State of the Loons; Speeding up the Rebuild

 I am sure it comes as no surprise to anyone in the CCHL that the Loons did not have the patience to go through a long rebuild. One year of losing, worst in the CCHL losing, was more then enough for us. After tearing down our team and creating a strong farm system we were in a position where if our prospects developed properly we could have been competitive in 3 or 4 years... Nope... don't have the patience for that. I can say that we have hopefully learned from our mistakes. We resisted bringing in high priced players in the later stages of their primes for immediate, short term success. Instead, we targeted players in their early twenties that have yet to reach their big pay days. Over the past few weeks the Loons moved multiple prospects and decimated our 2022 and 2023 draft picks in order to create a core consisting of Eichel, McAvoy, and Werenski. As strong as that core seems to be, they need reinforcements. Our hope is that those reinforcements will come from what is left of our prospect pool. This upcoming season will be extremely important for Wahlstrom, Puljujarvi, Zegras and Oettinger. All four showed glimpses of developing into top players in the league. If at least 3 of the 4 can continue to improve the Loons can start focusing on making a run at the Kehler Cup.

Its almost Beniers time in Capeside! 

After multiple emails, slack messages and trades the Loons will be able to draft Matty Beniers in this year's draft. Just a few months ago we bragged about a strong center group consisting of Eichel, Zegras, Rossi and Turcotte. We have since subtracted Rossi and Turcotte but are very excited to be able to add Beniers to Eichel and Zegras down the middle. Capeside also owns the 6th and 25th selections this year and have our sights firmly set on two players at those spots that hopefully will keep the Loons on top when and if we are able to get there.

More great news came the Loons' way early this week as Capeside was selected to host the 2021 CCHL draft. Word is that Matty Beniers is already here looking for a house  with a view of the local creek here in Capeside. As mentioned on Twitter, the Potter B&B has been fully restored and will be available for any GM looking to make the trip to Capeside later this month. Rooms are going fast but thankfully the GMs of the Ice Cats and Millers have agreed to share a room while the Comets are taking the couch. I am sure that volunteering for the couch was not just to be a nice guy but a strategic move in order to be a part of any and all trade conversations that may take place in the B&B. We are on to you Max!

Just a few more weeks until we find out who will join Matty in this year's Loons draft class!

CCHL update - mid June 2021!

 1)  The website is updated to include all transactions that were submitted and confirmed as legal trades.  

2)  Please remember  your trade formatting.  I had a lot of trades I had to correct formatting things on.  With the number of trades being so large, I shouldn't be doing this.  Going forward, I will not process anything that has formatting errors as it just takes twice as long to do an update with me cleaning up these trades.  There are plenty of transactions to view on the website if you are in doubt so please refer to those.  

3)  The new disk was due to be out Friday at 6pm.  To date it has not been put up and the creators have not responded with a new date/time.  I anticipate it will be soon (another freeze to follow so I can do the update/move first year disk players) but I just don't know when it will be for sure.  

 

Now the MUST READ part:  

4) We have made a slight tweak to the rules on trading draft picks for beyond two drafts.  As of June 15th each year, you may now submit trades involving draft picks for the next set of available picks.  This means that on June 15th (this week) you can submit trades including the 2023 draft picks.  On June 15th, 2022 - you can submit trades involving 2024 picks.  

We have made this a few weeks earlier than normal because we know these trades exist and they create a ton of administrative work following the draft; a time in which the administrative work is at it's highest for the league offices.  As such, the only reason we are permitting this early going forward is to try to reduce some of that chaos following the draft.  The rules have been updated to reflect this and reads as follows:  

On June 15 each year, we will allow the next draft pick year to be available for trade.  For example, on June 15, 2021 - trades involving draft picks for the 2023 draft will be allowed to be submitted.  On June 15, 2022 - draft picks for draft year 2024 will be available to be included in trades.  While the league office does not support trading picks in advance of two draft years, the reality is that the picks are being traded and it is creating an administrative nightmare immediately following the draft.  In order to potentially avoid this, we permitting the picks to be dealt a few weeks ahead of the draft.  

