This season has by far been the biggest turnaround I've ever seen happen during a season in EHM. Going from bad to good between seasons happens all the time, but to have the kind of breakout we did this season is just insane. I kept thinking it was just a fad and that we'd start being horrible again at some point in the season, but this is what happened:
By late March we looked like a very real contender for the President's Trophy too. But then we ran into some over-zealous opposition goalies that put an end to those plans, and meanwhile Tampa and Washington both ended the season on ~8 game winning streaks, but we did manage to win the West (by ROW as tie-breaker). It was so close at the end there were so many teams capable of catching us down the stretch as we lost 5 of our last 6 games due to facing all goalie prospects that I had no shooting data on and thus getting totally messed up by them being able to put up .93x results against all odds. This is what the standings ended up looking like:
Aside from winning the west we also had a few other nice firsts this season with our first 50 win season and first 300 goal season.
With 2 games left of the season it was all but guaranteed that Pivonka was going to win both the Rocket Richard and the Art Ross, but in keeping with EHM tradition he had a 2 game pointless streak to finish the season while Kucherov scored 5 points in his last two games, stealing both Trophies on the final day of the season. Kucherov also had a completely plausible 6 game streak where he scored 12 goals in March, so that wasn't dumb at all. But regardless I think it would be criminal for Pivonka to not be in the running for Hart this season, he put up 90 (47+43) points in 73 games. By 51 games played he had already broken the RW scoring record for the franchise and his consistency was almost scary, if he hadn't been injured he'd have sailed past 100 points and 50 goals without a shadow of a doubt.
After we turned our fortunes around everyone started putting up numbers, we even had solid point production from the 4th line for once (but we should probably not speak about their +/- as that would require a lot of very creative uses of profanities). Dadonov picked his game up and ended with a quite respectable 72 points (4th on the team) which prompted me to sign him on a 3 year 9M$ a year extension (because we still need a bunch of overpaid guys for the salary floor).
Overall our 1st line put up a combined 232 points (72 - 70 - 90) and our 2nd line put up a combined 214 (75 - 64 - 75) keeping in mind that two of those 2nd line players are rookies, and played the first 1/5th or so of the season on the 3rd/4th line. That's a pretty solid amount of production, I was especially impressed with Grigori Denisenko who really just exceeded any and all expectations I had of him by shattering Joel Eriksson Ek's franchise rookie point total record of 66 points with his 75 this season. He was firmly on the NHL assists leaderboards throughout the season, keeping even pace with Liljegren in that department. With the rule of thumb in EHM being that a forward is capable of about 20 more points per season than he puts up in his rookie season in his sophomore year and beyond; We're looking at a 90-100 point scorer in Denisenko and a 80-90 points scorer in Poehling (whose name I now know how to pronounce thanks to the entry draft last night).
That brings us to the defence, our 1st pairing struggled a fair bit from time to time this season, so there probably won't be a Norris nod for Liljegren just yet. But he did set a new franchise record with 61 points. However a very pleasant surprise came from Adam Fox on the 2nd pairing, who put up 42 points with a +32 rating. There is some argument to be made for having him slot into the 1st pairing Two-Way role next season, but I need to do all my analytics stuff before settling on that.
When it came to the goal-scoring department we mostly scored by committee, with the only two standouts being Pivonka at 47 goals and Nichushkin on 35. I don't know what it is with Nichushkin being so bad in the early stages of every season, but that is an issue and may lead to me needing to replace him long-term. Apart from those guys we had no less than six 20 goal-scorers on the team. So a lot of guys chipped in, with the 3rd line adding no less than 57 goals between the three of them.
Zhukov also really started coming into his own after new years. He started the season so poorly that him being able to work his way above .900 by the end was no small feat. He was such a big factor in us putting together the run we did, and he ended the season with a 40-15-6 record at 20 years of age.
We head into the playoffs as the #1 seed and we're facing the Dallas Stars, which isn't great because we don't do that well against them quite frankly. But let's hope for some playoff magic from Zhukov like we had in our 1st round last season and we should be fine.
