March 12, 2012

[BSBullies]

BUF 0 - MTL 3
Shots: 39-10 MTL
PP: BUF - 0/1; MTL - 1/10

12:02 0-1 MTL Sam Gagner [15] (Evgeny Kuznetsov, Ales Hemsky)PP
14:49 0-2 MTL Marc Savard [28] (Andrei Kostitsyn)
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33:06 0-3 MTL Luca Sbisa [2] (Sam Gagner, Ryan Malone)
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no scoring
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Three stars:
1st: Carey Price
2nd: Sam Gagner
3rd: Ryan Malone

Farm result: Rochester 2 - Hamilton 1

COL 3 - ANA 4 (SO)
Shots: 28-26 ANA
PP: COL - 0/5; ANA - 0/4

09:51 0-1 ANA Aaron Voros [8])
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27:29 0-2 ANA Ryan Whitney [11] (Chris Campoli, Henrik Zetterberg)
34:23 1-2 COL Andy McDonald [20] (Taylor Beck, Gabriel Landeskog)
39:32 2-2 COL Marek Svatos [8] (Danny Markov, Mike Comrie)
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48:48 2-3 ANA Evander Kane [17] (Joe Pavelski, Jean-Sébastien Giguère)
56:29 3-3 COL John-Michael Liles [4] (Drew Doughty, Gabriel Landeskog)
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Shootout
--------
Anaheim Mighty Ducks win 2-1
Colorado Avalanche - Matt Duchene, miss; Zach Paris, goal; Milan Hejduk, miss;
Anaheim Mighty Ducks - Henrik Zetterberg, goal; Nikita Filatov, goal;

Three stars:
1st: Evander Kane
2nd: Marek Svatos
3rd: Andy McDonald

Farm result: Lake Erie 0 - Syracuse 3

EDM 1 - SJ 5
Shots: 23-18 SJ
PP: EDM - 0/6; SJ - 0/1

13:21 0-1 SJ Brad Boyes [17] (Ryan Getzlaf, Ivan Telegin)SH
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28:07 0-2 SJ Alexei Ponikarovsky [7] (Jack Skille, Pavel Kubina)
29:06 1-2 EDM Lubomir Visnovsky [3] (Stephen Johns, Zack Stortini)
31:46 1-3 SJ Tomas Filippi [7] (Travis Moen, Michal Rozsival)
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42:39 1-4 SJ Jack Skille [15] (Marco Sturm, Alexei Ponikarovsky)
59:42 1-5 SJ Jack Skille [16] (Pavel Kubina, Alexei Ponikarovsky)
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Three stars:
1st: Jack Skille
2nd: Alexei Ponikarovsky
3rd: Brad Boyes

Farm result: Oklahoma City 2 - Worcester 3

PHO 3 - NAS 2
Shots: 25-19 PHO
PP: PHO - 1/5; NAS - 0/0

06:54 1-0 PHO Jordan Staal [19] (Lauri Korpikoski, Joe Basaraba)PP
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29:37 2-0 PHO Jordan Staal [20] (Shane Doan, Brett Connolly)
34:06 2-1 NAS Sergei Samsonov [11] (Shea Weber, Vitaly Vishnevski)
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47:35 2-2 NAS Ryan Suter [5] (Colin Wilson, Drew Miller)
51:16 3-2 PHO Shane Doan [39] (Brett Connolly, Mikkel Boedker)
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Three stars:
1st: Jordan Staal
2nd: Shane Doan
3rd: Brett Connolly

Farm result: Portland 2 - Milwaukee 1

[BSBullies]

EHM giveth and taketh away as Brad's Habs annihilate the Sabres but the latest long-term injury strikes Nokelainen. The Ducks hopes for an 8th seed slightly improve with a shootout win where the Avs lose Landeskog for 8 weeks. It's business as usual for Phoenix and San Jose where Doan nets the winner to create a 3-way tie in the Richard trophy race while the Skille's of Jack lead to a convincing road win.

http://www.ehechockey.com/EHEC.zip.

[GM Office Q]

Get ready for 11 straight games, MISTER anderson.

[SabresGM]

Just can't seem to stop the eight spot from slipping out of my hands, because the offense has just totally dried up. Brutal.

Wow, just saw the box score, what an abortion of a game. Looks like the good squad showed up tonight, Kassian with 10 PIMS himself and 15 penalties total, 10 resulting in power plays, which equaled the number of shots we had tonight. Good God.

[SharksGM]

12 wins in a row hell yeah. Jack Skille is a badass with 42 points despite not playing a minute of PP time and being 69/69 (or perhaps because of it). On the minus side that was a terrible game by the top line and
Joe Thornton had his 13 game point streak snapped . Poni puts up his 300th career point after Boyes recorded 400 the other day. Not bad.

Not a fan out of the out-of-town scoreboard but a 4 point cushion and 2 games in hand on Phoenix with 12 games left is a good start.