5)  Lastly, the plan for this season only was to allow teams to re-rate up to 3 players off of the alternate ratings disk that we have access to.  The reason for this was that with the disk we use doing a two-year rating, it wouldn't capture breakout players or rookies accurately.  

After reviewing the ratings off of the disk and importing them into the CCHL system, the fact of the matter is that the adjustment will not work as intended.  The alternate ratings did not provide players with the boosts we had hoped for, and actually really sees star players go up as much as 10 overall.  The intent was not to turn McDavid or Matthews into Super McD or Matthews - they are already that on their own.  The real problem is that this will really only improve star players and that was not the intent behind the idea as that could dramatically skew the competitive balance with 3 players on a roster of 20 going up by 8-10 each.  

I will take responsibility for jumping the gun on the idea without seeing the ratings and the impact once we brought them into the CCHL weights.  

We did talk as an executive committee and have come up with a compromise that we will be trying for this season only (as of this writing.  If it goes well, maybe we keep it going...we'll see).  

CCHL teams may use one rating from the alternate pack to change up to 4 players on their team.  This means that CCHL teams can use one rating (example in a moment) from the alternate pack to improve that rating category on up to four players on their CCHL team, but a team may ONLY upgrade one rating on 4 skaters (goalies not included).  

Example:  The alternate rating has John Hockeyguy with a 80 in skating but our disk has him at a 70, you can change that to a 80 from the alternate rating pack.  You could not however change his skating and scoring rating, you would have to pick just one to update per skater (up to 4 skaters per team).  

Once we have the new disk and it is uploaded, I will send out the alternate ratings file to the league and another set of cells to copy/paste that details how to easily format your rating change requests.  It will be easy but formatting will be important and I will not accept anything that is not in that format because I don't want this to become an exercise in interpretation for myself.  

The bonus to this is that with changing all of the ratings for 3 skaters like we had initially thought about doing, there would be reductions in some ratings based on the rating systems.  In doing it this way, CCHL teams will ONLY see positive gains.  

One other thing to note is that this cannot be applied to UFAs signed in the 2021 signing period.  These 4 improvements can ONLY be applied to players under contract throughout the free agent period.  

Teams also do not have to participate in this but I don't see why all teams wouldn't take 10-15 minutes to go through the process to accurately rate their teams.  

I think that's it for now.  Any questions, please address Paul/myself.  Please do not reply to all as it will be easier to answer questions directly rather than in a league format.  

Thanks,

Matt

CCHL Revenue increase, UFAs and Disk releases

 Well, it's been another week and although things are fairly quiet around the league right now, behind the scenes they haven't been quiet at all.  

The executive team has spent some time reviewing what the addition of the Seattle Kraken will do to overall NHL spending and what that means for the CCHL.  

Essentially, an additional $81.5 million in spending in the NHL could equate to about $50,000 more per CCHL game overall, so we've made that adjustment to our per game.  

For the upcoming 2021-22 season, teams will now receive $1,3000,000 per win, $1,1000,000 for an OTL or SOL, and a cool one million dollars (I said it like Dr. Evil there), per loss.  

We thought it was important to get those figures out to everyone prior to the UFA bidding period since we know there won't be any adjustments to the NHL salary cap for the upcoming season.  You may now bid knowing the full financial picture - but that does not mean you should be reckless as a lot of teams could still lose money in that scenario.  

Now onto the UFA period.  I have sent off the listing to Paul and Bobby this morning to review to ensure we have captured everyone eligible to be signed.  Remember, that the player must have played enough games to get on this disk.  A few slipped through the cracks last year so as a team we are working to avoid that scenario taking place again.  

Hopefully, that review will be done within the week and Paul can kick off the annual UFA bidding by the end of the month.  

I had hoped that the disk would be released in time for the UFA period but that is still a minimum of 2 weeks away - and it would be longer by the time things were imported and players were deleted accordingly.  We simply cannot wait that long given that's two weeks usually and we need to continue to move forward according to schedule.  You can still get an idea on ratings via the Showtime website, but it's important to note that the overall will change a bit (usually a bit higher) because our Simon settings are a bit different.  

