And that's a wrap......

CRAP! I was busy installing at hot tub and missed all the excitement, name calling and finger pointing!! And I had a few doozies to throw in the mix!!

After reading through everything my initial thought was "what is the issue here" as I was under the understanding that if you were 3 - 8 going into the playoffs that you could end up anywhere in the draft order in the end.

Having said that if others want things changed then lets have another poll, vote on it and move on. Jarrett(aka the pollman) where are you when we need ya?!?!

Assuming that it will be changed I would like to see it go back to using the regular season only. I suggest that the playoffs account for nothing and in fact if you come 9th or 10th after the regular season or are eliminated from the playoffs you are done and no more hockey until next year. Last year I placed last I think and was surprised to see I was about to play three consolation rounds. I never set my line up or cared how I was doing. Same thing this year except Greg was short on cash and needed $50 so I made a side bet. Other then that the consolation rounds give me flashbacks to my days of playing house league and being told I am a winner while being presented my participation medal.

I don't think that we will ever be able to come up with a process that will make everyone happy all the time and I have more concerns about lopsided trades then I do people "strategically positioning themselves" for a better draft pick.

Now lets get a poll or two going!

What I like about this league is that everyone can put their thoughts and opinions in and everyone take's an interest. I think Greg and Matt have done a wonderful job of not only setting up this league, but also making sure that the quality of the people participating in this league is top-notch.

For that reason, I don't believe that we have to worry about 'tanking" and "lopsided tradings" as much as other leagues might have to. I understand people's concerns about those matters, but by seeing who makes up this fine league, and having chatted, spoken to and conversed with outside of league parameters, I don't see a need to worry. And if there happened to be a lopsided trade or someone tanking, we would all know it I think.


Now, if indeed we revert back to the old way of determining the draft order for this year, I have another idea that I would like to propose, but only to be implemented for the following season.

Instead of a snake draft, would there be interest in keeping the draft order for each round of the draft? Just an idea I had heard from someone a while back and thought that it may be interesting. That type of draft would indeed be more in line with how things work in the "real" NHL. Just a suggestion.

Thank you all for listening!

Ray

I know I have thought about that too, Ray, and the reason I have not proposed it is because it's become clear over the last five years how difficult it is for a winning team to repeat. We already have some valuable mechanisms in place to help lower-seeded teams become competitive quickly. The cascading keeper format, in particular, has done a great job of that. I don't mind the challenge of trying to repeat with the dominoes stacked against me, but by changing from a snake draft, I think it could very well unbalance things gong forward.

I think there are a couple other GMs that haven't made any comments about this situation but once we hear, I think we need a poll on whether to change this years rule retroactively or just change for the future... Then we can all chat out our ideas on what we want to see in the future. I do believe that the keepers were the real issue with tanking. And it wasn't so much tanking for me but wanting to win. I hate wanting to lose. The way we had it last year 4th and 5th would play each other but 5th got to keep one more player (worth way more than draft order after 3rd in my opinion anyway). The change we made on keepers satisfied me in my drive to always want to win.

I feel the same way for our changes to 9th and 10th place. Getting first pick overall is huge imo and having losing not necessarily help, makes me feel better (if and when I'm in that 9th and 10th spot).

I would vote we keep everything the same except just use regular season standings for 3rd to 8th draft order.

I would love to see us make it more like the NHL... Then I'd get my full keeper ... But that's not going to happen... And I would consider doing away with snake draft as it makes drafting more fair and if we want to help the lower guys it would be better not to do snake... That's part of the reason I was surprised people were so upset about not getting that 3rd and 4th spot.

When I joined the league, I liked the way it was setup originally. Cascading keeper list for both prospects and NHL level players. I also liked the draft order in reverse order of the regualr season standings. I believed that to be more than fair and it would give everyone a pretty much equal chance at the start of the new season. Barring injuries and whatnot, with that format, everyone was on equal footing to begin with, IMHO.

My vote would be to revert back to the draft order being in reverse order of the regular season standings this year, if that wasn't obvious to everyone already, and then next season go back to cascading keeper levels.

As far as keepers are concerned, cascading levels, as put forth in the original manifesto, seems to make the most sense if we want teams to have a chance to be competitive and not become frustrated trying to climb out from behind the 8-ball.

For this season, since some may or may not have made trades relying on keeping 12 NHL players, we should keep the level of keepers at 1st-10, 2nd-11, 3rd thru 8th-12, 9th-13 and 10th-14 but would like to hear if anyone has other suggestions regarding keepers for this upcoming season.

I had pondered every team keeping the same amount of players (say 15-regardless of keeper level status) and then have a fifteen round draft where at the end you would need 5 prospects on your roster of 30. That involves a decision on which way you want to go when building your team. For now or for the future? We have had a few team owner changeovers, but it looks like we have 10 solid and loyal owners now.

