I wanted to do a new version of this video as I haven’t done a video on this in a long while.
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33 Comments
Ever heard of or played Strat-O-Matic Hockey?
I absolutely love this. Maybe in the offseason you could recreate the league in an EA game on stream if you get the time
When you change your mind, put me on the list of season ticket holders for the THGHL
Did you have to transcribe these from the slabs that they recorded this on??
I really wanted Hartford to win in my imaginary league I had control of, but I was just too good and clutch and they never could beat me in a game 7.
I love this. I did very similar shit in school. I even used to draw pictures of goalies, I wanted to be a goalie, and like… was fascinated with pucks just over the line or what would happen in some weird scenario and just getting the net physics right, of course it was awful I was a kid and bad at art, but strangely enough my favorite goalie for awhile was Blaine Lacher in Boston, purely for his name. I had no idea how he played or what style but damn it if I didn’t love him cause I saw his name on NHL 93 or 94 or something. Plus the Bruins logo was way easier to draw well compared to the Red Wings logo. But, luckily I had NHL games on consoles, so I could simulate leagues all day long and write down the results and the leading scorers and all these stats and I would WATCH SIMULATED GAMES, I shit you not, because it wasn’t fair to play them because I was good and would always win. So I would sit in my room and watch a CPU v CPU game, only in the playoffs mind you… they were the most important… and like come up with story lines, and when someone busted their head on the ice (real thing in some years of the game) I would make up like… oh some player took a cheap shot and blah blah blah. I remember it all quite fondly, honestly. If I wasn’t out playing street hockey or the years I played, ice hockey in high school, I was doing a lot of this kind of nerdy stuff at home. Kind of embarrassing, but again, I loved it and I remember it quite fondly.
I admire the chutzpah it took to post this type of video to the public at large.
This may be the most affirming video I've watched in my 10 years on YouTube.
I used to play a Paralympic sport called Goalball when I was in high school, and organized a couple major regional tournaments for the sport before I dropped out of college. Goalball is the only competitive sport created for athletes who are blind / visually impaired. It combines an offense like dodgeball/bowling with a defense of soccer/hockey. However, because teams are only 3-6 players, and it's primarily only played by blind / visually impaired athletes, the "regular season" is just a 3-4 regional tournaments from January until the end of May, with a National Championship Tournament in June.
So in 2016, bored in my college dorm and alone for a three-day weekend, I would up creating a "National Goalball League", that just so happened to have 30 teams in the NHL markets (team names were just the cities, so there was New York and Brooklyn). I never went as far as creating all the players on all the teams, but I did wind up thoroughly constructing how the league would operate, and used RNG to determine all the scores. This allowed for dynasties and parity while also ensuring my market biases were a non-factor. And then I'd keep stats in Excel about it – although in the early seasons I didn't, so when I started around the 60th season, I kept a lot of the records to the Championship series (wins and appearances, matchups, etc). I'd do all the Round Robin & Playoffs on my phone, and then do stats on Excel.
Up to season 318 right now, though I never did the Playoffs for 318. Definitely gets harder as you get older with more responsibilities eating at your time. But I'm glad you made this video Shannon. This makes me want to explain my non-sense in a video some day. In 25 minutes though? That'd be a challenge of its own lol
THE GREATEST ONE, 15 TIME STANLEY CUP CHAMPION
I have my own Formula 1 carpet league. Carpet – because I was playing with my Kinder cars on my Grandma's carpet.
Formula 1 only had 6 teams, because I only had about 13-14 usable cars, which I could sort by color in 6 pairs. Sometimes some cars broke down, so I had to do something about the teams. This is how McLaren and Williams happened to merge into the British Racing Team (with BMW engine, wiining in AVUS and Monza every time) after one of my "Williams" cars got broken.
My drivers didn't have names and barely had nationalities, for me they were just Team name #X.
Ferrari was winning disproportionally, of course, but Benetton, Sauber and Jordan also got their share of winning.
Holy Crap! Canucks are so bad they can't win more than 20% of the time in the wildest dreams of their best fan… lol?