I would expect that we'll have the new ratings imported shortly after the UFA period.  Don't forget that the ratings are based on an average of the last two NHL seasons since they were both shortened.  

The unfortunate part about that is that some of the players that have emerged in the last year will not rate accordingly.  This is where we have the ratings from another group available and for this year only, we are allowing CCHL GMs to pick up to 3 skaters from their team to change the ratings from the Showtime ratings to that set of ratings since it's a one-year disk.  I do caution though, without seeing those ratings, it may not be the windfall that people are hoping it will be as the ratings from the alternate disk aren't necessarily kinder because of how heavily they use defensive/offensive zone starts to determine a lot of areas.  

I'd expect we'll be looking to have those adjustments done over the middle to end of June - after that period of time, we'll close the opportunity to make those adjustments so that way we have our standard set.  

As you can tell, there is a lot going on over the next while for the league.  The exciting part of the off-season is finally upon us with the free-agent period, disk release, and then our annual entry draft. 

Stay tuned as things are about to get fun!  

Thank you Dave Atkinson

 On Saturday afternoon I received an email from Denver Spurs GM Richard Poelker to let me know that Dave Atkinson has passed away after a bout with cancer.  

There will be a lot of people in the CCHL that don't understand who Dave was, and why he was important to the CCHL - even though, to my knowledge, he was never a part of the league.  

To begin, let's take a look back as to how Dave Atkinson became the "ABPA guru" for the last twenty years out of pure necessity and a love of simulated hockey.  

About two decades ago, the DOS-based simulator program's manufacturers announced that they would no longer put together an annual disk for each NHL season.  It looked like the end of the APBA hockey simulator as we knew it.  There wasn't another simulator on the market at that time that quite did the trick and provided the same level of realism that APBA did.  Realizing this, and having worked for the parent APBA company Dave stepped to the forefront to ensure that APBA disks would continue on for the next two decades.  

He started a yahoo email group with APBA stakeholders and began crafting a disk to represent each NHL season.  Over the years, the process became more refined and defined, to the point where each year there was a site dedicated to doing voting of comparables between players that would garner 100,000 votes annually for Dave to craft the disk from.  

The CCHL used APBA for the first 16 or 17 years of our existence, but as time moves on, it was time to evolve to the Simon T simulator three years ago.  

Looking back at it, there were a few reasons to make the transition at the time.  The first was that APBA was still relatively giving us results from an older style of play and did not have the shootout.  It always weighed shooting percentage far too heavy and could lead to some crazy numbers on guys that didn't play a lot but scored on 35% of their shots in their 11 games.  

We saw the Simon T simulator as a way to change towards the future with the shootout and new rules of the National Hockey League being incorporated into gameplay.  The other aspect was that there were multiple rating disks available for us to use - we weren't limited to just one group should that group cease to exist.  Simply put, as much as we loved APBA, it was time to adapt.  

Without Dave though, the CCHL would have likely folded many years ago before Simon T's sim was a reality because there just wouldn't have been an APBA disk annually without his leadership and tireless work for the APBA community.  

A year ago, Dave hosted online seminars for a number of people that wanted to know more about what made the APBA simulator tick and how to generate ratings/the disk annually.  

Even though the CCHL had moved past it, I attended one of the sessions because, for 20 years, the APBA simulator was all I had known so I wanted to know more.  

It was interesting to see the inner workings of the process, but it also gave Dave and myself a chance to discuss the Simon T simulator and led to a lot of conversation between us in terms of the comparison.  He was super interested in learning more about it and we wanted to set up a night to go through it via zoom.  

Sadly, our schedules never allowed for that to happen and it's not going to happen now.  

I should have known something was up.  It's May and we haven't even heard anything about a new APBA disk creation process despite the NHL coming to a close for the regular season.  Honestly, I never gave it much thought this year and figured it would happen in the summer.  I was wrong.  Dave unfortunately had much more to deal with that the community did not know about.  

