[Critch]

I think the time for another Anchorage title is running out. The game seems to be pretty good at being NHL-like with teams having period where they challenge and periods where they rebuild. If you've got a top player or two, support them with a halfway decent supporting cast and some role players and you'll be a playoff challenger as long as you can hold it all together. And, like the NHL, eventually the core players will get too old, the supporting cast will be too expensive to re-sign, and the draft picks will be too far down to fill the gaps so it's time for a rebuild.

So Anchorage are rolling along as contenders but getting to the end of the Jordan Gavin era, he's 31, still rated 5.0 and hasnt started showing up on the monthly dev report with negatives yet but it cant be too long. I've seen some top players hit their mid-30s still 5.0 star rated, but it seems most regress earlier than that then hang around as over-paid average players for years. For the original Anchorage core Gavin and Vuollet have hit early-30s still at their peak, Mews has started his slide but still a top defenseman, Hemming and Karmiris have hit the overpaid average player stage. I've seen some complaints online that the regression kicks in too early, but it seems varied enough to me and the devs claim to have done a lot of research and are happy with their model, peak round about 29 but some players can drag out their peak. So that's all ok to me.

I do think that if you played all out and were not squeamish about taking advantage of the AI you could roll the challenging window on and on, trade for top draft picks, trade for top prospects, so 1. no negotiating trades (take it or leave it) and 2. no offering trades are my house rules. I can shop a player and then pick which offer to take but no haggling and no targeting other team's star players.

The game's problem is that if you look too close you start to notice all the strange things the AI does. There will be top players who have gone a year or two without signing for anybody, top players who have been signed on high value multi-year contracts then been cut a month later (apparently when the AI GM wants to free up cap space they'll cut somebody high paid even if they're a new signing), non-top players with gaps in their career too (I noticed one player on waivers who had been drafted then stayed at a team for 6 years never playing a game at NHL or AHL level, just being passed back and forward 3 or 4 times a season but never playing at either level). I think Restricted Free Agents is a problem too, no qualifying offers is another new houserule, it just doesn't seem to work in the game. There's no offer sheets, no arbitration, and RFA doesn't seem to lapse. I think Tarin Smith sat out for 4 years because he was officially still my RFA so that put everybody off him.

I've seen complaints online that FHM is stuck with issues that roll forward year after year, top players who sit out years has always been an issue and never been fixed. When you're churning out an annual update it's easier to market with new features than to try to sell the game on fixing the bits that don't work, I guess.

So there's a lot to like about the game, it's deep, it's customizable and it's a fairly good sim of real NHL, but it could really do with some patching rather than new features.

2036/37 Stanley Cup Final - Toronto Maple Leafs v Atlanta Thrashers
It took 70 years in the end, but Toronto Maple Leafs have finally ended their Stanley Cup drought. It was a great season for them, they won the Atlantic division with 118 points (tied with Seattle for the President's Trophy, they had exactly the same record, same wins, same regulation wins, so no idea what the tiebreaker after that would be, we'll call it a tie). They beat Philadelphia Flyers, Nova Scotia Admirals and Hartford Whalers to reach the Stanley Cup final, then beat Atlanta Thrashers 4-1 in game seven of the series to clinch the championship.

Their star players are a couple of Russians, 29 year old Left Wing Nikita Ovcharov (52 goals, 47 assists, 99 points) and 26 year old goaltender Aleksey Medem (.921 save%, 2.15GAA). There are no original players left on their championship roster, Auston Matthews retired as a 38 year old one year too early.