PowerPlay Magazine

There was a time, not so long ago, when one simply had to manage energy in order to be competitive late in the season. Well, that era has passed. As many of you (hopefully) know, there have been many recent changes to PPM, one of which involves experience and chemistry scaling with the level of importance you play. The remainder of this article will be a data-free opinion piece by yours truly on how I'm embracing the changes.

One thing that has been noticeable since the first week of this hockey season is, you do NOT want to lose a game on low (L) or very low (VL) importance. If you do you'll take a hit on your finances. Now, if you have a small arena it isn't a big deal. However, for those of us with 20,000 seat capacity, this means a $2M+ hit per game (~25% of attendance). Let's say you go the season playing .500 hockey and for each loss you're hit with this penalty. That means you'd have (ignoring any potential cap) a penalty for all 19 home games working out to nearly $40M lost in the form of attendance penalties. Now, $40M is definitely not laughable but that is roughly my weekly sponsor contribution so it isn't all that bad. However, you then have the balancing act to consider: would I make more than $40M by saving energy and potentially finishing higher in the standings come the end of the season? That is a question I cannot answer, and it only gets more complicated when you consider the win bonuses under the new sponsor system.

I for one am going to play all games, at least to start, on normal importance(N) or above. Winning is important but I don't want to mortgage my end-of-season success at the expense of saving a few bucks now. So, I decided to run a 5-lineup spread that will get me the best of both worlds while taking advantage of one of my favourite ProPack features.

Default Line-up - My best 22 players. Played against my closest competitors.
Line-up A -  Substituted my 4^th line with the 5^th-best player in each position (i.e. sub 4^th line for 5^th line). This will be used against stronger teams that I should beat.
Line-up B - Substituted my 3^rd line with my 5^th line. This will be used against decent opponents.
Line-up C - Substituted a mix of my 2^nd and 1^st lines for 5^th line players. This will be used against relegation-bound teams.
Line-up D - A 3-line team of players never to see league or playoff action this season. This group will play all friendlies on very high importance (VH) to take advantage of the increase rate of chemistry and experience growth. They will also feature in games my best players likely can't win.

One thing I would like to point out is by playing my rookies (Line-up D) on VH against the elite teams I have low odds of winning against with my best players, they'll gain experience even faster (appears to be around 1 Exp per game). And, because I'd be playing higher than N, there will be no attendance penalty despite potentially getting destroyed with double digits in the goals against column. So, let's look at a couple of scenarios.

Scenario 1: Running the same players on N for all league games.
In this scenario, assuming 25% for each line, you can expect your players to all be at 81 energy come playoffs (neglecting NC and friendly energy loss). You have a shot at winning some of the tougher games you would otherwise not win should you send out your rookies. However, I suspect these to be on the order of one to two per season.

Scenario 2: Running the 5-lineup spread including rookies in league games.
I plan on playing rookies against 4 of my toughest opponents. That brings my effective league games down to 30 games. Of these 30 games (15 opponents), I plan to play line-ups with approximately the following breakdown:
Default Line-up - 10 games
Line-up A - 10 games
Line-up B - 6 games
Line-up C - 4 games
Line-up D - 8 games

Let's now convert this breakdown into what it means for players by line:
Line 1 & 2 Top Players:  85 energy (30 games played)
Line 1 & 2 Bottom Players: 87 energy (26 games played)
Line 3: 88 energy (24 games played)
Line 4: 90 energy (20 games played)
Line 5: 90 energy (20 games played)
Rookies:  88 energy (8 games played, VH)

You can immediately see the difference between the two scenarios. Both have no attendance penalty, yet Scenario 2 is quite favourable from an energy standpoint. Consider the previous article on the impact of chemistry and experience. We know energy scales linearly so a player with 88 energy is 88% as good as he would be at 100 energy. In the case of 100-primary players this is a small effect. But, in the case of say, my starting goalie who has a strength of around 350 at 100 energy, this difference of 4% between "Scenario 1" and "Scenario 2 - Line 1 & 2 Top" is 14 Goa strength (336 versus 350). If I were to rest him as if he was on Line 3, it'd be even more given a projected Goa strength of 325.

I haven't exactly blown any minds here I'm sure but I wanted to share and give you something to think about. The new changes were implemented to cut back on people who perform match agreements. If everyone starts playing N as the new baseline for league play, it all comes out in the wash since we'd all be comparable as if we had played VL or L all season. However, given these new changes, if you manage your team better, you can actually come out ahead thanks to the increased rate of chemistry and experience gain and importance greater than N. The changes certainly added another dimension and I for one am pleased to see it come to pass. You may not see the effects of the increased experience effects in the short-term, but playing your rookies on VH in friendlies all season will slowly give you an edge in terms of their development. Just make sure you don't send an auto-line-up out on VH - that would be quite the blunder.

I had a few more items I could talk about, but I think I've rambled on enough between this article and the last. I'm now about halfway home from LA and perhaps it is time to do some work I'm actually paid for. I'll post an article about draft strategies in the future. I want to see how the post-draft-1 changes affect things before I start spewing words onto virtual paper for all of you to read.

I will be offline for much of the next two weeks. Hopefully when I get back to civilization I find my team has been well cared for by my sitter and there are not a whack of argumentative comments below (not saying anyone whose name starts with an "s" and ends in "hawk"). If there is a mutiny and my sitter sells all my players, be sure to bid and bid high ;). Good day and good weekend,

-Scott