[Virtual Jarmo]

Man, I might have to go further with limiting NZT and H&G. These absurd shot totals are pretty damn unrealistic. 39-10? 27-8? Come on. Worst you get is a 40-20. At least the lesser team gets 20 shots.

Injuries are pretty damn frequent this year. And they seem longer. Fighting slider's being reduced too.

We're going to have EHEC CBA talks this summer, just like the NHL's. Definitely going to get all the GMs involved also.

And no, I have no say on taking out the red line, putting it back in, hybrid icing, or defensive zone hand pass penalties as it pertains to EHEC.

[Montreal Canadiens]

That's the 4th time this season Buffalo has injured somebody on my team. Hemsky, Kostitsyn, Nemeth, now Nokelainen. Just a straight bunch of goons but I'll take the two points as usual until they learn how to play hockey.

#totaldomination

Also a 4-0 road swing over some real tough competition. I wonder if we lose to Ottawa at home lol.

[SabresGM]

That's the 4th time this season Buffalo has injured somebody on my team. Hemsky, Kostitsyn, Nemeth, now Nokelainen. Just a straight bunch of goons but I'll take the two points as usual until they learn how to play hockey.

#totaldomination

Also a 4-0 road swing over some real tough competition. I wonder if we lose to Ottawa at home lol.

Well, to be fair, I've only been present for one of those "dominations" and injury, but 39-10, albeit unrealistic, is pretty much the definition of run-over. Well done.

[Jets GM]

Man, I might have to go further with limiting NZT and H&G. These absurd shot totals are pretty damn unrealistic. 39-10? 27-8? Come on. Worst you get is a 40-20. At least the lesser team gets 20 shots.

Injuries are pretty damn frequent this year. And they seem longer. Fighting slider's being reduced too.

We're going to have EHEC CBA talks this summer, just like the NHL's. Definitely going to get all the GMs involved also.

And no, I have no say on taking out the red line, putting it back in, hybrid icing, or defensive zone hand pass penalties as it pertains to EHEC.

moving scoring slider up > removing the GMs freedom and ability to run their own team

[Virtual Jarmo]

moving scoring slider up > removing the GMs freedom and ability to run their own team

= goalies with .850 save percentages leading the league.

It's not like anything that we'd discuss would be remotely close to outlawing NZT or H&G.

It also has nothing to do with goal scoring. As I outlined when we were voting on NZT restrictions, the goals per game numbers between EHEC and the NHL are very similar. It has to do with unrealistic shot totals and an uneven playing field for some teams.

EHEC: 41,903 total shots on goal over 1036 games: 40.44 shots on goal per game
NHL: 61,627 total shots on goal over 1036 games: 59.48 shots on goal per game

That's a really enormous difference. It may not mean much of anything to you, and quite frankly, it probably doesn't, but it means a lot to me.

EHEC: 5643 total goals over 1036 games: 5.45 goals per game
NHL: 5639 total goals over 1036 games: 5.44 goals per game

As I said, scoring isn't the problem. The problem lies with the gap between the bottom ten teams and the rest of the league. That's due, in large part, to shot and powerplay discrepancies based on tactics. And, yes, I realize it may be different if we had not had so many orphaned teams for the majority of the season, so that's something we will have to consider when discussing these things.

We're not able to get quality applicants to fill teams. We have to keep the guys around that we currently have. That's not going to happen if they're constantly getting outshot by 20 and 20 points out of the playoffs by the beginning of March the entire time they're in the league. That's not fun for anybody and no game should be a guaranteed two points.

[Jets GM]

Those numbers are pretty telling, I figured the scoring slider was a "general offense" setting and increasing it would lead to more scoring chances, shots and goals. Clearly, I was wrong.

[Parker]

EHM manages goalscoring very precisely, but shot totals less so. You can see the results of this in the save percentage numbers for really bad teams; they are much higher than the percentages for good teams. It's almost as if EHM decides the score of the game based on some meta-calculation of each team's strength relative to the league, but then runs an actual game simulation to figure out who did the scoring and how many shots each team put on net.

At any rate, the sliders control the meta-calculations. Every team would be affected equally. I've run sims before to see if lowering the scoring slider gives defense-first teams an advantage (they're playing to their strengths) or a disadvantage (since they're already good at defense, making the whole league better at it would decrease their advantage) and similar test runs with fighting, penalties, and injuries. I simmed 20 seasons for each of these tests, controlling for every other variable, and team movement up and down the standings did not follow any pattern. Some didn't move at all, some moved randomly.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think there's an in-game way to deal with these issues.

[SharksGM]

The parity situation could be helped by having orphaned teams' lines filled out regularly, even if they never trade. It doesn't have to be by the simmer necessarily. Dallas and Ottawa wouldn't have been quite so terrible with an active GM all season long or even just someone regularly re-inserting injured players into the lineup.

[Parker]

Maybe we should switch to NHL:EHM.

