[Critch]

A Bad Plan is Better than no plan

I'm really just writing this dynasty as an incentive to myself to keep playing the game and finally give it a chance. I've repeated the whole "buy it, try for 10 mins, shelf it and move onto something else" cycle too many times, so this time I'm going to force myself to work out what's going on. I'm going to get my money's worth even if it's no fun.

The game is now slowly chugging it's way through simming up to July 1st 2024, Expansion Setup Day in FHM. I have every league selected, leagues from countries that I didnt know had hockey leagues, so it's slower than a week in jail but it'll get through the two set up seasons soon. This is the third attempt at simming the set up seasons, first time Toronto won both Stanley Cups, next time Philadelphia won 2022/23 so I'm counting both of those attempts as immersion-busting bugs and trying again.

As background, the players in FHM have an veritable cornucopia of ratings, the player page is covered with numbers and stars describing the players in all kinds of detail. There's the attributes, loads of them rated 1-20. Then there's the role rating, how good the player will be in each role (things like "Enforcer", "Sniper", "Two-way Forward") calculated by weighting the applicable attributes. And then there's the Overall and Potential ratings, a single 0 to 5 star summary of everything.

For the Overall and Potential star ratings for players, here's a handy rough guide I found somewhere on reddit:

1.0 star and below - not ready/not good enough
1.5 star - Emergency backup
2.0 star - depth
2.5 star - bottom 6 forward/low defenseman
3.0 star - NHL regular starter
3.5 and above - Top player

So the Anchorage Huskies will be starting out with the following glorious five part plan:

1. Get enough cheap 1.5/2.0 star players to fill out a roster. Preferably young players with potential, but with enough current to not be too exposed in the NHL.
2. Set up with stodgy, defensive lines to keep games close. Trap, dump and chase, lots of big lads checking.
3. Watch the waivers to snap up any young players who'll improve the team
4. Give extended contracts to anyone with a reasonable chance of one day being 3.0 star or better. Especially if they're defenseman. The more serviceable players on long term team-friendly contracts the better. (One redditer I read said the key was finding 2.0 star current/3.0 star potential players and signing them long term to build a cheap base to add stars onto, sounds like a plan.)
5. Finish last in the league, win the lottery, draft a "once in a generation" future all-star.

In what may be a great omen for the future of this dynasty, Washington Capitals forward TJ Oshie said "excuse me, sir" to me in Wegmans grocery store tonight. I was looking at the pre-packed sushi and he was trying to reach the edamame. He even said "oh no problem" when I apologized for being in his way so he's a proper gentleman.