I would love to find a way to name a league award after Dave.  Even though he was not a part of our league, the CCHL likely doesn't continue on past the early years without his work on the disk with the team annually. l

While I never got to meet the man personally, Dave's presence for the computer hockey sim world really can't be forgotten.  Even if you didn't know who he was until today, he was a big part of our lives.  

Thank you Dave and may you rest in peace.  

CCHL RFA and UFA contracts - can be sent starting today!

 It's that time of the year again where the teams in the CCHL make decisions about their restricted free agents and who to sign with that one precious unrestricted free agent spot each team has.  

This is our first year where teams are eligible to sign somebody due for unrestricted free agent status in 2022, but at the cost of a 25% increase rather than 10% if it's a 2021 (current year) free agent.  

If you have a trade involving an unrestricted player you are resigning, once the information has been submitted to the league (Bobby/Matt/Paul), the player can then be traded at that point in time.  

While there is no benefit to sending in things early (you can only send in one list - no revisions), the benefit is that you'll have peace of mind knowing you've sent it in.  You'll also have an up-to-date roster shortly after in which to make your deals.  

If you need help with the formatting on your free agent signing email, please refer to the rules page in section M, point number seven where it lays out the exact format to be used.  If this format is not followed, the league does reserve the right to ignore the contract re-signings.  While it seems harsh, some people have submitted formats over the years that require the executive to have to interpret their intentions which is why we developed the process on the website.  

The deadline for submitting free agent contracts is on May 22nd.  Just four days after that we will enter a trade freeze in order to allow the league executive to prepare the free agent listing and bidding process.  

Have fun and please submit your contracts anytime - starting now!  

Love and hockey, 

-The Commish

State of the Loons; Damaged Goods

 Off-season trading recently opened up and the Loons have made a splash adding some high end talent, however some are damaged goods. 

First order of business was to address the head coaching position. After the Loons and Craig Janney mutually agreed to part ways mid way through last season, local scout Steve Heinze stepped up and led the Loons to some wins down the stretch. Being the long term coach was never what Steve wanted, however his success with the team was rewarded with the head coaching position for our minor league team the Northampton Chicks. Northampton's schedule allows Steve to spend more time with his family by remaining close to home. Steve came to us and recommended that we reach out to his former teammate Mike Sullivan.  Mike is a lifelong Massachusetts resident, having played for both the BU Terriers and the Boston Bruins during his playing career. Mike also is the only American born coach to win multiple Stanley Cups.

Having Mike at the helm definitely speeds up our rebuild. After both our fire sale last year and our investment in last year's draft we found ourselves with a very deep prospect pool. So deep that we were in a position to package multiple prospects together in order to bring in top end talent. Due to injuries, two such players became available: Jack Eichel and Marco Rossi. Both are dealing with significant injuries but the potential reward is worth the risk. Jack gives the Loons its first true superstar, and a Massachusetts star as well. Marco is someone we planned on drafting at the 4 spot before moving up to 2 and grabbing Stutzle. Capeside's center position looks to be stacked for years to come with Eichel, Zegras, Rossi and Turcotte.

After adding Eichel, it was time to start building around him. An immediate hole was at a top pairing defenseman. A trade with Bismark filled that by bringing in Jonas Brodin. Jonas is enjoying a breakout year and is entering the prime of his career at a manageable $5m a year. Pat Nemeth, Connor Garland and Nick Schmaltz were acquired to fill out the roster. Talented rookies Oliver Wahlstrom, Trevor Zegras, Janne Kuokkanen, Jesse Puljujarvi and Jake Oettinger are expected to make the team next year and be main contributors. 

After a large investment in last year's draft, the Loons currently do not own a draft pick in either the first or the second round. The 2021 draft class is thought to be on the weak side with a lot of unknowns so we will be looking to load up on longshots in the later rounds. 

We still have some holes to address either through trades or bargains in free agency. A top line wing would be a priority if we could find one without jeopardizing our future. Depth defensemen and a bottom 6 right wing are also areas of need for us.

Millers off-season Preview

 

Coming off a shocking end to the season that saw the Millers win 8 of the final 10 games of the regular season and the first 2 games of their playoff series as the number 8 seed one might think the Millers are on the verge of an upswing. Real (NHL) life is cruel, and injury woes and poor performances by several of the core players have tempered expectations going into the 2021-22 season. What follows is a summation of the team’s off-season moves, free agency decisions, the draft and how the current roster shapes up.

