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Wagner, I have read through everything you have posted and, unless I just missed it, have you stated how a team knows whether they are the one to organise the PU game or not?

I apologise in advance if I just can't find it but you have noted it.

Luckily, points difference matters very little (if at all, other than for possibly statistical interest/purpose?) in this league, as in situations where teams have equal number of wins, the team that has won their regular season meeting is ranked higher for playoffs (and not the team that has a better scoring difference).

Yes, I had forgotten.

@ Wagner...

Obviously the new draw means you will have to alter some info on the official thread. Eg. before you had 5th to 12th spot in finals...now might have to be 5th to 14th spot? I will let you make that call.

Sorry for the extra work but it is nice that we can include 2 more HG teams in our first Season.

Yes, some extra work, but 16 in a way feels more complete than 14 (and in terms of other possibly affected areas, possibly last or two last regular season matches might have to be organized in a separate time window about a week after HGL regular season has started, but I still didn't check the schedule if that's necessary with 15 matches/team, or if it'll leave us long enough time window before the season to finalize organizing all matches before season starts).

Yes, I will alter information on official threads. And all managers, please send me BBMail if you notice something clearly wrong information after a recent edit of post, so I can then correct it ASAP.

As far as altering amount of teams reaching playoffs, it's a sword with two blades. I see benefits in both options (12 or 14 best to playoffs).

Couple of observations of our league system:

A) When I was doing preliminary comparing of different league systems, this system (12 best to playoffs) should work well with 16 teams as well (apart from 1-2 clearly weakest teams?)

B) This league system of ours has gotten it's inspiration from Finnish ice hockey league, 'Liiga'. I'm not sure if links are preferred on this thread, but I will send one now to show you guys how exciting things can get with such league system. For instance: HIFK earned a 4th place by scoring 2-1 winning goal without a goalie about 30 seconds before the end of last game of regular season. And Pelicans, who now does have to fight against relegation, had still a chance to reach playoffs during the last round of regular season.
https://www.liiga.fi/en/stats/teamstats/season?tilasto=sar...

C) With the earlier lineup about 85% of teams (12/14) reach playoffs, with 12 out of 16 it would be 75%.
With 14 out of 16 teams it would be 87,5% of teams reaching playoffs, which is not dramatically different from 85%. However, a two-fold challenge exists: first round of playoffs need to include even number of teams, so practically 4, 8 or 16. In practice, it would then be 8, as it couldn't be 16 and 4 would only add 2 teams to round 2 of playoffs so then massive amount of teams would need to be granted a straight spot to 2nd round of playoffs, which would effectively wreck the idea of this system.
So 8 teams (I guess) it would need to be who are trying to qualify for the second round of playoffs.
If we would then add the amount of participating teams from 12 to 14 (and remember, 8 would be have to fight their way into the second round of playoffs), it would result that we would have to increase the amount of teams guaranteed a spot on the second round of playoffs (based on regular season success) to a 6 from 4 teams.
(Increasing it to 5 as a middle ground option wouldn't be a possibility as then we wouldn't have an equal number of teams on the second round of playoff). But now if we would include 6 teams, then we would have 6 teams on second round based or regular season success, and 4 based on winning on first round of playoffs, and eventually 10 teams would be reduced to 5 which doesn't work.

One problem with 6 automatically included also is that best teams would've guaranteed their spot on the second round of playoffs very early on..

Consider it my responsibility. :-)

Thanks MrJ, your help is appreciated! :)

I see the dilemma. Regardless of what we choose it won't work perfectly. Therefore, go with the setup you think is best, Wagner. If we have to adjust it at the Playoffs then we can. If nothing else, we will learn from what transpires and be even better organised for Season 2.

Wagner, I have read through everything you have posted and, unless I just missed it, have you stated how a team knows whether they are the one to organise the PU game or not?

I apologise in advance if I just can't find it but you have noted it.

You are indeed correct, it still doesn't mention anything about it - it just states one team is responsible for sending a challenge, and therefore can decide at what time of the day regular season match is played (we can consider later if we should stick with times determined by HGL when it comes to playoff matches).

I forgot to ask from you this earlier (before creating the schedule), that is it possible somehow to take these kind of things into account when auto-creating schedule, so that it would automatically for instance bold the names of teams responsible for challenges?

So there are two ways handling this, please correct me if my thinking is wrong:
1. If we have 8 voluntary teams who voluntarily are willing to spend 15 tokens for regular season, I guess we could then bold (or mark otherwise) their team names on the schedule (and possibly to a participating teams list as well), and those 8 teams would send challenge to all their regular season games (however, do I have an error in thinking here, would it totally work if done this way or would some matches be left unplayed?). I have lots of tokens, so I could afford to be one of the required challengers, this first and likely for forthcoming seasons as well.

If there is no error in my thinking (again, please correct me if it does!) I think doing it this way would then streamline things a bit, as in terms of regular season play half of teams (this system would probably only work with an even number of participating teams though, which we do have this season!) would be marked to the participating teams list and/or schedule page as teams that are responsible for sending challenges to all regular season games, and then those 8 remaining teams would only need to accept challenges to these Pickup matches.

