EHM The Blue Line

My team was dominant during the regular season after a few new additions and some tactical tweaking. However, once I got to the playoffs, we squeaked by the first round and were trounced in the second round by the Flyers (who went on to win the cup). It was strange cuz we (Rangers) owned them during the regular season. We also got bounced out of the playoffs by the Caps in the first round last season (roster was hurt by key injuries, most notably Jagr). I was wondering if anyone has any advice for making a good playoff run. Here was the lineup

Prucha-Immonen-Jagr
Cole-Lindros-Weinhandl
Axelsson-Sutherby-Hall
Tukonen-Richardson-Korpikoski

Redden-Roszival
Gleason-Salo
Staal-Brewer

It's a young lineup, epecially on the first and fourth lines, and I lost Brewer and Roszival early to injuries. I lost Gleason, Hall, Rosizval, and Cole in the off season and added Maltby, Vaananen, and de Vries to shore up the defense. Does anyone have any tactical suggestions for the playoffs or does it run similar to the regular season. I was down 3-1 to the Devils in the first round and was only able to win the series by setting all my tactical options to very offensive except for my third line. Try to continue it into the Flyers series but got destroyed. I think my D for next year will be much more solid with the pairs being Redden-Salo, de Vries-Brewer, Vaananen-Staal with a shutdown line of Axelsson-Sutherby-Maltby. Any tactical changes for the playoffs would be much appreciated.

First of all welcome to TBL

I've had numerous runs in the playoffs successful and not... in Challenges I've had teams I didn't expect to work take it all (especially my Washington team) and teams that I expected to breeze though get knocked out. My Montreal team won back to back but others met with the same kind of dismantling.

One thing I noticed in my Washington game though was that I started tweaking and thinking I had to do something "different" and barely scratched my way through the first round. I did however take most if not all of my victories in game 7s so the margin of victory like in real life can be razor thin. So, since my teams play with two forward lines of scorers and two lines of line matching man-to-man for mainly defense the key to winning or at least keeping as much advantage as I could was to have my offensive guys take more chances to do what they have the skills to do which is setup plays and score and my defensive guys to not try and do anything offensively and play their roles even more. In the end that was the difference.

So, given that the playoffs can be a short number of games, especially in a first round loss it's hard to tell if you lost because your team just hit a rough patch you'd have shrugged off during the year, if it was the injuries that were to blame, if you just came up against a team that nobody could stop at that point etc.

So for all those reasons I say only make changes because you know something wasn't working and to make sure your tactics match up with your team's skills. Any tactic changes you make need to have time to run until you really know they are the thing making the difference. It has to be a scientific process or you are making decisions based upon bad data and that won't help you in the long run.

Thanks for the advice!

I've been going through the old boxscores of the playoff games and realized a definite weak spot, fourth line defense. Consistent minus throughout all the games with little offensive contribution. Since then I've traded for more young, defensive-minded, hard working fourth liners like Jared Hagos and Jay Pandolfo. Too soon yet to see if it'll have an effect but it makes sense in my head at least. Cap trouble forced me to lose de Vries and Staal was injured early for a few months so my defense is kind of in shambles, definitely need cheap defensive help. Also Jagr is showing up to practices out of shape, not helping my cause. I guess I have to wait and see how this shakes out, if I need more help I'll let you know, thanks again!

Three cheap solid defenders are Kwiatkowski, Westcott and Roche you can get em for a song usually and they'll fill in for ya just fine, they always make their way onto my team at some point

Done and done, hello defense depth, goodbye spare parts

I was wondering if you knew how to take control of the farm teams. I wanted to add a GM and take over control of the Wolpack to help develop my prospects but I could only add GM's to NHL teams. I tried to change the selected leagues in the options menu but it wouldn't allow anything beyong the NHL. Is that an option I have to select when I start a game or is there some way of altering that it during a dynasty?

Powerslave wrote:Done and done, hello defense depth, goodbye spare parts

I was wondering if you knew how to take control of the farm teams. I wanted to add a GM and take over control of the Wolpack to help develop my prospects but I could only add GM's to NHL teams. I tried to change the selected leagues in the options menu but it wouldn't allow anything beyong the NHL. Is that an option I have to select when I start a game or is there some way of altering that it during a dynasty?

I'm pretty sure you have to do that at the beginning of the game, so you're stuck with just your NHL team

When you start a new game. The leagues you select either on Enchanced or Standard are the only leagues you can change during a carrer.

So say you had the NHL as Standard and say great britain and Enchanced. You can swap these to either Standard or Enchanced. You can't do it with leagues you have not started the game with.

You can add a GM at any time but yes, you have to have the option of either standard or enhanced selected for a league in order to change that league during a game.