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Playoff Index @VHLM GMHere is your index for the playoffs, we will be starting these tomorrow so please get your lines and such ready in the meantime. The schedule will be the same as always. Games 1 and 2 simmed day 1; 3 and 4 simmed day 2, and any subsequently required games simmed 1 per day. Also as per the rules adding any new players is unfortunately now closed, this is a physical limitation of STHS. However anyone new up until right now have been added to your rosters so you can put them in your lines. Live sims will be in the same place as I usually link when I sim. I will update discord each day when I'm going live. Hope you all had a great regular season and looking forward to some playoff action.

Dom Chic has been released by the Miami Marauders.

1. The regular season has come to a close, with Stockholm finishing in fourth place and securing the final playoff spot. Did this meet or exceed your expectations? 2. The Vikings will take on the top seed in the VHLE, the Oslo Storm, in the first round of the playoffs. Does Stockholm have what it takes to pull off a massive upset? 3. Who would you say is the regular season MVP for Stockholm? 4. The Season 94 Draft Class looks to be very deep again this season, who do you see being a potential steal? 5. Lately the VHLE has been relatively top-heavy, do you see a string of strong draft classes courtesy of the VHL Recruiting Team restoring balance and competitiveness to the VHLE? 6. What's your favorite holiday meal?

What an end to the season! London grabs 100 points for the first time in a while. Wann Kerr leads the league in goals, a first in London history. He also leads the league (alongside John Jameson) in points, with a whopping 127! Leonard Triller breaks 100, Sjin and Lloyd Braun break 90. Teno finishes of their regular seasons with one that should no give no doubt to voters that they belong in the Hall of Fame. The team allowed the second fewest goals, scored the third most, and ended with the best goal differential in the league. Jillian Woods ends the season as the highest scoring defender in the VHLM, and leader in assists as well. Ottawa gets 50 wins, 100+ points, and leads the league in the standings. Best goals against by a decent margin, and best goal differential. The Regular season was a thing of wonder for me and my people, which means I’m surely in for some playoff disappointment, but I call this season a win regardless, and I’m excited to see where the next season takes us!

reminds me of @leandrofg's work here. and there is nothing wrong with that.

1. New to the team, so just get a bit of TOI 2. Playoff hockey is unpredictable, you never know 3. Not been here long enough to judge 4. I'm just looking forward to getting on the ice when I'm needed 5. Pub crawling 6. This is our year, go leafs go

Just never updated my tags!! But once a Wolf always a Wolf!!

Ok?

Any team with @Dil on it is surely a contender in my eyes

A place to discuss your favorite college football team and how they did last season. For me, I'm from Michigan so I've got 2 big schools to pick from but I choose to root for the same team as my dad, Michigan. Our season was probably the best season we will have for a while, we were undefeated, and won the championship. I'm not expecting that next year though as most of the players are going to the NFL or graduating.

Still a wolf apparently

The Malmo Nighthawks have clinched their second straight Victory Cup, wrapping up the season with wins over the Los Angeles Stars and New York Americans to post a 51-17-4 record, three points ahead of the Seattle Bears for first overall in the VHL. The Nighthawks went 17-3 in their last 20 games, breaking open what was once one of the tightest European Conference races we've ever seen. Centre Viktor Jensen led the team in scoring with 94 points while defenseman Jacob Stone put up 87 points, 223 hits, and 164 blocks and between the pipes, Ash Sparks authored another fine season going 45-15-4 with a .924 SV%, 2.41 GAA, and 6 shutouts. Last season, the Nighthawks won the Victory Cup but followed it up by failing to win a single game in the post-season. "The Victory Cup is nice, but it's not the goal. At the end of the day it's not worth much if you don't get it done in the playoffs, and obviously last year couldn't have gone much worse in that regard. We don't want a repeat of that," said centre Phillip Rave. The Nighthawks will face the winner of the wildcard series between the Moscow Menace and Warsaw Predators.

who r u

It's been a while since I GMed a juniors tournament, yeah I'll apply.