2. We mark (bold, or other marking) the names of teams to the schedule for each week separately who are responsible for sending challenges for that round, so then people know whose responsibility it is to challenge for which rounds.

In a way option 1 would seem easier, unless like I said I have some error in my thinking which would cause schedule not to work if done that way, and unless we have problem finding 7 more voluntary managers (to use 15 tokens for regular season challenges).


By the way, I'm glad to see you all have already done it 'correctly' in your messages, but it's important that we stick with the practice of not using @ in our regular season matchups, as that's reserved for playoffs schedule only (as @ to many refers to home/away court), so -, v. or Vs. all work, likely first option being visually easier for the Commissioner at least.

Last edited by Wagner at 3/16/2025 11:18:43 AM

I think your thinking is correct regarding 8 volunteers...this should cover all games. I have about 20 tokens at the moment so I am happy to be another volunteer other than yourself. However...

Maybe the better approach is to have 1 team in every matchup (bolded name or something to identify that it is their responsibility to organise the PU) and then, any mangers (like you or myself) who wish to make it known that they are happy to organise every one of their games and use their tokens, then we could just alter the schedule and bold that team's name for every match?

We have options. I guess it boils down to:

1. How quickly can we organise 8 managers willing to volunteer their tokens and organise all of their matches?
2. Failing that, we would simply have to make it equitable and have every team bolded equally and equally responsible for setting games when it is their turn.

Attention all managers competing in the HGL...

Please let it be known if you have plenty of PU tokens (15+) and are willing to organise every one of your games in this upcoming season's HGL?

We need 8 managers to do this for this method to be viable.

Already Volunteered:
1. Wagner
2. MrJ
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.


Last edited by MrJ at 3/16/2025 9:24:40 AM

Yes, perfect is hardly found in world anyway. :) It is unfortunate, that few initially weakest teams will have bit harder time to reach playoffs, but everything is almost always a trade off (as nothing is absolutely perfect from every possible standpoint).

So while it likely works very well with 16 teams in my opinion (as in Finnish ice hockey league, link to end of regular season league table provided in one of my earlier messages) as 75% of teams are still included in post season play, it might work even better with 14 or even 15 participating teams. So in that sense though 14 teams for HGL would've been totally ideal for us. These things are often a balancing acts, as everything affects everything.

As far as adjusting the system for the playoffs, I'm not totally sure what you meant... I originally spent lots of time comparing different league systems and thinking of best options, their limitations, etc.
I haven't spent lot of time in the recent weeks to ponder if it would have another workable solutions, as I haven't seen any need for it.

But the problem with altering playoffs persists, that number must always double from the amount of 2 (if we proceed from finals to semifinals, to quarter finals, etc.), so final must include 2, semifinal 4, and quarterfinal stage must include 8 teams. So that restricts the possibilities to adapt the playoff system a lot - this league system we use is already is an adaptation and I think is very much adapted from the typical 8 teams playoff format to emphasize the importance of including a lot more teams (to the playoff play).

Also, I might not be a fan of including all 16 teams to playoffs (while that is also theoretically possible), as it would create more uneven matches for the first and second round of playoffs, and would make regular season success a lot less meaningful.

Also, what is luckily good news for currently weakest teams of HGL, in 1 or 2 seasons you can work miracles in terms of training and therefore can have a better shot at (or in) a playoffs in the next season or the one after that. Also, which is the nature of HG, practically all of us are training so that might not be the only way to reach other teams, as teams are in different stages of their HG projects - some teams are aging and losing skills more quickly at some point than they are able to train, so this kind of development I think will be seen throughout the seasons of HGL. :)

Speaking of development stages of HG teams...
One of the interesting things to compare, would be the average ages of players (of a team) that are in Top 5 (or Top 8, if we want it to be in reflection with Top8 players salaries), and on the other hand average age of players ranked from 6th to 12th (or from 9th to 12th).

It might provide us interesting background information on a stage team is currently in. Again, this is an additional layer of work and I'm not going to promise I'll get it done, but I wanted to throw it out for you guys to comment on.

I have deleted my schedule post in the Season 1 thread, I will repost the new schedule along with each teams link (for easy access to their team page) on that thread when I get to a desktop (at church now) will be this afternoon (5 or 6 hours)

Great job everyone!!!

Thanks for your efforts and active participation lately as well T-Lit!
Adding team links makes organizing matches easier, and that's why I planned to add them to "teams participating" lists (likely today).
That's also one of the reasons why I added 'participating teams list' above the schedule (on HGL Scores-thread), so direct links could then be used from that above post to access each teams page when organizing matches.

I will add the Season 1 schedule likely to the 4th and/or 5th post of HGL Scores-thread based on schedule auto-created by MrJ (after we have reached a conclusion on how to mark a team responsible for sending challenge, unless we get 8 volunteers after which we can just announce and mark those teams responsible to the schedule without exceptions), but I will not include such links to team pages to my aforementioned post as my main post is meant only for schedule and possibly for adding scores/box score links of games. Speaking of which, isn't it so that Pickup match numbers are only released to managers after match has started? If match numbers already known before (somehow, I don't know if this would be possible), then links to full season worth of matches could be created beforehand (after match invitation would be accepted), and added to official schedule post.

Last edited by Wagner at 3/16/2025 10:12:21 AM