This is brilliant
I used to do the exact same thing in school but with the Hunger Games, Survivor, wrestling, and eventually a full competitive promotion involving SSBU. Unfortunately, my health stopped the ENCWrestling promotion at the start of season 3 but maybe one day it'll get back up and running again.
Now it all starts to make sense…thanks for sharing.
I had a small, battery-operated tabletop hockey game that I would use to simulate games with. I created a bunch of rules that dictated how I played such as when I had to carry the puck and when I had to pass or shoot, how to retrieve loose pucks and who gets possession when, etc etc. I would simulate entire seasons and record all the scores in notebooks. Even though I had a "fair" system, somehow Montreal always won the Stanley Cup, haha.
I just re-did the 96-year history of the championship in the league I created. I made up the teams in mine
7 Straight Cups! What a great league! 😉 🔥. Seems like you had a great imagination for sure!
Holy crap! I thought I was the only guy who did this! Seriously. Except I wrote this down in the last few years and I did it on a computer so it was easy to change.
Mine was different in that I imagine being born a a few decades older and my 25-year career was between 67 – 92.
Since this was still the age of dynasty, I only managed to change 6 Finals:
71: Boston sweeps Montreal (get rid of the 1st vs. 3rd and 2nd vs. 4th seeding. Get Scotty Bowman from St. Louis since he gave the coaching job to Al Arbour right before the season and Sinden had resigned.)
73: Boston beats Montreal in 7.
75: Buffalo beats Flyers in 7 after a 3-0 come back (keep in mind that that season, a New York based team twice came back from down 3-0 against a Pennsylvania based team to force a Game 7. This would be the 3rd).
86: Edmonton beats Montreal in 7. (Roy and Tretiak (who I somehow manage to get from the Soviet Union) are the Conn Smythe Trophy winners.)
88: Pittsburgh beats Edmonton. (Lemieux vs. Gretzky. Gretzky becomes second non-goalie to win Conn Smythe for losing team. Highest scoring Finals ever. I get Lafleur out of retirement, Dionne from Rangers and Tretiak somehow.)
90: Pittsburgh beats Toronto in 7. (The team barely makes the playoffs, wins four consecutive Game 7's including coming back from down 3-0 against Toronto. Harold Ballard dies the day after.)
Those are the only 6. In my universe, Orr gets more Cups and in fact, those three: Orr, Gretzky Lemieux, all get exactly 4 Cups and 2 Conn Smythe Trophies.
I have way more than this, I actually went into some detail like Shannon but that's all I'll reveal for now.
I win more Cups than Shannon but it's also more historically realistic IMHO. Having said that, because I was trying to be as close to being historically accurate as possible, my hometown team, the Canucks, don't win during my playing career. I imagine being an owner and coach after and then winning the Cups then.
George RR Martin writes like you do. I couldn't write like that completely. I plan the outline in some detail (or at least the philosophy) but then while I'll write, I think of something else and may skip to a different part of the document.
Holy crap! I thought I was the only guy who did this! Seriously. Except I wrote this down in the last few years and I did it on a computer so it was easy to change.
Mine was different in that I imagine being born a a few decades earlier and my 25-year career was between 67 – 92:
Since this was still the age of dynasty, I managed to win the Cup every year and only needed to change 6 Finals (which means my list is easier to remember):
71: Boston sweeps Montreal (get rid of the 1st vs. 3rd and 2nd vs. 4th seeding. Get Scotty Bowman from St. Louis since he gave the coaching job to Al Arbour right before the season and Sinden had resigned from Boston.)
73: Boston beats Montreal in 7.
75: Buffalo beats Flyers in 7 after a 3-0 come back (keep in mind that that season, a New York based team twice came back from down 3-0 against a Pennsylvania based team to force a Game 7. This would be the 3rd).
86: Edmonton beats Montreal in 7. (I help save Steve Smith's ass in the Calgary series. Tretiak (who I somehow manage to get from the Soviet Union) are the Conn Smythe Trophy winners.)
88: Pittsburgh beats Edmonton. (Lemieux vs. Gretzky. Gretzky becomes second non-goalie to win Conn Smythe for losing team. Highest scoring Finals ever. I get Lafleur out of retirement, Dionne from Rangers and Tretiak somehow.)