[Virtual Jarmo]

Thanks for that post, Parker. That's the kind of stuff that I was interested in knowing. Running some controls and then testing different variables.

There probably really aren't ways to increase shot totals unless we're rolling 4 R&G lines per team. What you did was what I would have wanted to do leading up to some discussions.

Definitely having varying levels of commitment from GMs and also vacant teams will skew the results. I guess it's up to the Committee to be more proactive in managing vacant team affairs.

[Montreal Canadiens]

Well, in my game against Buffalo more than half of my shots were on the 10 man advantage powerplays I had. Pretty realistic IMO. Although the other night when WPG only had 7 shots was a bit ridiculous.

[SabresGM]

Well, in my game against Buffalo more than half of my shots were on the 10 man advantage powerplays I had. Pretty realistic IMO. Although the other night when WPG only had 7 shots was a bit ridiculous.

I was thinking that, too. 18 of MTLs 39 shots came with the man advantage, and while I don't have time to check the consistency of that with the NHL, I'd think that it may be a tad higher than average, but not by much.

I think if there is a way to mess with the settings to even shot totals out, that'd be great, but Parker seemed to debunk that. What certainly seems reasonable is constant monitoring of orphaned teams to make them competitive as possible.

[Virtual Jarmo]

What I'd like to do is go through and compare the times shorthanded in EHEC to the NHL's numbers. That'll be a gigantic pain in the ass, though, as I don't know of any easy way to do that in EHM.

I do agree that the abnormal powerplay numbers are creating the big shot discrepancies, but that just means that there are very low shot totals 5-on-5. That's what I'd like to change. That's where all the tactics come into play.

[Parker]

This isn't just an issue with EHEC rosters, but pretty much EVERY EHM rosterset out there:

Player ratings as a whole are way too high. You can tell by the player's status in the organization. When a contending team's fourth line players are 70+ OA, they demand to be core players even though they only get 6 minutes of icetime per game. Scoring is very normalized among players (a shitty player playing on a top line will generally still put up 75% of the production of a good forward on that line) because of the high ratings. We've got over a dozen guys in the league with 90+ shooting, and not one of those guys is likely to ever have a 50-goal season. If the "average" offensive player's shooting is 70 rather than 80, there's a much bigger gap between the elite and the run-of-the-mill, and scoring totals reflect that. When I was working on my 92-93 season retro roster project (92-93 is my favorite single season in the NHL and in my opinion the apex season of the modern NHL) I found that Teemu Selanne and Alex Mogilny were never going to score 76 goals if they had 99 shooting and the average sniper had 80. If the average sniper had around a 75 SH, the true elite snipers' goal totals increased.

EHM tries to compensate for an unusually strong league by giving you absolute shit for draftees until some of the uberplayers retire and the league's mean talent level decreases. Try running sims a few years ahead using our current rosters and watch the draft classes suck balls for about the next ten seasons. EHM is trying to balance the overall talent level of the league. If a fourth line player on a contending team was 60-65 OA instead of 70 OA, he'd be happy as a regular player instead of a core player, which is much more realistic, and I believe is also the way the game intended.

I'm not suggesting re-rating EHEC players or anything here; just trying to shed a little more light on some of the sim engine issues in the league.

[Parker]

Dan's got a great point too: in addition to making orphaned teams a little more competitive, we could get some of their high-end young talent developing. This would probably help to recruit GM's if the team has some young star players already contributing instead of sitting at 55OA in prospect limbo because the team doesn't have a GM to sign them to entry-level contracts.

[CapsGM]

Player ratings as a whole are way too high.

[MinnesotaGM]

I agree, suggesting for after post draft activities for gmless teams. Maybe having 2-3 gms from the opposite conference help modifying gmless teams, go away with autoing draft picks and pick best available to which what team actually has a need for(dunno what is done here). Draft picks,free agents,tactics adjustments month to month basis just to give these teams a lil groomin and attractability to possible applicants.

Thoughts?

And to run n gun as mentioned above, i actually did a experiment with 4 r n g lines in a actual league it was successful and royally sucked as well. Scored 326 goals but on the flip side gave up 292. After a offseason overhaul did the basic 2 passing,hng,nzt line and both went down drastically 234 goals while only giving up 195. Basically coming to a conclussion that R n G lines do increase scoring but also hangs your defense out to dry.

[Penguin]

Have the non-playoff teams each write a playoff preview for one of the 1st rounds! Giving them rewards determined by Adam.

[Virtual Jarmo]

Have the non-playoff teams each write a playoff preview for one of the 1st rounds! Giving them rewards determined by Adam.

This isn't a bad idea. I'll see if the non-playoff teams would be interested.

[Virtual Jarmo]

Have the non-playoff teams each write a playoff preview for one of the 1st rounds! Giving them rewards determined by Adam.

This isn't a bad idea. I'll see if the non-playoff teams would be interested.