One of many posts I came across back in the day that featured someone who was really important in one of our affiliate leagues saying negative things about ours in their league's Discord server. Did we deserve it? On some level, yes. Most people know that there are things you just shouldn't say anymore. Maybe not everyone agrees what those things are. Maybe some people aren't quite up on what means what and how those meanings have changed. But you've got to be living under a rock if you aren't aware that much of the Western world has fairly recently come to terms with how our choices of words can affect others, intentionally or otherwise. Whether with any intent to hate or not, lots of words are out there that once were generally accepted in most casual settings and have since been looked at with a bit of hesitation. "If I were a member of this group, would I appreciate this word being used in this way?" is a fair question that's made lots of people reflect. If you're over 20 or so, chances are that you've had both the exposure to such things being common and the life experience to question it. I'm sure you know the sorts of things I'm referring to, so I don't think I need to keep explaining. I won't act like I haven't cringed at a thing or two I've said or found funny in the past. I'm also not going to act like the VHL hasn't, either. Talk to any super-old member, and you'll probably hear a whole lot about how the league used to be the Wild West of the Internet. I've read lots of "if you think this is bad, you haven't seen anything"-type comments, and I believe them. I've seen members attack each other personally and drop comments that really aren't OK in general. But by the time I'd joined the league, it was a good bit tamer than it was. And it's a good bit tamer today than it was then, as well. The single most impactful day in the history of "what is and is not OK to say in the VHL," though, came about after I'd joined. October 31, 2019, should have been a really cool day for the VHL. That morning, @Beaviss, who had revolutionized league recruiting and brought it back from the brink of nonexistence by reeling in the great classes of the S60s, was hired into a very deserved role as league commissioner. The VHLM was in the middle of their Cup finals in S68, with a Game 6 slated for that day that could have given the Houston Bulls their first ever championship. And it was Halloween! What's not to like? There was a lot to like in Houston, that's for sure--that Game 6 I'd mentioned went their way. The season was over and the M had their champion. But the story didn't end there--in fact, this one starts at this point because one comment that responded negatively to the game did so with a choice of words that would not be accepted in the VHL today. Though you can find the thread easily, I'm not going to link it for a couple reasons--mainly, what was said initially came from members who I genuinely believe are good people, who apologized for what they said and took accountability to settle their own business. I consider the start of the situation much more their business than mine, so all I think is absolutely necessary to know is that one of those "ways to describe things that used to be common and now are considered less fine to say" made its way onto our forum. It isn't OK now and wasn't OK then--but it's also a matter that has been settled. Houston, interestingly, was helped quite a bit by deadline signings. The VHL had recently rolled out a strengthened affiliate program (the one still in existence today that gives a free 12 TPE to the super important people in our affiliate leagues), and much of the SBA's leadership had created right at the deadline and signed with the same team. With that being Houston, and with a full weekly cap claimable by all these players, all of SBA leadership saw the thread when they won the Cup--and that also meant that all of SBA leadership saw what was said. At the time, the SBA's guidelines for personal conduct were very different from ours (and much more strict). I had been in their league for a very short time at that time as a very casual affiliate member and never had an issue with anyone there myself, but I was familiar with a few stories that at I thought were ridiculous (I really don't remember most of the stories or most of the details of what I do remember, and it's also been almost 5 years, so I'm not sure if my opinion is any different now). But being a league with stricter guidelines, I can understand where some people may have been shocked to see things posted that they would have dealt with personally on their own website. I'm not going to say that the SBA response was entirely in the right. Our league wasn't given much opportunity to officially respond to a fairly aggressive pushback, and later on that same day, the SBA had removed their affiliation with us entirely. Their justification for this was (legitimate or not is up to you) that the VHL had generally held relaxed standards that the SBA was not interested in promoting, and that recent events had made it clear that the VHL was not interested in changing them. One day in the books for Beav as commissioner, one affiliate partner lost, and one serious dialogue that hadn't even begun to reach a conclusion--what a start to a job (and an admittedly funny one). This was something that made lots of VHL members mad--myself included, and I had nothing at all to do with that game thread. From my perspective at the time, the entire community, just about none of which I felt were actually hateful people and most of which really didn't go around regularly dropping off-color words, had just been punished over something that probably never would have gone down the way it did had the Hounds been able to win a few more playoff games the finals been anything at all other than the team with the SBA's entire BoD up against the team that dropped the first comment. I had a lot to say about this, mostly on Discord, and although I remember being very opinionated and openly saying that I thought the whole thing was pretty stupid, that was about as far as I ever took it. The first few days