Three things this week:
1) Exhaustion issues/ benching: A few guys are still having issues with players being pulled out of their lineups due to fatigue. Fatigue doesn't equal injuries and doesn't show up on the injury report each night.
Injury - A player has sustained an actual injury and will be out for X number of days.
Fatigue - is a "condition" whereby a player is tired from his most recent game and at a minimum, his performance may be affected OR if he's so fatigued that his CON rating falls below 96 or so, SIMON will automatically put him on your bench and replace him with a different player.
It's up to us to put him back in our lineups...We can put the player back into our starting lineup after his CON has improved to the 96 or higher range. (We can't do it before.)
So, right now, for example, GIL has Austin Matthews (AM) out for a day because of "exhaustion." That means he's on the GIL bench. He will stay on the bench until Dan puts him back into his starting lineup and sends me a new file with updated lines.
It's best to download the updated league files after I've simmed each night and open up your team and look to see if anyone has been sent to the bench. Also, I suspect most of us are carrying smartphones. Send yourself a Google reminder to put your player back into the lineup once he's no longer tired.
2) Let's look at fatigue and see if there's a way to better manage it...
Using Matthews as an example.. (Not picking on GIL, but AM is a great example...)
If you go to the Pro Team Scoring report you'll see the shooting percent column is wider than most of the other columns and is easy to spot near the middle of the page. Just to the right of it, you'll find a column with the abbreviation AMG (Avg. minutes per game). Scrolling down to Matthews, we see so far, he's played 23 minutes per game.
Is that good? Is that bad? How do we know?
Go to NHL. com and click on player stats. Adjust the report to reflect NHL 17-18 stats and also select from the team drop-down menu, the Maple Leafs. NHL. com has a column way over on the right, 3rd from the end) TOI/GP, where we see Matthews averaged 17:40 of ice time for every game he played last year.
SIMON goes off of last year's NHL actuals to determine each players condition ratings.
So far, GIL is using AM almost 6 more minutes than he's rated for by SIMON based on last year's NHL actuals. I won't tell Dan how to run his team, but I suspect if he cut AM's ice time back a bit here and there - AM wouldn't get benched for exhaustion very often.
Unrealistic results: Some of our teams are rightfully frustrated. On paper, fine lineups, no big holes that I can see, a quality goalie, etc. Yet, a handful of teams seem to be underperforming to some degree. Would that have happened in APBA? I suspect not. So why then in Simon are the results for some teams so different than what we expect them to be?
In a way, it makes no damn sense.
Except, that it does.
We're about 37% percent into the first season under a new simulator. A simulator that is decades newer and substantially more sophisticated than our last one. APBA was fun, but it was badly-outdated and had become unworkable to deal with. Further, its results, even when league size was factored in, weren't remotely realistic, were they?
Last season, the eventual champs, Calgary finished with a W/L record of 69-10-3 for 141 pts. The best team in the NHL finished with 117 pts.
The season prior to that, Dayton had the best record and a total of 136 points, whereas in the NHL the best team finished with 118 pts.
The season before that, Dayton again had the best record and finished with 135 pts, compared with the NHL's best 120.
APBA was in the end, outdated and easily manipulated. Simon so far presents a far, far more realistic sim experience for our league. It's going to be harder than APBA was, maybe a LOT harder.
That's part of the fun, right?
Every year we see a handful of teams in the NHL not play up to their billing. They may look great on paper but something doesn't click and the team goes nowhere. Simon is perhaps (I can't be sure) reflecting that element so far in our 2018-19 season.
We all need to do our homework, far more than we did in the old sim. Review the manual, know and understand the ratings. Print off lines for each game and then study the boxscores and write yourself notes on what worked and what didn't. Compare your rosters, position by position and see where your strengths and weaknesses are.
It's a long season, friends.
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