If we decided at some point about every team keeping the same amount of keepers, then maybe we do the draft like the NHL and not snake. This does make it simple in a way, and complicated in another.

Alright, enough of my blabbering, back to work.

Well.....this is something!

I have been thinking about this a lot and I know that we didn't see the consequences of our vote when deciding upon this rule. My thoughts on this are that we should do what is best for the league. In all fairness we will probably have to vote on this. But, I would be in favour of going back to last years rules. It doesn't really affect me based on where I finished in the standings, but in all honesty, I don't agree with the 9th and 10th place rule as well. It did benefit me to get the first overall pick, but lower amount of points against is something i don't agree with. It is something that is totally out of our control. We would be better of flipping for first pick, or even playing for it in the consolation round.

I am in favour of going by the regular season standings for 3-8. The way we determine who picks first needs to be changed as well I believe. The snake draft I am not sure about yet. I do like Ray's idea though.

All lots to think about for sure.

I think this whole draft order rule should be fixed, but Im not sure its fair to change the rule this year though as we did vote on it. But i do think next year they should be changed.
Id be fine with drafting according to your regular season standings. If you finished 1st you draft last and last drafts 1st, then playoffs are just playoffs.
I also dont mind the idea of getting rid of snake draft to have normal draft.

Id be happy to start up a poll but there is alot of options for alot of different things being thrown out which makes it confusing

Slow but sure we are hearing from everyone.

I think that job number one should be finding a solution to this years situation and then following that we can begin a new thread to work on solidifying our plans for the future. I don't want to get these two things tangled up in one thread.

I still see three possible options available to us for this season:

1. We do nothing. We stick with the vote and we address the issue in the off season. I think that an argument can be made for this approach.

2. We revert to our previous system that served us reasonably well for years.

3. We introduce a new system, such as Ray's, and work forward from there.

Keeping my personal opinion out of things for the moment, it seems like was have several GMs in favour of Option 1 and several GMs in favour of option 2. I think one can see merit in both positions. For Option 1, a GM might argue that things were discussed at length, voted upon and implemented. If something was overlooked then it needs to be done in preparation for next season. For Option 2, a GM might argue that something indeed was overlooked and that something was rather dramatic. Reasonable positions on both sides and both worthy of consideration. The tricky thing, from my perspective, is how to solve this dilemma. I don't think that we have heard from Scoop as yet on this, but from what I gather neither Option 1 nor Option 2 has a majority of support. Earlier I discounted Option 3 as I thought that it might take an eternity to hammer something out that we could all agree on but now I am wondering if perhaps there is a compromise that can be reached somewhere within.

What if we kept our keepers as is. That means 10, 11, 12 (times 6) and then 13 for the two last place teams. Now, we have a group of GMs supporting keeping things as is. Draft order would then be as follows:

1-Scott
2-Jarrett
3-Greg
4-Gord
5-Brandon
6-Scoop
7-Chris
8-Ray
9-John
10-Matt

And a group of GMs supporting a return to last years approach of draft order determination. It would produce the following order:

1-Jarrett
2-Scott
3-Chris
4-Ray
5-Gord
6-Scoop
7-Greg
8-Brandon
9-John
10-Matt

The teams in blue have no change in draft position.

What about a lottery to solve this hot mess that we have gotten ourselves in this season? Matt and John don't participate. Their fates are sealed. For the same reason, both Jarrett and Scott also do not participate. That leaves the 6 jokers in the middle. So, looking at our positions at the end of the regular season it would look like this:

3-Brandon (awarded 3 tokens)
4-Greg (awarded 4 tokens)
5-Scoop (awarded 5 tokens)
6-Gord (awarded 6 tokens)
7-Ray (awarded 7 tokens)
8-Chris (awarded 8 tokens)

Mr. Matt Jackson is coming over for a visit this Sunday along with his wife and beautiful baby girl Loiuse (she takes after her mother). We could, theoretically, hold the lottery this Sunday and have the whole business behind us by Sunset.

What I am hoping that this option accomplishes is a compromise of sorts. If I, with all of my commissioner might, rule that Option 1 is the way we are going , then I am going to have a handful of irate GMs to deal with. If, on the other hand, I rule that Option 2 is the way we are going, I would then have a handful of GMs who would deem this ruling unfair. With Option 3, the lottery option if you will, I am hoping that we all might find this a meeting point somewhere in between that might allow us to put this nasty stuff behind us and allow us to focus on a permanent solution for the future.

Look forward to feedback.

I think .........

Nice sum up Greg. Shoukd someone start a poll with the 3 options to see what we are doing for this draft and then we can look to the future