on the VHL end saw some reactions from our members, though, that certainly didn't help the situation. Some people went to their league to call them the same sorts of words that lit the fire, and not only got banned for it but became shining examples of people the SBA could point to and identify as parts of the problem. I remember disliking some people I'd never talked to personally, and I felt that even though my own disagreements never broke any rules (written or otherwise), I felt that I was disliked by some people as well when I made them known--something I confirmed much later on when I joined BoG and found a screenshot of the list of people the SBA had a problem with, with me on it. Things were pretty quiet after the first few weeks or so, though. We kept observing the affiliation agreement on our end because we didn't want to punish any regular SBA users who had nothing to do with the situation, and while the topic kept coming up (it was huge news!), it didn't ever turn into people going at each other's throats. The only differences were that VHL tasks weren't claimable in the SBA, and lots of us had grown to distrust one another. After five months of sitting around and passively disliking each other, though, the VHL was informed that affiliation was gone forever. The league had been working behind the scenes to try to work out a set of policies that were agreeable to everyone, and it was eventually decided that this was no longer realistic. VHL leadership claimed that this decision was made unilaterally, and you can read the thread I linked there to try to develop your own opinion on the matter. That was one of the more interesting arguments featuring really important people on both sides that I've ever seen, and it relit the fire on our end. Lots of people made it clear how much they still hated the SBA then--I think I did too, but I don't remember. Something that made me think about things a lot, though, was this post made by SBA member @Beowoof a couple days after that announcement. What was detailed in that post didn't fully line up with what I'd seen or my own perception of the situation (I was in BoG at that point and had access to all the primary sources of info), but if I tried to look at it from the SBA's perspective, I found the thoughts laid out there pretty reasonable and could see how someone on their end could have viewed things in that way. I also liked what @okochastar had to say there and thought a bit about how I'd gotten to know a handful of people from the SBA in the past months and really liked them. The sim league world was really a better place once we stopped wondering how we could run around shit-talking each other and got past all the stupid league identity stuff to just have a little bit of fun together in our free time. Plus, I'm sure the VHL wasn't perfect then and isn't now--but the league had taken a harder stance against the sorts of things we were called out for in that time and I really didn't miss seeing them. Why, though, is this in Gustav 30 in 30 instead of just being a recap of the league in general? I'm mostly describing things done by other people, and the most I was ever connected to the situation was that I complained about it a lot. Well...I talked quite a bit in my second installment about how I'd been part of a very tribalistic team-versus-team drama in the VHLM and how that shaped my views on having basic respect for people. I think that did quite a bit in terms of adjusting how I dealt with people I knew I'd have to see again around the site. But I think that sort of tribalism popped up again on the level of the entire league, had real league-altering consequences, and sucked me back into the mindset to some extent. I was important enough as a VHLM GM that the league knew who I was, and so now I had to make sure my league was taken seriously. The SBA, much like any other league, has tons of good people in it that deserve my respect whether I've met them or not. I think this was the last time I jumped on any "my group is better than your group" train in a sim league as blindly as I did, and I think I learned a lot by watching things go down that helped make it so I wouldn't jump on things like that again. Also just like any other league, following incentives for benefit takes priority. Reddit recruitment was pretty much the only source of new members for either of us at the time, and the SECOND our accounts were reported and blocked from a bunch of communities, guess whose affiliation was magically back. I will also clarify that I have NEVER believed the VHL to be a hateful place in general. At the end of the day, now that I'm done caring about it, I think this was an unfortunate situation featuring lots of immaturity both ways that somehow eventually ended up changing the vibe of the league a little bit for the better. For the most part, I think we had good people who had gotten used to a certain environment and evaluated how they did things once that environment was challenged. To some extent, that was eventually me too. I did some growing that I'm almost glad happened as a result of staring alone at a screen instead of saying something wrong in real life and hurting people close to me. That isn't to say I learned to be offended by everything, or that I'm now whatever cartoonish representation of "woke" some people have in their heads over things like this (in fact, I really couldn't care less about that sort of mindset). There's a huge difference between that and just having respect for people and treating them normally--and I think the VHL has largely learned to adapt in those ways. I'm not sure that I'd say I'm glad this was a big chapter in VHL history, but I'm glad that we're past the negative parts. Enough of that--it's time to have fun with what's left of my Wednesday night. Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience (hi Berocka): #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name #2: Can't We All Just Get Along? #3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway? #4: The House That I Built #5: Can We Fix It? #6: American Beauty #7: The Kids Are Alright #8: Dogs In A Pile