Contracts wise we have a lot of stuff ending this season, Boychuk is finally doing his last season for us. He's a - rating machine on the 4th line so I'm not going to be missing him much. That is 3M cap hit walking out the door though, which is a bit annoying. We also have Tlustý's insane 5M a year cap hit coming off the books. He actually had a huge upswing with everyone else and ended the season with 46 points and a +13 rating. But he's started losing his legs already, and there's a lot better scoring talent in our system clawing at a shot to take over that 3rd line goal-scoring role. Again though, that's a combined 8M cap hit out the door. Add in that 5M$ paperweight extraordinaire Andrew MacDonald's 5M cap hit is going off the books and I think you can see a bit of an issue forming here. I've managed to off-set enough of that little issue by giving Timothy Liljegren a 5M a year bridge contract (he wasn't having any of my attempts at a longer deal), as well as Dillon Dubé on a 2.4M a year extension, which sees us able to make the floor without too much issue. But next year we have a somewhat absurd amount of cap hit walking out the door too. So dealing with that will also be fun. It's also not like I can give my young stars deals that are too silly, because I'm stuck with those forever. I did that mistake in Winnipeg and had Ehlers on a 11M a year deal for over a decade. It wasn't exactly helpful, and I'm running out of placeholder players to pour money into dumb contracts for. But Fox, Zhukov, Pivonka and Westerling all come off their entries next year so we should be able to manage just fine. But it's so backwards when you need to try and hit the cap floor early in a team build. In real life you can just get draft picks for taking bad contracts. In EHM you'd need to pay draft picks for the privilege of those same horrible contracts, because the trade AI is really smart *cough*.
Playoff Update: First game of the Dallas series rolls around and I had forgotten Elliott played the last game of the regular season before I went to dinner. He ends up starting game one for us and breaks his finger in the first period. At least I dodged a bullet by having him take the injury over Zhukov, right? Well, sort of. We end up winning the first game in OT. The 2nd game rolls around and Jaro Halak plays like a golden god in goal for Dallas (who have a silly stacked roster in this save). We lost the game, the series is now tied at 2. Game 3 rolls around and we get off to a good start, then in the second period Zhukov fractures his wrist at the same exact time that Dadonov sprains his wrist. Don't even ask how in the name of rigged events that happens. We're now in Pittsburgh territory, say hello to our third stringer Austrian goalie Mickael Rauter, who's so good we've missed the AHL playoff two years in a row with him in net. We're doomed, clearly. As it turns out Jaro Halak forgot goalies are meant to make saves, so we still win that game. The series is now 2-1 in our favor, but we are fielding our third stringer and whatever you call your 4th goalie on the depth charts against Halak. To the surprise of just about no one Halak becomes amazing again this game and our Austrian gentleman does not. The series is now tied at 2. But wait, there's a very obvious pattern here! Halak is amazing every other game and useless every other. And he was useless in the first game, which means we have to win in 7 (assuming his SV% is rigged to keep following that pattern). Guess what? In the next game Halak is useless again! There is hope for us yet. We're now up 3-2 in the series with a shot at ending it in their barn (but we won't because Halak will certainly become a god again), and that was exactly what happened. 3-3 it is, but clearly Halak will be useless again in the next game, so no sweat. As it turns out Jaro Halak is the most consistently inconsistent playoff performer in the history of consistently inconsistent playoff performers, and we get 6 goals past him to take the series 4-3. I love it when blatant rigging works in my favor for once. Oh and Denisenko also got injured, because apparently all our players' wrists are made of glass...
That may just be the most stupid playoff series I've ever seen. It even rivals that one final series against Tampa I had with the Jets.
Now we just cross our fingers Zhukov is back before the next series starts, because Mickael Rauter had a .853 in that series and I sincerely doubt we'll get past San Jose with that.
San Jose proved too much, we lost the first two games at home mostly due to still having to use our third stringer. For game 3 Elliott was back and he put up insane performances two games in a row to get us back to a 2-2. But Martin Jones was disgusting against us, he was overperforming his previous SV% by over 5% for the series. Elliott couldn't keep up the performance in his 3rd game back and we were against the ropes with the series at 3-2, and Zhukov just came back to fitness so as a last ditch effort I changed our shot targeting and put him in net. Jones did go back down closer to his normal SV% for that game but Zhukov phoned in a .800 performance and we lost. Really though with the absurd injury situation it's a miracle we even made it out of the 1st round. It's a bit hard to foresee Jones being weak against low shot targeting for the previous 16 games to suddenly be amazing against it now, but sometimes that happens. 6 games really isn't enough to tell for sure though, since it can just as well be a hot streak. Changing to targeting 5-hole did bring him down to .900 from the .94x+ performances he was putting up the previous 5 consecutive games though, so in hindsight maybe we could have made something happen if I switched sooner. But being too trigger happy on swapping targeting for a goalie does more harm than good a majority of the time in my experience, so I went with the more conservative approach.
Regardless I'm pretty hopeful for next season after seeing what we were able to do after new year. Maybe the game will be so nice as to stop injuring my goalies every 2 seconds and we can make a real attempt at a cup run next season. Now that we're actually winning I've started to look more at the details of some of our players stats and Eriksson Ek sadly is racking up waaaaay too many PIM (which is why I think the Sniper(Phys) role is garbage tier) and he won't be the long term solution for our 1st C. It's too bad there's no way to tell a premade prospect has that variation of the Sniper role until it's too late.
He was horrible last season and I can understand why. So getting a good goalie will be one of my urgent priorities as they don't have any in their prospects pool.