeup and I was gong to get myself pretty

Not enough makeup in the world tbh

***luke*** · 08-21-2019, 03:07 PM

08-21-2019, 01:42 PMSlowpoke Wrote:
08-21-2019, 01:17 PMluketd Wrote: I thought this was actually makeup and I was gong to get myself pretty

You dont need makeup for that.

Slowpoke u r qt

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