65. It was wild. They were taking turns slapping each other in the face, running in circles around piles of burning Toronto jerseys, and vandalizing the branding across the city. It was great to see! 67. A big whiff of smelling salts always gets the engine going. 68. Nothing out of the ordinary. Show up for games, throw on some tunes, tape my sticks, and help my team win games that's it. 69. Call it L because I don't want anybody touching this league. I like it the way it is. 70. I'll take Acyd. Keeping the "acyd" theme here so the weapon will be an acid launcher. 71. I'm not sure if I would like it but I've always wondered if bacon flavored ice cream, or ice cream with bacon bits would taste good. I generally don't mind mixing foods as long as it's conventional though.

INDEX @VHLE GM ITS TIME

Game 211: Bratislava Watchmen vs. Cologne Express Game 212: Vasteras Iron Eagles vs. Rome Gladiators Game 213: Cologne Express vs. Oslo Storm Game 214: Rome Gladiators vs. Bratislava Watchmen Game 215: Cologne Express vs. Stockholm Vikings Game 216: Oslo Storm vs. Vasteras Iron Eagles Go to Standings

Phoenix Rise to the Playoffs In a thrilling winner-takes-all matchup (well takes a playoff spot at least) against the Calgary Wranglers, the Chicago Phoenix secured their ticket to the post-season in the final game of the season. Facing intense pressure, the Phoenix delivered a dominant performance, clinching victory in a decisive 5-1 triumph. Chicago wasted no time asserting their dominance, with goals from B-CHI D10 and Babay Shrimp in the first period giving them an early 2-0 lead. Despite facing a determined Calgary squad, the Phoenix continued to control the game, adding to their lead with Legacy Gaming finding the back of the net in the second period. As the game entered the final period, Yaroslav Trunov extending their lead early in the third period before Calgary managed to pull one back with a goal from Randy Bobandy. The Phoenix would still get the last laugh though with Bryce Woodworth sealing the victory with a late goal giving the Phoenix 68 points on the season, 1 ahead of the Wranglers 67. With their playoff berth secured, the young and determined Phoenix will now shift their focus to the wildcard round, where they are set to face off against the New York Americans in what is expected to be a difficult matchup.

64. I think my name would remain the same as my player name but my finisher would be a dropkick with my skates on for extra damage. 66. If a poet wrote about my season so far I think it would be called "a spotty flame" as I have been red hot and on fire during this season but my points seem to be inconsistent in when I score them, and if I had not been so inconsistent I would prob be at the top of the list for MVP ROTY and whatever the VHLE equivalent of the Rocket Richard is. 67. My go to for hyping up the energy is bringing out the smelling salts and taking a big ol' sniff. 68. While preparing for the playoffs I really have not changed my routine up at all because why change whats working. 69. Elon musk takes over the VHL and rebrands it to the XHL all of the forum activities would just run through x. 71. A sausage wrapped in a pepperoni pizza it just sounds like a good super cheat meal for when you feel like being really greasy.