 

Trades

To date Georgetown has made just one trade.

Nick Schmaltz to Capeside for Mikael Granlund and prospect Gage Gocalves.

Schmaltz did a fantastic job as the 2^nd line RW and 1^st unit PP member but was caught in a numbers crunch as he’s spent the entirety of this NHL season as Center and the Millers prefer some defensive and face-off ability from their pivots, neither of which Schmaltz provides. With Larkin, Hayes, Gourde and Kotkaniemi entrenched down the middle and unlikely to be rated as wingers, Schmaltz was the odd man out. Enter Capeside, in need of a 2^nd line Center. Granlund returns to Georgetown, where he began last season skating on the Larkin line before being dealt away to Amos for a couple of prospects. This time around Granlund is expected to play as a middle 6 winger, opposite either Vrana or Farabee. Granlund will also be killing penalties and supporting the power play. Goncalves is a hard-working, quick and physical forward prospect. He’s seen as a complementary player at the highest level, willing to do the dirty work but skilled enough to hold his own in the top 9.

Free Agency

Georgetown has 4 pending Unrestricted Free Agents: Blake Comeau, Michael del Zotto, Bobby Ryan and Wayne Simmonds. Comeau did yeoman’s work after his acquisition, stabilizing the 2^nd line and the PK. He’s unlikely to be re-signed as Georgetown has younger wingers they want to look at. Ryan and Simmonds were acquired after hot starts with the Millers hopeful of one emerging as a bottom 6 scorer and PP asset. Both ended up injured and tailed-off their early scoring pace and are long-shots to return. Del Zotto has the best chance to come back, despite the relative depth of the Millers blueline. MDZ played up and down the lineup, showing decent chemistry with Shea Theodore in a run on the top pair, and anchoring a revolving cast of teammates on the 3^rd unit. His re-sign price would be close to $5 million which is pricey for a 3^rd pairing rearguard but the Millers have cash to spare.

The Restricted Free Agents are Christina Djoos, Kevin Hayes, Drake Caggiula, Jordan Martinook, Jake McCabe, Marcus Nutivaara, Lucas Wallmark and Casey DeSmith. Hayes is a no-brainer to be extended, possibly for the maximum amount of years. Martinook is versatile and solid defensively and is expected to return. McCabe was acquired to give more bite to the D unit and did well paired with Theodore. He suffered a devastating knee injury during the NHL season and it’s unknown how much he’ll be able to contribute next season but the club likes him and will likely give him a one year contract and monitor his rehab. DeSmith will be extended and will compete with Jonathan Bernier for the backup goalie job. Wallmark did a fine job as the 3^rd line Center, showing some really good chemistry with Jakub Vrana, but he’s performed poorly in the NHL and the Center depth makes him expendable. Caggiula brought a spark after his acquisition but hasn’t produced in the NHL and will be replaced by younger, cheaper options on the 4^th line. Nutivaara and Djoos are both offensive-minded Dmen with deficiencies in their own zone. Djoos is younger and cheaper and thus more likely to return as a depth defender on a one- year contract. 

 

The Draft

Their late season run took the Millers out of the lottery and they will pick 7^th overall. The club has 7 other picks in the draft, the earliest coming in the 4^th round, and have announced a willingness to deal those picks for prospects, cash or 2022 picks.

 

The Current Roster

Assuming no UFA re-sign and the RFAs returning are Hayes, Martinook, DeSmith and McCabe, this is the early version of the Millers depth chart:

(* denotes rookie)

LW-C-RW

Fabbri-Larkin-Fast

Granlund-Hayes-Farabee

Vrana-Gourde-Foegele

Texier-Kotkaniemi-Martinook

Wagner, Grundstrom, Maltsev*

 

D

Theodore-Miller*

Leddy-Skjei

Smith*-Anderson*

McCabe, Stecher

 

G

Binnington

Bernier

DeSmith

Hogberg