90: Pittsburgh beats Toronto in 7. (The team barely makes the playoffs, wins four consecutive Game 7's including coming back from down 3-0 against Toronto. Harold Ballard dies the day after.)
Those are the only 6. In my universe, Orr gets more Cups and in fact, those three: Orr, Gretzky Lemieux, all get at least 4 Cups and 2 Conn Smythe Trophies (I get Gretzky another 2 Cups in Vancouver before retiring.)
I have way more than this, I actually went into some detail like Shannon but that's all I'll reveal for now.
I win more Cups than Shannon but it's also more historically realistic IMHO. Having said that, because I was trying to be as close to being historically accurate as possible (with the exception of my existence), my hometown team, the Canucks, don't win during my playing career. I imagine being an owner and coach after and then winning the Cups then.
Observations:
* Bossy, Gretzky and Lemieux have 0 Stanley Cups. At least Ray Bourque has 2.
* Canadian teams win 12 years in a row (at least) and then only American teams win. Do you imagine no Canadian teams winning after 1999 (as in real life)?
* 10 teams actually won in that 20-year period. Yours only has 7.
This is such a cool video!
I've got an Ontario Reign jersey with "Starphase" on the back of it. I have season tickets for them, and players move around so much, I just figured I'd get my moniker on it.
Also, in NHL20 I made an entire league of 32 custom teams, and just did a fantasy draft for all of them. It took me so long. I want to do it again, but it really is time consuming. I remember I timed how long it took me to make a team when I already had the idea for the team set up. It took about a half hour. So, multiplied by 31, that's be 15.5 hours.
Alternate name for this video: "The Hall of Fame career of Shannon Skanes"
Lol. I don’t care what anybody says. But, if I’m an owner of a NHL team Shannon would 100% be working for me. I’d give him any job he wanted. GM, special assistant, whatever he’d be comfortable with. I’d win games with Shannon on my payroll. Lots and lots of wins. Banners would be hanging from the rafters when it was all said and done. Then 20 or so years into the future. Shannon would gain admission into the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Wow! I find this very fascinating! I kinda did the same thing as a kid just not on a NHL level.Very very interesting.
This is cool. When I was a kid I created a league too, not quite like yours though. I tried to keep bias out of any results by last-one-standing over multiple rounds. I created my own teams, and each team had a team name with the same letter as the first letter from the place (i.e. London Leafs, Dawson Devils, Memphis Mud Holes, etc…) and I got through two years before creating a minors system, then the following year the bottom five major teams would be replaced by the top five minors teams. I only wrote out results, never really created players and made lines, schedules and so much flawless organization. It's cool to know I wasn't the only one to have done something like that once.
If you would have could have ( probably not should have)become a Nhler what position would you be
When would you have been drafted
Who was said years #1 draft pick
I've been doing something like this too for 4+ years and results of seasons/series are based on how well I do in video games (that aren't EA). In 2019 I had Dallas play Tampa in the final which was what the next year's Stanley Cup Final would be in real life.
It's definitely a big time waster lol
I remember when I was a kid I came up with an international football league with teams in cities like Jakarta, Sao Paulo and Islamabad. Just teams and jerseys though, no lore of this magnitude!
Love this video. I'm from the UK and when I was in school a friend and I created a football (soccer) league based on the streets around where we lived – we created players, detailed each game, team sheets, scorers etc. Think we ran it until we were in our early teens.
You likely won't read this comment, but what the hell. As I'm listening I'm playing EA Sports NHL 2016 in Be a Pro Mode.
My player is in his 20th NHL season, playing for the Canucks. He was drafted by the Black Hawks, but when the sexual abuse scandal broke out I didn't want to be on the team anymore and 5 seasons later my player was traded to Vancouver.
Of course my player is the best in the league, currently with 217 points 44 games into the season. I'm curious to see how long my player can play. He's the oldest player in the league already at the age of 38. I want to see if my player can break Gordie Howes' record and play until the age of 53.
Note: I've simulated about 20 games in 22 seasons including Juniors.
Fun Times.
LMAO!!! Shannon that was great! I didn't know you started as a Flames fan
Well there's your reason to get an nhl game, as it would be a completely new league and fictional you could do it on older version of nhl when it was actually good. Just an idea like that